Helen Oswald
Rough work
The damp, sweet, southern summer
thickens like syrup, turns chapters
of our holiday novels into pancakes.
High in the pines, a shrill persistence
keens some forest loss unknown to us.
We are visitors here.
Unseen in the half-light, a blade
tears at the air, slices silence,
cuts through our time
so that soon we will find
our days piled up like logs,
some rough work done for the winter.
Helen Oswald won fourth place in the 2004 Arvon International Poetry Competition and her pamphlet, The Dark Skies Society, was published in 2004 by Waterloo Press. She lives in Brighton.
Page(s) 73
magazine list
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- North, The
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- Obsessed with pipework
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- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
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- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
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- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Private Tutor
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- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
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- Shearsman
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- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
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- Yellow Crane, The