Two poems taken from my back-catalogue...
Heights (selected by Edwin Brock for 'A Rose is a Rose is a Rose' 1995)
The church is caught,
gaunt; a documentary item
in the cruel round of memory.
Silhouetted against the moor's cloak
its dead bell peals unheard
across acres of peat-dark fields.
The moor yields up its secrets rarely;
and this one it guards.
Pews gather dust in the stone-dank
guts of the building. The moor winds
creak through its gaps: a galleon
on the shoulder of the hill.
Our devotions are now given to more obscure gods.
Sheets of slate blind the windows.
Three houses are shuttered closely.
At night we hide our fires.
From the valley no light can be seen
as the dead streak like lightning
through the razor grasses of the heath.
The Frog Princess (from 'Ambit 175' 2004. Taken from a series of three fairytale poems published in that issue).
This heart pounds and mocks.
I pull on my frogskin gear
and wish for someone to turn me into a princess.
Following sluttish nights the aftershock
leeches like a sick thing.
The payback.
I open my eyes to a newly sullied world
and think this is the answer.
But after the pretty boy's kisses I am still a frog.
Thursday 3 November 2011
Wednesday 16 March 2011
A prize....
One of these has won me a prize. Will find out out which and what on 19 April...
The Yare at Rockland
A distant V of geese
unwinds its thin skein
eastwards over swaying sedge.
Drawn swiftly, precisely,
thin, wet sepia strokes
blur against the lowering sky.
Smoke also unwinds
from floating houses
cast loose from land.
As land chases its edges,
four horizons ring us.
The land shifts; waterbound.
All our edges are water;
slick, like oil, like pigment
mulled against stone.
Tilling
I work the soil with my own hard hands
while my neighbour, his sky-blue eyes
ringed with granite, stalks the fields
like the elements that close hard fast around me.
The deep furrows in the raw sienna mud
are waterlogged with bits of the sky.
A rook swims across one, then another.
He raises his gun. The shot thuds in my chest.
Birds scatter like thoughts; outwards.
The kickback jolts his shoulder which is,
I know, suede-soft and softly tanned, giving
gently to the touch of my clay-hard hands.
The Yare at Rockland
A distant V of geese
unwinds its thin skein
eastwards over swaying sedge.
Drawn swiftly, precisely,
thin, wet sepia strokes
blur against the lowering sky.
Smoke also unwinds
from floating houses
cast loose from land.
As land chases its edges,
four horizons ring us.
The land shifts; waterbound.
All our edges are water;
slick, like oil, like pigment
mulled against stone.
Tilling
I work the soil with my own hard hands
while my neighbour, his sky-blue eyes
ringed with granite, stalks the fields
like the elements that close hard fast around me.
The deep furrows in the raw sienna mud
are waterlogged with bits of the sky.
A rook swims across one, then another.
He raises his gun. The shot thuds in my chest.
Birds scatter like thoughts; outwards.
The kickback jolts his shoulder which is,
I know, suede-soft and softly tanned, giving
gently to the touch of my clay-hard hands.
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