In The Poetry

Timer

gold survives the fire that’s hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn
An envelope of coarse official buff
contains your wedding ring which wouldn’t burn.

Dad told me I’d to tell them at St James’s
that the ring should go in the incinerator.
That ‘eternity’ inscribed with both their names is
his surety that they’d be together, ‘later’.

I signed [...]

Timer

gold survives the fire that’s hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn
An envelope of coarse official buff
contains your wedding ring which wouldn’t burn.

Dad told me I’d to tell them at St James’s
that the ring should go in the incinerator.
That ‘eternity’ inscribed with both their names is
his surety that they’d be together, ‘later’.

I signed [...]

National Trust

Bottomless pits. There’s on in Castleton,
and stout upholders of our law and order
one day thought its depth worth wagering on
and borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warder
and winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb.

Not even a good flogging made him holler!

O gentlemen, a better way to plumb
the depths of Britain’s dangling a [...]

Initial Illumination

Farne cormorants with catches in their beaks
shower fishscale confetti on the shining sea.
The first bright weather here for many weeks
for my Sunday G-Day train bound for Dundee,
off to St Andrew’s to record a reading,
doubtful, in these dark days, what poems can do,
and watching the mists round Lindisfarne receding
my doubt extends to Dark Age Good [...]

Timer

gold survives the fire that’s hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn
An envelope of coarse official buff
contains your wedding ring which wouldn’t burn.

Dad told me I’d to tell them at St James’s
that the ring should go in the incinerator.
That ‘eternity’ inscribed with both their names is
his surety that they’d be together, ‘later’.

I signed [...]