Window, Honley
by Niall Campbell
The village bell’s been broken for a month,
sounding a flat, wrecked chime to the main hour;
the clapper between its iron walls sung out,
so I’ll ask what time matters anyway:
just light, less light, and dark; the going off
of milk or love; our tides claimed back: weed rafts,
green wood and all; those old wolves disappearing
from the bleak forest that we dream about;
a town fire; a town flood; the marriage that
left confetti in the streets until the storm;
yesterday’s sweet unrust; a man with pen
at a lit window, that he’s long since left.
Niall Campbell is a poet from the Western Isles of Scotland. He received an Eric Gregory in 2011, and recently won the 2013 Poetry London Competition. His first collection, Moontide, will be published by Bloodaxe in 2014.