Guest Poems

CPR On his knees in the wet street he pressedon the chest of a stranger older than his mother. Gifting again her lungs with his breath, then handsre-clasped in a kind of prayer-meets-compression. (What are prayers anyway without repetition?Or miracles, in this case,...

Orcadian Inheritance For Ann Scarth (née Harper), 1762 to 1867, Evie, Orkney My dear child, you can travel the worldbut I am bound to this place, this grey blue sky and sea, this brown green land, red grey standing stones.I live, I live, I lived a hundred years and...

The Dance Morning Walk at Cannon Hall, Barnsley Electric orange, acid yellow, cyan, these bird-likeguardians, totems carved from pine and oak, installedin their set stations, keep watch over the narrow serpentine,the muddy island, this tangled wilderness of...

A Rhizomic Persuasion Golden Shovel based on a quote from Elizabeth Heyrick’s ‘Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition: or an Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest and Most Effectual means of getting rid of West Indian Slavery’ In Leicester market watch whatpeople stop to buy,...

A Patch Of Sunlight Speaks Breathing the dust of centuries, I spreadmyself beneath your beam that slants above,its shaft across my face. Alone, I’m dead,my whole existence turns upon your love.Darkened by shadows, troubled by the soundof trampling feet, I long to fly...

Losing a Language Death-rattleon the pebbles. This is a tide that won’t return. The waves’ eloquencebreaking, leaving onlya scattering of shallow poolsthat shrink towards oblivion. Take this drypebble in your hand.Remember how the lips of the seacould make it...

Fact or Fiction Mornings, I scroll through the news on my phone;I like to know the world still exists before leavingthe house. Though today, I don’t want to readabout how Europe is on fire and the ice capsare melting, I just don’t have capacity anymore.Instead I shall...

Charlie Charlie was huge – ‘last time I saw a spider as big as that’a man I loved had told me once ‘I tried to bash it with my shoeand it took it off me and hit me back…’ She was blackest black – glossy, plum of a body,short stout legs at the ready, eyes peeled better...

The Dead They buried him in a shoeboxamongst the terraced stones,packed in tight as teeth. God help the hand that puts me there.Don’t sandblast my nameon a bookmarked bible slab.Don’t trap me in an eight by six,gawked at by the passing busas next door’s dog lifts its...

Cheddar Gorge I walked up the road from Anne’s hotel,climbing onto limestone heights,kaleidoscope inside my head. I can’t … I can’t … it’s impossible … I thought the cliffs an awesome sight,below the bushes dropping steep,suffused in eerie golden light. I can’t … I...

Talking to Thrushes for Andy, of Maggie’s Centre Instead of you, I’ll talk to the thrush.As I can’t book an appointment,I’ll talk to a sparrow too – one that calls from the hawthorn.Or the nervous starlingon the green steel bridge. When birds are hidden, I’ll talkto...

bells bearded men under straw hats at springgaudying the playground with ribbonsthat sprout from a maypole you’d go in groups round the canopybut recall the other times when snakes would descendthrough a nightmare in the airround your side of the bed till you’d find...

Loss My loss comes wrapped up in phrases:… no more funding… have to let you go. Yours has no such delicate packaging:the click and boom of gunshotsthat violate the rushing street,the angry blade that rips through flesh. I add the experience to my CV,gain advantage...

The Deliverance of St Peter David Teniers the younger, c.1645 On one side of the massive door,which stands unaccountably open,the guards, so steeped in reality it hurts,are playing dice, that means of transport fromreality into some other sphere of things,where it’s...

On not Being the Last Bird to Sing my child’s face, stretchedin pain like a Noh mask, relaxesand she sleeps at last,leaving the land around usto lie awake under a crust of starsthat mists the sky with light likethe illuminated face of a watch.On the hillside, a hare...