Jim Caruth
Anti-Clockwise on the M25
There are not enough minutes in the day
and so as always, we are living foot to the floor,
slicing through Essex, past long fields
blue with early rapeseed, like frost
at first light; past green deciduous woods
and high grassed banks of cotton thistle,
tansy and white campion, seeing nothing
but the names on curtainsiders, forty foot rigids
and low loaders piggy-backing containers
from Tilbury. We are tied to the tarmac,
its scars of burnt rubber, the purple viscera
of indecipherable creatures, its edges of orange cones.
And above our heads the azure signs, vivid against
a stone-washed sky, offer a change of direction
but we are unswerving, tuned to a junction number,
waiting for an arrow, the words - The North.
and so as always, we are living foot to the floor,
slicing through Essex, past long fields
blue with early rapeseed, like frost
at first light; past green deciduous woods
and high grassed banks of cotton thistle,
tansy and white campion, seeing nothing
but the names on curtainsiders, forty foot rigids
and low loaders piggy-backing containers
from Tilbury. We are tied to the tarmac,
its scars of burnt rubber, the purple viscera
of indecipherable creatures, its edges of orange cones.
And above our heads the azure signs, vivid against
a stone-washed sky, offer a change of direction
but we are unswerving, tuned to a junction number,
waiting for an arrow, the words - The North.
Page(s) 30
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- French Literary Review, The
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- North, The
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- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
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- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
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- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
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- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
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- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The