Prodigal Son

Mike Ferguson


Never returning home, and with those many times in a pigsty all that enlightened was leaving again. You can love whoever for whatever without the need for narrative. Placing a parable in a colloquial aside is like painting with sand. Our sly cries and raw provocations. A return to form can mean how prose replaces the sonnet. A restoration of the sun beyond a horizon of tall trees. Of course, he did not literally return to a place that never existed. Redemption in shame, apparently. I turned away, many years ago, and these are the consequences of having been there in the first place.


Mike Ferguson is an American permanently resident in the UK and widely published in online magazines. His most recent print collection is the sonnets chapbook Precarious Real [Maquette Press, 2016] and he edited with Rupert Loydell the music poems anthology Yesterday’s Music Today [Knives Fork and Spoons Press, 2015]. A retired English teacher, he co-authored the education text Writing Workshops [Cambridge University Press, 2015].