V.E. Day in Selwyn Road, Cambridge. Author pictured in back row, third from the left.       V.E. Day   She holds a finger to her chin. Flowers bind her hair. White tablecloths stretch endless invitation. Flags fly. Plum trees pink the pavements and she’s stumbling into sun, brother a sweep, her sister a…

Photo by Mediocre Studio on Unsplash           She puts away childish things   Early mornings – I would turn no light on, open no curtain, and force whatever little light the letters held to my eyes. I loved this most – reading against the dark. So really, it should be no…

Photo by Ben Allan on Unsplash         Not Harlem but Close   The place that produced me was heavy as the heavens. Its tiger tooth pinched monthly, sinking into us one bill at a time we emptied our pockets and dreams into a concrete bowl and ate the contents. The ceiling peeled,…

          Aged   I’m thinking again of Gallagher’s strat. You can’t get that sweated scrubbed-out look from a custom shop, and you can’t cheat it down like some shabby-chic with a sanding-block. Just the road-house hours—in the clubs with the crowd and the guys with real chops. And drinking too much.…

Photo by bennoptic on Unsplash           Silence   A squirrel scampers the wall of the nature reserve In this idyll I’m not sure I fully deserve, Four moorhens, the family of swans, And from a thicket a robin in full song, Two young humans sharing a kiss, And here floating, alone,…

          The Form of an Armoured Car (Belfast, 1977)   A Saracen’s squat tonnage shudders through the lines of flat-faced houses. Its heartbeat pulses on their window panes as soldiers scatter into pre-established patterns: defilade, enfilade, duck and cover, run. Boots clatter over cobblestones. An officer shouts. His public school English…

Photo by Dagmara Dombrovska on Unsplash         Landskein   The hut tilted and in came the tide, gathering jars and books from my shelves – but it was their time. Through the bobbing window there was still that one dark stain between sea and sky, the inky line spreading into the water…

‘The Nightmare’ by John Henry Fuseli, oil on canvas, 1781           Gothic   Where are you now? At the first flush of dawn everything pitched with exaggeration. An ordinary evening against a dull sky illuminated by lightning… Your letters – ironic, obscene – seduced by a fourth-wave feminist in remission. Ruined…

Fotheringhay © Kevin Gardner           Church Crawling for Kevin Gardner   Leighton Bromswold Yes, locked, of course. And once we find the key it’s comically huge, and hard to turn, but when it does, George Herbert’s century comes tumbling, sliding, singing at my phone from beams and dust and tracery and…

Photo by Michael Mahood on Unsplash         From the Sea-window   The tide’s going out. The heron stalks the rock pools. A dunlin picks its way through the seaweed. A black poodle paddles in the shallows. The ladies who swim wade ashore and take off their wetsuits and pink floats. The heron…

   Andrea Sonda on Unsplash           Window in the Rock   When you glimpse it you’re crammed into a floating bathtub with a teenage boy at the tiller, hurtling towards likely death. At the moment you think if I live, Mum can never know, you look back and spot the rogue pixel…

Harry Grout on Unsplash           Zaban i urdu   Zaban i urdu, meaning language of the camp. In Urdu, here is idher or yahan. There is udher or wahan. We drive through a town. My father says, We lived here when we first came to England. Temporary lodging. A street of houses…

Frans Ruiter on Unsplash           Brian Clough in the Rijksmuseum   I had four beautiful days in Amsterdam. The weather was gorgeous, the sights were just absolutely gorgeous. Everything about the place is magic. – The Frost Interview, 1974   As he stood eye to eye with Rembrandt’s 1628 self-portrait, did newly-sacked…

© Hilary Davies           In the Mountains of the Monédières, by the Green Waters of the Vienne   In the mountains of the Monédières I sat by the brook and waited for you. The young goats came to see And the pipits dipped all along the watercourses. On a sudden I thought:…

    Photo by Anna Kukhareva on Unsplash              Cleaning the Big House   Norfolk, England, 2030   It was the English woman Veronica Berridge who let the place go — her spirit vanishing maybe eight years back I imagine into one of these portraits in the attic room perhaps this one…

Photo by Datingscout on Unsplash     Andrew McNeillie’s New and Collected poems, Striking a Match in a Storm, is published this week by Carcanet. There will be an online launch reading on Wednesday 30th – details here.           Salmon Farm Blues   Call me old-fashioned, as you will, but I prefer…

Photo by S. Tsuchiya on Unsplash           Susumu   The sun beat down on Tokyo intensely: Forty-five in the shade. The matsu tree Stretched out across Susumu’s back garden, Providing relief from the scorching heat. Susumu’s dad had finally convinced Him to have the minor operation: Yarinasai, he’d growled, don’t be a…

Photo by Javier Balseiro on Unsplash           Caiaphas   I am content with what I have done in my time, and have little to alter. You fit your mind to the world around and pray that one bears the other. I am not visited at night by ghosts of the men that…