Camilla Lambert
Diary, May 1941
She digs obdurate Cornish soil,
carries water swilling in iron cans,
hands that stitched Chinese flowers
on silk, now calloused, engrained.
She mothers struggling shoots,
shields adolescent beans from gales,
eyes that smiled in youth from smooth
cheeks now sunk in sun-burnt furrows.
She looks across the sea, bathed
blue in light on a still August day,
thinks, leaden-hearted, of limbs shredded,
of children crying for their homes.
Beach watchers stern under tin helmets
fishermen by day, patrol walls,
stretch barbed wire coils across bleached sands;
she is warned this coast can not survive.
She works the plot, forks, weeds, lifts,
loads baskets until the moon creeps
above the headland; indoors, turns the page,
inscribes ‘It is too hard, I’ll write no more’.
Page(s) 18
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