Alan Whitaker
Witness
Where thirty years before,
on New Year’s Eve,
I sat and gazed across a deep ravine,
I have returned
to look for snow and marsh.
Emerging from the willows,
grown now tall from saplings
buried in that trampled winter,
I follow once again the ancient path
to seek my ledge above a stream.
Another year has had its days,
and older, but not wiser,
I stand once more above this
hostile passageway of wind,
where trees are bent towards the east
and crows still rise like shadows,
frightened out of sleep.
Beneath a rift of rock,
the preacher in his prime, striding
through the rushes and the reeds,
black-tied, collar stiff with frost.
And, motionless, the poet
who would not be led,
marooned between the footprints
which bind him to their steep,
diminishing path.
Page(s) 86
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