Directions

You go through the wall:
the Remembering’s on your left,
widows’ dahlias, match-wood crosses –
then John William Robson gone slant, lost
in the pit disaster,
across from him the black yew
with rats in its roots,
a trembling of needles
for they’re gone too fast
to catch their faces:
keep to the path.
Here’s willow for a sailor’s concern,
knuckles tapping at his mossy anchor,
the scrubbed marble doorstep
with its jar of snowdrops for an infant
unnamed and dead two lifetimes over.
I walk here all weathers, in rhododendrons’
Popish purple, blackberries’ wet blue
that get picked at night, in secret.
Winter now, all stab-sticks in black ground,
I’ve nobody here. Years ago
it was all running feet,
unearthly calls, kids in their dens
singing on glue like foxes,
but still I came anyway.
For some it’s a shortcut.
I’ll see you again.

Cobbles

I love walking them late rainy nights,
their slippery fish-scale sheen lit from within,
love to listen to their mutter under my bootsoles,
how they unbalance me
yet hold –

they came from reefs,
languorous and murky, settling slow
in a warm mineral broth
studded with trilobites, flurried
by silver tail-to-fin-to-tail
oozing into stone

and now
like shoulders in a crowd or
a house of cards, delicate
weight with counterweight,
each one alone yet borne along in shoals,
they roll me home.

Eye-Shine

Night man not hunter but
nosing for sounds, sudden
flurries, a call or whisper,
creatures made huge by darkness
turning their heads towards his scent
night vision shows
two silver shillings
fathomless flat surfaces not wet
but lunar then blinking
becomes language
between them, a ceremony
night makes possible when he
blind but for the lens and they blinded
by his beam meet not on equal terms
but somehow marvelling at one another
from across such distances.

Auld Lags
Barlinnie Prisoners visit Kerrerra Parrot Sanctuary

Each dusk the ferry goes farther,
last light an arc, unsteady, strobing the wash.
Visitors leave us their voices
to settle and fade. Some smoulder on,
give us bad dreams
for most of us cannot be hushed or comforted now:
when we kiss we draw blood,
the lingo never charms for long
and our own language has too much jungle in it
but when the Bar-L boys bring us their gutturals and jackets
hand-tacked in sail cloth for suicide watch,
nurse us gingerly like thorned bouquets
between knuckles of LOVE and HATE,
we are none of us able to summon back the ferry,
unpick the paths that brought us here,
unsay what cried out.

Pippa Little's collection Overwintering (OxfordPoets/Carcanet) came out in 2012 and was shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. She has also published three pamphlets and two small press collections. Her work has appeared in many anthologies including In Protest, HRC, and Best of New British Poetry 2012 and 2013, on radio and film and appeared in print magazines and online. She lives in Northumberland with her family and elderly labrador.

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