Month: August 2010

Last Farmer: Salt Modern Voices No.6

Yes I finally have a solo publication as a poet. Not bad after 25 years of writing.

It is due to be released soon and you can pre-order from Amazon and Asda (links below).

My thanks to Chris Hamilton Emery and Salt for picking up on the poems. I am really chuffed that I am on Salt as it has a vast array of top writers on its catalogue (check it out on link below and purchase some – every little helps).

As for the title well you will have to wait until publication to find out who the Last Farmer really is…

The Pamphlet is now out of print and I am no longer represented in any way by SALT

Landlocked

LANDLOCKED

platform

Tied to a flat land
Of reclaimed pits and winding river
The railway has gone
Coal blackened tracks have grown over

Every wind caresses its absence
The silent factories know their part
But cannot speak, chains hold fast
Beyond pale gates and security huts

Poppies and cow parsley, ragwort and buddleia
A necklace of flowers around the empress lines
The slag of the steel rails is buried deep
Rusting wires rippling with plastic

Where prisoners of war once huddled
Now euro-workers assemble market stalls every Sunday
Chatter into cheap mobiles, pocket loose change
Against backdrops of power station, Tesco and trains

Midnight and bodies tumble from white van crates
In the empty parkway
Duck and dive and gulp clean air
Before swimming beyond the broken chainlink

The Shipstone Star

THE SHIPSTONE STAR
star

Red lead rain lashed to pink
hangs like a soviet star
on the left side of Nottingham’s tunic.
Always east facing, a towering symbol.
The dawn of a century personified, rusts
above a city of casual workers, bicycles
and the hard slogging dutiful dead
who fleck fields from the Rhone to the Rhine.

Never facing the river, that westward
leaches mud from peak and meadow.
The dried, limed stench of rutted tracks
lining the willow barks of Derby and Leicester.
Gables glossed white upon lace-curtained
suburban fuchsias, trimmed lawns and empty trailers.
Safety in numbers as the suburbs huddle
into its coat from Bramcote to Beeston.

Cattle slide into ditches, barges grind
at their moorings as floods flow on toward
dry fens gasping for this summer downpour.
The star remains firm, but tatty.
A remnant of a fading imperial industrial glory.
Cheap imports in containers trundle round the ring-road
headed for Poundland, Primark and Ikea.

We died for this, these rain-sodden shires
whisper the ghosts in the graveyards
as hooded boys on BMXs spin on street corners.
In a damp bedsit a shelf-stacker from Warsaw
lifts a Samurai Sword from the wall and mimes
the DVD still stuck on play on the monitor.
Star and blade flash for a second and are gone.

 
The storm lashes the window.
The Shipstone Star shines black on a white sky.

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