A storm is ending summer, trashing gardens,
flooding the road clean. Jackdaws are hurled over
the fields like socks; the swifts have gone.
Night gathers, Venus and Mars port lights
over the city.
Somewhere in the rockery a toad is eating itself.
Fat as a hand, he shrugs and gulps, eyes peeled.
His shed skin makes a rich dinner,
fuel banked against the coming dark.
He swallows. The earth opens a crack more.
*
Once I dropped on a line from a disused bridge
abseiling seventy feet, then caving, the guide
with his stories of trapped miners and rising water.
I wake to thunder and blinds rattling. The rain will find holes
in the roof again, bloom on the chimney-breast.
The wind tails away through the morning
leaving a scour of sharp-edged hills:
woodcuts against a pale absence. Smoke plumes
from the allotments; a windscreen flashes on the hill.
The courgette flowers even as its leaves curl.
*
Settling between worlds, the toad is vital and foetal.
He knows the road to the underworld and the road out.
His skin tempers as the north levers into night,
feels the earth’s deep water, its frost, its iron.
The lucky countries have finally copped it.
We sit in front of the news or wait in traffic,
strong-armed Cnuts watching the tide turn.
Our strange summer laid us in its long grass.
Now we wake to a vacancy.
*
Late on a clear night, Orion climbs out of the south.
It’s the same and it’s not: no armies, but bunkers;
no bombs or riots but people looking at the horizon.
Each autumn, an exhalation. Now something else,
a known scent, soundtrack to our spring playing again.
I buy bulbs, anemones bright on the packet.
They sit in the kitchen, knurled and brown like old men
remembering. A lit bus hurtles past romantically.
Now there is nothing but meaning.
The first section of the poem ‘Sapo’ (from Rob Hindle‘s collection of the same name, published by Longbarrow Press in October 2022). You can order Sapo by clicking on the relevant PayPal button below.
Sapo
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More than 60 previous Featured Poems can be accessed via this index (many of these pages also contain audio recordings and short films).
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