North
Beyond the bowling greens of winter wheat
hedged with hawthorn— beyond Lincolnshire,
the landscape slumps north
past freight yard pallet fires, and back gardens
hung with Monday's freezing washing.
A scraggle-oak profile shoulders slate cloud,
and pylons mark the distance west
with cables, humming overheads
diminishing to points of no return
trans-Pennine or the Borders.
Our seamless Intercity
blurs by the mucky brass of stations
Victorians engineered, their timetables beaded
in biscuit brick, vaulted iron, and rock-face
skewerings beneath the Norman hundreds.
The pit towns, steel towns, the Tyne towns
forging screw and funnel for dead fleets,
survey zero in the tide and from it
sink the mark to Gateshead's Angel,
its bloom of rust a reckoning.
The underworld beyond the carriage windows
nudges us awake: a girl, hair flying, on a field dyke
by a ditch and upturned caravan,
mouths something we each believe
we understand, waving wildly as we pass.
Page(s) 14
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The