I discovered a poem the other day I'd written a year ago - and competely forgotten about. I wrote it on one of the inner pages of a new notebook (why I did this, I've no idea). I've been steadily filling the notebook with notes on guitar lessons. Well, the other day I turned over the page at the end of a guitar lesson.... and there it was. The reference to angels was, I think, a reference to a print by local artist, Piers Browne:
Askrigg
I saw no angels:
only the sun
catching the slates
of the wet roof
after the rain.
The stream was full,
coughing its way impatiently
through a concrete pipe.
A skylark sang and,
on the opposite hill, a car
twinkled like a fallen star.
Handel Rigaudon
5 months ago


11 comments:
Almost as good as finding money in an old pair of pants you haven't worn in years.
Beautiful imagery Dom.
Great poem, wonder how you could possibly have forgotten it!
I find this quite lovely, Dominic. Spare, full of great imagery, and rich in meaning.
Thanks for these comments!
GOML: And I did that the other day, too. Only a fiver, but who's complaining.
WG: Thank you.
JW: Quite easily. I think I pulled into a layby to write it when I was whizzing from place to place, somehere near Askrigg. I had in mind a wonderful, rather Blakean painting by Piers Browne I'd seen on an exhibition in Askrigg itself not long before.
George: Thank you. It's about a place, too, that's just over the hill from your coast to coast journey, in the Dales.
Great! All I find in old notebooks is stuff like "MILK BREAD YOGHURT EGGS SOAP".
Quite lovely, Dominic.
(And Carmen found a £10 note in an old coat she hadn't worn for years the other day! Life is full of such riches.)
Lovely! What a wonderful final image.
It really is very good Dominic. There ought to be a movement of secret poets who leave poems in unexpected places - in library books, written in the dust on parked cars, scrawled in felt-tip pens on rural bus shelters.
Thanks for these comments, everyone! Just one specific - Alan, there is one, more or less: IPYPIASM (International Put Your Poem In A Shop Month) every December. But you've got me wondering, what does one do for the other 11 months of the year?
As Jenny - fancy forgetting so delightful a poem. Look after it now, Dominic - it's a keeper!
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