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 »

Howard Wright

print this page

Big top

As you wait for something to happen in your life,
a pencil train is eaten by the sharpener tunnel
and a wooden jetty walks on the water of a 'Dangerous Place'.
Ceasefire. The siege. A dentist with false teeth.

A bald barber; an optician who wears glasses.
The professional alcoholic. Laughing theologians.
This the kettle season of hairy frost and newspapers to freeze
the blood. Clear nights crammed with unimaginable stars.

Honeymooning swans upended like chunks of ice.
Lazy cars digesting the pornography of commerce under
a new sky of ravenous blue when a circus lands by the river,
and camelopards and tigers emerge to graze its hoary banks.

Behind the grumbling generators and fishnet satellite dishes,
the overloaded clothes-lines and painted canvas,
the clowns, trapeze artistes and fractious strongmen
pace the cages waiting for the curtain to go up.



Untitled illustration


Howard Wright was a runner up in the National Poetry Competition 2000 and won 4th prize in the 2001 Peterloo Poets Competition. He has recently appeared in the TLS, Fortnight (Belfast) and Tabla 2001.

Page(s) 26

Back to top