A mix’n’match of church styles clambering over the rocks. Piled upon stone in Norman shape of round and fat set in the armpit of tall and stretched and greying Gothic with crystal seams for the wind and windows. And a setting of cloisters open to the air with green garden on top of the world and walled arms scaling down the cliffs’ curling shoulders to the earth’s place as mountain-island.
Archive for Poems
23
Jul 2011
Day’s End
Sun sinks its girth over the edge of the world.
Fat light spills, rolls across the land
chasing viscous shadows with slow stealth.
Bumble bee hums to the tune of a sigh,
the swell of a breeze lapping at my window.
Put your words away, the earth is stopping.
23
Jul 2011
Bristol
Bristol is complicated.
The history has subsidence.
Where have all the people gone
Who built a castle, town and bridges?
They traversed this place
And in their faces are lines
Of a hidden railway and river.
Features now buried.
The rocks moved
To enable the first explorations
Of earth and sky.
Down to coal-scarred, sand-crusted soil
Where the bed of industry
Gave of her slumber
To heat and to sparkle a home.
Up to the springs of a hot well
Where the favoured medicine
Spilled its tonic to the sick.
The contact, the connection
Has been covered and crushed.
Bristol fights for the surface,
While slinking below
The Frome carries something lost
Out to sea.
We are a floating harbour.
The landscape which so realises
Our suspension
Sees a gorge’s drop below
Where there swells an empty distance
Between here and the past.
Sewer and cellar permit a junction
Insofar as a need prevails
(here are the tracks of a terrestrial life),
But why must we be lost to a tide
Complicit in erasure
With commerce?
When the ships depart
There can be no home.
TRIPLE BILL now on, as part of the