Blame Dr Beeching Trains no longer ran on the branch line at the end of our road, and the station had burned down years before. So your threat to throw yourself off the footbridge was a gin-inspired gesture even I saw through. It was true, that after months of trying, I had given up on you that night, started chatting up your best friend in … Continue reading Two poems by Colin Will
The Night Horses are stalled between sleep and dreaming. In the steading they lower their massive heads to the earth’s nod. In darkness white-faced Clydesdales lip at nothing. Below a halo of bats they rest their load of feather and bone and horn. They hear, don’t hear, the scrape of shoes, as a gelding shunts his weight to tilt the other haunch. Their slow brains … Continue reading Poetry in Horses
Plotkin’s cat The neighbour’s cat gave birth under our bed. As good a place as any, we thought, in the old empty suitcase father brought home after the war. Four black-and-white smudged kittens wriggled blindly in a smell of birth. We wanted to pet them, my brother and I, and I remember a hand, his or mine – it doesn’t matter – pulled back sharply … Continue reading ‘Plotkin’s cat’ by Colin Will
