Poem of the Month

 

A new poem will be placed here each month, usually from one of my published collections.

 

My poem for June 2017, Attention, was first published in my 2016 collection The Migrant Ship (Melos)

 

Attention

 

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

 

Don’t worry, you have my attention;

I can hear the soft knock of a beak
tapping under my eaves.

I can see the valley slipping out of mist.
I can feel the warmth of sunned stone.
I can taste the sharpness of a pippin
I can smell the cracked piths of a flailed hedge.

It is this world and no other world;
it is no simulacrum, no notion or idea,
no construct of the mind but is itself
in all its passionate clarity.

So, for this reason, you have my attention.