Well, I know I'm biased but I always thought one of the best poems I ever wrote is this one: a tale of a romance that was never meant to be, inspired by attending a Leonard Cohen at the Leeds University Student Union Building in 1972 with a semi-detached girlfriend.


For Roz:
​Leonard Cohen Plays Leeds (1972)

You claimed to have
a steady boyfriend
who none of us ever met
Many years after
your attempt to catch up
with me again 
Too late, I realised
the reasons why

If only: you hadn’t always 
tried to impress
If only: just once
you’d dropped your facade
If only: I’d been bolder, braver
and challenged your silly games
But you played hard to get
so I got another

I still recall the way 
Cohen sang that night
The upbeat arrangement 
he used for So long, Marianne
How the backing singers 
sang the lines
“to laugh and cry
and cry and laugh”

And how you looked
when you smiled

© Copyright Charles Christian

A new poem of mine Little Lost Cosmonaut – combining science fiction with a ghost story, what's not to like there! – has just been published on the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Eye to the Telescope zine (see link).

​
Little Lost Cosmonaut*
by Charles Christian


Poor little Valentinka
Lovely little Valentinka
Floating in her tin-can
Heaven above, the Earth below
Both unattainable now

A jammed valve 50 years before
Hypoxia then asphyxia
oxygen starvation and death
The ghost of Valentinka stares down
at her own desiccated body

Celebrated and beautiful in life
she could have been a red star
in the Soviet firmament
with her own black ZiL limousine
and a dacha in the country

Valentinka’s ghost still recalls
the taste of vodka, the smell of borscht
the sound of the balalaika
And walking hand-in-hand in Gorky Park
then kissing by the banks of the Moskva

But hers was a secret mission
and Mother Russia buries her mistakes
Everyone she ever loved or trusted
is now dead and gone or else chose
to forget the girl they once knew

Standing by her capsule’s window
from time to time she sees the flares
of rocket-ships soaring up from Earth
Maybe tomorrow rescue will come?
But no one sees or hears her signals

Like a matryoshka nest of dolls:
lift the hatch, open the Vostok
see the shrivelled corpse, free the ghost
Poor little Valentinka
Lonely little Valentinka


* There is a long-running conspiracy theory that, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, as many as 18 Soviet cosmonauts (including two women) were lost in space on never-publicly disclosed flights. The majority are still out there.

This spring I had the great pleasure of editing the 2016 Rhysling Award Anthology. Nominees for the Rhysling Awards are selected by the membership of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Each member is allowed to nominate one work in each of two categories: Best Long Poem and Best Short Poem. All nominated works must have been published during 2015. 

The anthology allows SFPA members to easily review and consider all nominated works and serves as a showcase of the best science fiction, fantasy, and horror poetry of 2015. The Rhysling Anthology is available in paperback on both Amazon.com ($13.95) and Amazon.co.uk (£9.76)