I have been asked to contribute a reading of a poem/poems to a spoken word anthology of Shore Poets in Edinburgh.
The Shore Poets used my poem ‘The Ice Horses’ as the title of their second anthology but I missed the launch because of returning to Oxford. Hopefully this time I won’t go missing 🙂
Here the cover of the original anthology from Scottish Academic Press in 1996 and the title poem.
THE ICE HORSES
I lean over and point my father’s gaze
at the photo of Bud Finch
at the wheel of his ‘Minneapolis Moline’ tractor
which, levitra though sunk during the war,
had been salvaged.
Later, as a storm battered
the tin roof of our garage
and flakes of broken fence spread across our lawn,
I returned to Bud’s memoirs.
One winter the Thames here froze over
and horses walked out across the river
to graze upon the reeds.
One fell through
and men from Bud’s village pulled it out,
laid it on a gate, carried it back to the village.
This flashes through my mind as I cross
the same water in the passenger seat of my dad’s truck.
We are working at a mental institution,
(once a military hospital)
slipping under the wooden floorboards of wards
to fireproof heating ducts with glass fibre.
We hear heavy horses above, wandering.
Later still I discover that my maternal grandfather
lay in that hospital as I was born in the winter of ’59.
My mother tells me I was taken in and shown to him
like a new tractor brought onto his farm.
Did his eyes see swaddling bands, metal bed, window bars
and bare floorboards glazed with water
or did they see barn, field, horses,
folding under snow,
ships sinking in a blizzard.
The Second Shore Poets Anthology
edited by Stewart Conn & Ian McDonough
Scottish Cultural Press, Edinburgh 1996
Rest of my poems in book HERE
To hear me reading poems check out my Poetry Myspace