Festival Poets
Featured
Lydia McMillan
Lydia McMillan is a poet from Dumfries and Galloway, currently living and studying in Edinburgh. She has been shortlisted for the Wigtown Fresh Voice Award and in 2022 was selected for the Scottish Poetry Library’s Next Generation Young Makars programme. She has been published in numerous magazines, and has read at literary festivals including Dandelion, StAnza, Wigtown and the Edinburgh Fringe. In March 2024 she opened for UK poet laureate Simon Armitage on tour in Kirkcudbright.
Lamb
Into the hard air you are delivered coiled like a seahorse / there is the mother’s tongue wet and heavy the saline scent of life / the hills around you are the breasts of fallen sparrows / there in the little marbles of your feet lies the secret of being /
Garden
I am trying to write something but there is light in the trees
in the car park. behind them is a garden. a woman emerges
shouting from a curtain of bedsheets and three children drop
their toys on the lawn and follow her out of favour.
in their absence the little red house is dirty plastic
the dolls and soft animals shed their names and lie misty
eyed among the ferns.
a man on the radio says schools will open again tomorrow.
I dreamt that eden wilted, it was empty for so long.
