Peter Robinson
At Swarkstone Pavilion
A wind up here torments
the pavilion’s ramparts
and mock-battlements,
carrying muffled reports
of rifle shots from thickets.
Christmas week, a church bell starts
old changes and the quiet’s
retold across worked landscape,
briefly abandoned — its
railway lines, trunk roads which slope
silent now by cooling towers.
Pink dawn light escapes
from massed low cloud, allows us
on river and canal embankments
these few reflective hours.
Too much happened here.
Bulbs in a farmhouse pantry
glow through the day, appear
remote against black country,
undeterred, and they’ll compete
with marshalling yard gantries,
headlamps on this causeway; feet
and veering tyre marks scar
muddied verges. Desperate,
that pair making love in a car
parked by the sand quarry
I never saw and, love, you are
saying ‘Don’t look! … Don’t worry!’
above still clanking extraction gear
and the rustle of fresh slurry.
A gasometer at its full extent
contributes to the short-lived reek
of a sewage reprocessing plant
just the point of change I speak
from fear myself, intent
on nothing else this week
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