Alan Whitaker
The primrose days
Drifting from another faded summer
beneath the high, dark arch,
skewed over a ravine of gorse and fern,
built to last forever
but plundered instead by faceless men,
come to wipe the land with razorwire.
By the wood pigeon’s nest
where we tottered on the rim of Space,
the cottongrass flattened,
the rabbit hole filled with rock and dissent.
Picking among the traces;
a shoe,
a sun-bleached bone,
prying flesh gouged by the dog rose
disguised as paper,
the hot smell of creosote
on smokestained stone.
Murmurs in time still shifting in the loam,
the smiles, the throwaway lines,
tiny ammonites of conversation
eclipsed by moon and sun
colliding here beneath the arch,
cracked at the centre like a fist,
punching the parapet
of night’s impenetrable pitch
as silent ghost trains glide below a scarp,
blackened spoors
from blackened air
in this wasting,
wasted land.
It was never like this
in the primrose days
when we sat for hours in a dip,
facing west to taste the sea.
Page(s) 59
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