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Second Light Network Enfield Poets Shortlands Poetry Circle

poetry pRO     True Compass?
Michael Curtis, Integral & CLP

Poets: browse the list

  

ppf SHOP ONLINE      MEMBERS’ COMPS & CALLS 31st May, Frogmore
 
MEMBERS’ EVENTS/VENUES Apr: Shortlands Poetry Circle, 28th (live)
 
see/hear: YouTube, poetry p f playlist – Martyn Crucefix reading his poem R-O-M-J-X

donations will be very gratefully received.

latest on site:
   Julia Deakin
   Joseph Long
   Peter Ualrig
       Kennedy
   Judith Wozniak

latest new pages:
   Barbara Hickson
   Marina Sánchez (biog)
   Kay Syrad
   Elisabeth Rowe (poems)
   Mary Robinson (biog)
   John Gilham

COMPS & CALLS:
May26: Frogmore

latest comp results:
   Frogmore 2025

selection of books:
   ppf shop online

previous projects:
   Poem Cards
   Blyth Valley Radio
   poetry tREnD

featured poet – Angela Dove


Angela Dove

Gozo

Give the house back to the night creatures, fat transparent geckos
suckering the walls, beady mosquitoes, kamikaze moths.
Be still now, this is the time of blank-eyed courteous night.
The sickle moon dips and disappears, replaced by the lighthouse,
pulsating over the rocks. A single red Hibiscus flower shrivels
and drops. A last mournful jet winks across the sky,
giving the island a miss. Our swimsuits drip across the balustrades
and the fridge changes gear.
 
This is the time for retreat when babies lie prostrate
sucking invisible teats and valley headlights salute roadside shrines.
Steep gorges hide their underwear, rusting wrecks, cigarette butts
and punctured lilos plastered to the rocks.
Now the sea remembers how it felt to be filled with fish.
Tour guides lock their safes, bartenders forgive their last customers,
badly paid waitresses walk home fortified by tips.
An insomniac priest genuflects before an empty niche, illuminates
another electric candle.
 
Dream now in the stultifying heat about the twisting sea.
In Santa Marguerita’s home for the aged and incontinent
a coven of nuns dream about their weekly bathe.
Wedged in black inner tubes they bob in billowing nylon overalls
and baseball hats. They crochet in their sleep: vestments and table mats,
a magnificent lace virgin ascending, arms outstretched.
Twenty sweating men heave her up and down vertiginous village streets.
Confetti rains, cracked bells clang, chrysanthemum fireworks burst,
and four bands compete simultaneously, Verdi, Wagner,
Jesus Christ Superstar, a medley from Cats.
The puffing Bishop shamelessly blesses all in the stir-fry heat;
islanders, tourists, toddlers, copulating dogs, nougat sellers
and cash machines.
 
We swim towards the dawn and our flight home.
We’ve swallowed the uppers and downers of August.
There are no casualties. I pad up to your room to count your head,
ears freshly pierced, a little altar of souvenirs. Here you exist
leggy and shy, only for the promise of tomorrow’s last swim,
beyond the rocks at Calypso’s Cave where Ulysses,
captured by the turquoise waves, spent a little time.
 

Angela Dove

published in collection, Cabinet of Wonders, 2002, Vernier Press,
ISBN 1-898825-06-8