Unamerican

There’s a new poem below. I don’t tend to like explaining poems, but I do appreciate a bit of context. Like many others I suspect, not least in the USA itself, I feel profoundly shaken by recent events there. When I was six, I discovered Charlie Brown cartoons, encouraged by an American exchange student assistant…

Can you ever know if a poem’s finished?

Writing poetry can be a strange and frustrating exercise. Sometimes lines, or even entire poems arrive like a kind of gift from the subconscious and you must record them on whatever comes to hand. Occasionally you might get one that feels complete from the off. Though in my experience this is rare. Even dreamlike poems,…

Norwhere Land

Norwhere Land Norwood, owns a sonic vagueness inside its name, where it’s neither wood, nor something else, an implied other option, a missing word, lost along the way.  That said, it was once wood: The Northwood, not of the NORTH of England, but north of Croydon, before you reach the Thames.  At some point, the old woods were given…

A question of a hill

I began to wonder, what makes a hill? Did all this tarmac count? 
Fences, PRIVATE SIGNS, the houses? Were they part hill as well – landscape like the stone and grass? The buzzard overhead, was that part sky, part bird, part hill?

Handles

I never considered handles before this,  never wondered who’d held my borrowed basket last filled it, gripped it tight, placed it back neat or abandoned by checkout,  unsettling us in its eerie. Didn’t ask, didn’t wonder what those hands did, who they touched waved slapped caressed, ever so tender. Did they stare at the milk…

The Revenant

Magpie Tales blog invited people to submit a poem or vignette based on this picture. She’ll get you in the end, Stretched out and unaware, Or watchfully expectant, She’ll come, she always does. Unable to resist, you’ll slip Down gradually, gratefully, Allowing sky blue water To do its work. Hag-like at times, she crouches, Opening…

Bookshelf invitation – Magpie Tales

Magpie tales blog asked people to write a poem, or vignette based on this picture: To make it tougher, I gave myself thirty minutes. Here’s my response. Every book is unfinished. The secret’s out. There’s something lacking within, And they squat on the shelves going nowhere. Abandoned on the edge of the road. Mere objects…