Back again...

Sorry to have neglected the journal - have been in Amsterdam to see my son (see my Flickr pictures) and in Lincolnshire to look after my Mum.

However - the big news is that I have won quite a major poetry competition - one of 4 winners in the Poetry Business pamphlet competition judged by Michael Longley. So I will get a pamphlet of poems published. I am over the moon....

Here, together with a photo from yesterday's walk, is a poem which will be in the pamphlet:


The holloway

Duck, and you’re fed inside
this oak-soaked dark -
a gullet carved from wildwood where
a pheasant’s broken clockwork startles.

You’re breathed in.
Only rattled blackbirds breach
the arched green hush
where banks are mossed.
Soft earth, hard stone,
leaf-litter, flesh the floor,
and still you are flowed, a boat,
runnelled and cundy borne,
away from heat that frets
in a future - not of your choosing,
yet somehow of your making.