Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

Ian Caws

print this page

The Blind Fiddler

By evening a frost was on the road
But when the clock touched twelve nobody came.
So often he believed her when she said
She’d meet him, that it was more than a mood.
And it was late, when at the Blind Fiddler
He waited. Later, it seemed in his room,
Life was a chain of meetings never made
And the consequences shaping each hour.

That menhir stone of quartz studded granite
Was once a fiddler who played on Sundays
And if they half believed these things or not,
A tale told by the Methodist preachers
Persuaded them of judgement at the least.
And though they always named it as the place,
They never touched together its features
Or by its hardness retrieved what was lost.

When conscience grew quiet, in summer heat,
They met as strangers in the after years.
And she who thought his love might now be hate
Remembered the cold midnights of those days
When she’d stayed at home. And he, in turmoil,
Walked back through his mind, past other affairs,
On track for the Blind Fiddler, in a daze
Of prescience, wishing the ground would cool.

Page(s) 38

Back to top