I’m really pleased to have a poem in the anthology The Cry of the Poor, edited by Fran Lock and published by Culture Matters. ‘The Weather In Priory Park’ is one of my lockdown poems, about an encounter with a man in my local park.
‘Something about a dog
secures you to a place. How else
could we live in those days?
Hunker down from disaster,
or watch as cloud invaded
a brilliant spring: Blackheath,
Denmark Hill, the City, all
the landmarks escaping us.
What we had was the park
which bloomed beyond
its essential skuzziness
into silver birch, hawthorn,
black inkcaps, a good circuit
where the dog could run.’
Absence Club 