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Rosebay Willowherb
A chill wind’s blowing from the north;
it’s bringing stubborn memories,
trans-Pennine railway journeys
even as these waterfowl
flaunt their green credentials
and the fumes of cars
(including ours)
rise from causeway corridors.
But at least this washed-out spring
will bring home all its colours,
like the rosebay willowherb
wildly waving as trains pass
from rail-track raised embankments
down where the seeds had blown,
and I’d caught sight of them
back with heartstrings tautening.
With nothing to prove and no designs
on anyone, willowherb thrives
wherever a wind has gusted
and thrown back on my own devices,
desires, I see how it survives
given the slightest noticing
from Garforth far as Manchester,
or something along those lines.
Operation Anniversary
Laburnum tendrils come again
in later sun and storm light.
I’m out running errands, layering landscapes.
Rain glints on the yellow droplets
this washed out, tropical-green spring day.
Then along with broken spheres
of half-blown dandelion clocks,
the laburnum, come again,
reminds me it’s been thirty years.
Later, lying here
with a weak gleam at the window,
I find those shiverings of laburnum
reach my way, reminding me
how fast or slow, looking after itself,
time’s bound to get on without us …
and taken back over this thirty-year
reprieve, it’s like I had pre-lived it,
already done my dying.
It’s like there really were nothing to fear.
13 May 2023
Desperate Measures
for Peter Makin
Convalescent from the long disease
being just another of those bare
forked animals taking exercise,
again I’m lining up my landscapes,
aligning them with thoughts
to see what’s not seen in this scene –
like Foxhill House against warm sky,
mildew and salts on polychrome brickwork,
now a law school with its laws
(the thin or thick rules we’ve to live by)
has me judging distance from lined trees
or lampposts set at intervals and these
in the Foxhill brickwork’s polychrome,
elaborate, unnecessary shapes
flecked by wildings’ wind-sown latest green
on what was Alfred Waterhouse’s home …
Yet still at that patterning, design, that care,
I’m puzzled why polychrome brickwork can’t mean –
seeing as there’s meaning everywhere.
Peter Robinson has published aphorisms, prose poems, short stories, fiction and literary criticism. For some of his poetry and translations he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Recent publications include Retrieved Attachments (Reading: Two Rivers Press, 2023) and, with Roberta Antognini, the Collected Poems of Giorgio Bassani (New York: Agincourt Press, 2023).
Copyright © 2024 by Peter Robinson, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author
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