In The Poetry

Timothy Winters

Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

His belly is white, his neck is dark,
And his hair is an exclamation mark.
His clothes are enough to scare a crow
And through his britches the blue winds blow.

When teacher talks [...]

Miller’s End

When we moved to Miller’s End,
Every afternoon at four
A thin shadow of a shade
Quavered through the garden-door.

Dressed in black from top to toe
And a veil about her head
To us all it seemed as though
She came walking from the dead.

With a basket on her arm
Through the hedge-gap she would pass,
Never a mark that we could [...]

Eden Rock

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour [...]

Healing a Lunatic Boy

Trees turned and talked to me,
Tigers sang,
Houses put on leaves,
Water rang.
Flew in, flew out
On my tongue’s thread
A speech of birds
From my hurt head.

At my fine loin
Fire and cloud kissed,
Rummaged the green bone
Beneath my wrist.
I saw a sentence
Of fern and tare
Write with loud light
The mineral air.

On a stopped morning
The city spoke,
In my rich [...]

This was the first war cemetery I ever saw, at Bayeux. It gave me a terrific shock. I lost my father as a result of the First World War and I’d never been in a British war cemetery. I don’t think I’d ever been to France before. That’s what promoted me to try to write [...]