Laura Spark

Laura writes short stories, poems, snippets and songs drawing heavily on allegory myth and metaphor. Her work has been used for stage productions, and she often performs with live bands.
Some of her short poems for children are available to buy as hand-pulled screen prints (see PRINTS).
Summer 2013 will see the launch of A Handbook On the Hunted for the Disenchanted Huntress, a collection of poems about the dangers a menagerie of potential lovers present for a character known only as ‘the huntress’.

Laura is interested in collaboration, loves a challenge and is available as a freelance creative writer and poet.

A Handbook On the Hunted for the Disenchanted Huntress ...a taster...

The Hoarfrost Stag -

Aye, watch if you must, from upwind, hid ahind brier, as solemnly he stalks yer snow laden moors. Yon lonesome, handsome Hoarfrost Stag. Let een bite, like the wintery night, that svelte shimmer o’ cauld grey pelt, but keep yer distance safe an’ huddled, an’ as ye sneak an’ hunt an’ peek, beware the lure o’ his solitary reverie, that seductive private communion atwixt him an’ the bitter night....

Midnight Crow -

Take heed my friend, of the boy who looks like a midnight crow, with sallow een; an skin akin tae the dust o’ diamonds. Take heed, for you may watch entranced as leisurely he removes his silken wings an’ tosses them o’er his perch afore pullin’ oot a book; an’ idly shiftin’ his whiskey...

The Darkling Woods (intro text)
Commissioned by Tilt Dance Platform.
Welcome to a place in between time, or a time between place, the glimpse between the velvet curtains of dark and light, the land of lengthening shadows and flickering shapes. As the days rays pale and drop out of the sky and the sleepy ground is consumed with mist, we enter the ethereal moment of the Darkling Woods. Just a moment, one tick of a clock, one hoot of a pearly owl, one swift flutter of a bone bats wing, this is the time of Darkling. She takes shape and rises silently from the mist, carrying the pale moon on her shoulders, and gently sends the beaming nymph wheeling on her nightly arch through the purple sky. Then as she grows and finds her arms and fingers, she searches out with deft tips each lidded star, gently prying back their heavy hoods to release their luminous glint. The twilight sky now has eyes, and those many slivers watch, as Darkling rises still and finds her hips, her knees, her feet, and pads through the undergrowth, amongst branches, over streams and under toadstools all at once as small as the Saturn-ringed Beetle and as omnipotent as the Magni-grave Stag. With each step she nimbly wills the night flowers to life. She pries open the petals of the luminescent angels trumpets and conducts them in their entrancing melodies. She sets the coiled moon-bell branches trilling and tolling, and releases from the bulbous dream pods of the reverie tree the heady scent of sleep. She plucks the choicest branches of the weeping willow and creaking birch and fashions the creatures of the night from them, all held together with mud and ivy. The bats, the owls, the fox and wolf, the woodlice and weasel, stoat and snail, the furry gloom mouse and the feathered dusk-dove. Her breath rustles very quivering leaf and wing, and the whole night chases her whistle through the trees as she sings the creatures to life. Her final task is her dearest, her demon, her soul animugus, the guardian of the woods, left amongst the halls of trunk and bark as trusted sentinel while Darkling rises into the sky to preside over the glorious night she has spun. She snaps off two delicate branches of the Thornberry tree and carves them with a slice of starlight into antlers. With the clay from the bottom of the moon-slick pools, on a wheel of glistening puddle-slate, she shapes four delicate hooves. She weaves a hide from old mans beard and poison ivy, pads it out with moss and root, and with just a drop of her own shadow-blue blood and one arcane tear, she gives life to the Fawn...

The Ghost of Sandhills
Commissioned by Magpie Studios
I cant hear a thing for the sound of the surf calling me to hush, be still be patient. To wait. I cant hear past their foaming (swirling, crashing) white noise out into the deep blue silent swells beyond. Beyond the aching wailing sea - where I might hear your whispers slink through the hairs on the back of my neck. What’s the sound of a sunken ship? And what light does a storm lantern cast, when there’s no mist to hold its beam ? Clear black endless oceans swallow a flickering flame, so I daren’t trudge the gaping waves for long, not in these endless dark nights. Come dusk let me be washed ashore, the floatsome of a tragedy played out beyond the eyes of dry land. Let my bones like driftwood shiver in the whipping salty wind. I dare not dive in the dark. [Let the wind wear down and shape my bones to oars, my body the vessel our row safe back home] The night, it amplifies the noise - there’s the voices, of the women of the waves, calling softly through their seaweed veils, the sound of the beach grass rustling when there no wind, the tide whistling as it slips back out, the sound of the stars scraping across the hull of the heavens. How am I supposed to hear you? Through all this din and racket? How will I find you, when their voices lead me this way and that, chasing the wild geese that migrate across the seas,… Whilst they keep you hidden from my ears and searching fingers, submerged in their clutches, dragging you deeper into their ensnaring depths. Hundreds of leagues down to compete with the hundreds of years of waiting, to fly by day and wait by night, scanning the horizon for your beacon, only to be met each day by the crushing blaze of the rising sun shedding cruel light on your absense Training my ears to block out the sound of the sea witches, so’s I may find you and ferry you home safe in the keel of my bones.

Excerpt from Nan of Boundary Bend
I heard from a poacher with no teeth and a stutter /The woeful tale of Nan and her warty frog lover! So it went when she was a lass she lived in a bog / God bless her, so innocent, fell in love with a frog. Tempted, frustrated, a little confused / The frog looking up, only slightly bemused Remembering a tale she heard when she was young / She lifted the frog and stuck out her tongue The kind touch of her lips on leathery features / The timid the jumpy, most warty of creatures Did indeed metamorph into a man before her eyes! / (Despite shedding his green-hued disguise We cannot say the man was pretty / But neither was Nan – so none’s the pity!) / They were in love and spent years together Roaming the steamy bogs in every weather / But happy times barely last forever… It was not long after the birth of their son (A very odd looking one) / That a strange change in Froggy had begun. He started to whither, shrink and turn pale / And here’s where we learn why Nan lives for the mail What a disaster there really was no hope / First a frog, then a man, now an envelope! That’s right, one night, while Nan was away, / Froggy transformed into a piece of stationary! By the time she returned he had been lifted away by a breeze / Nan heard of her leathery loves fate from a spider in the eves! She searched the swamps, the bogs, the woods / She gave up, frustrated, it was no good! Her love was now paper, stolen from her kitchen by a zephyr / Lost to Nan and her frog-son for ever and ever! But wait, an idea, Nan had one last plan… / She ran to the town to find the postman ‘Please, I’m looking for a job, have you got any time?’ / Said he ‘I’m sick of my job, you can have mine!’ So she delivered the post to the township / When no-one was looking she gave each letter a lick ....