Julian Flanagan
Still Up
The night crop of silence
is stacked over High Legh,
the lanes and side woods,
fields and sunk meres.
Our house creaks under it:
beams shrink just slightly,
heavy-footed wardrobes tick politely,
Alice's busy sleep shuffles through the baby alarm.
The plot is bound in hawthorn,
witch-proof,
so the monochrome garden
can go about its noiseless business undisturbed.
Low apple trees scrum down.
Old pigsties lurk,
beady as pillboxes in the rhododendrons.
The willow gleans the rough grass.
Damson trees border the lawn,
their oval leaves hanging down
pleading innocence - we have nothing.
But look inside, up at the brittle web
and find their fruit of small nights,
clouding over now
with a cirrus of sugar under the skin,
ready for the stepladder and tomorrow's picking pot.
Page(s) 26
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