David
Bircumshaw
| For
Robin Hamilton The squirrels in his beard were sleeping, he hoped. The night was free of ghosts. Wild metrics roamed Outside the fence, but surely a caesura, a tranquil Resolution was here allowed. Red over white, White over red, a delicate disturbance of syllables Opened a rose in his hand, allegorical ladders Climbed past his window, like late summer scents Carrying sons of Plato. He thought of sharper Forms, flints, granite, the clear waters of grain. A dominie thought called him, a hard collar Nabbing by the neb the dumbheid and stoshy. Awa' ye bogles, spirits, mistwalkers, ghosts. Nae archetypal squirrels, lost souls of quotes, But a drey made still, and the dree told beware. Morning Prynne Language ah the pile-up roots out the boxed-in matchday made now in China. Granite slabs are in short supply, etiolate echolalia, observance at the doorstep, deliveries of common fauna pecking orders unfulfilled. Granite echo Grantham her unreturned from Newton walled. Global pinched at space economy her speech assumes. Palinora, aero, unfound at airbase bounds, high cheap at shop, sheep corner sells at slant, off-time, across a bare baste rate exodus, drawn line. Close shave, obeisance, safefail, reversal, hymn me more real. Notes: In West Midlands speech, the sound of Prynne is naturally pronounced as in ‘pry’ rather than ‘prince’. Assonates with ‘time’. The Blue Tit, Cyanistes caeruleus, until the decline of doorstep deliveries, was noted in Britain (from the 1960s on) for its trick of opening bottle tops. From ‘Campylobacter Jejuni: a Bird-Watcher’s Guide to the Late Poems of Peter Reading’ – Hilda Roberts, Alconbury Press (undated) Recent renovatory roadworks on Leicester’s Gallowtree Gate have been delayed by a shortage of granite from the mountainous Chinese province of Huang-ti. ‘Palinora’ – an ineluctable reference, possibly a personal name. >>>Candice Ward
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