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Second Light Network Enfield Poets Shortlands Poetry Circle

poetry pRO     Romania’s Moment
6 English Poets, 2017 delegation

Poets: browse the list

  

ppf SHOP ONLINE      MEMBERS’ COMPS & CALLS 31st May, Frogmore
 
MEMBERS’ EVENTS/VENUES Apr: 17th, North Meets South – Julia Deakin, Michael Di Placido and Anne Stewart
plus Stuart Handysides and Pam Thompson (online, booking now, free entry);
18th, NWK Stanza; Shortlands Poetry Circle: 20th (online) & 28th (live)
 
see/hear: YouTube poetry p f playlist – Caroline Carver reading her poem The Moving of Feet

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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 – Valerie Bridge


Valerie Bridge

The Ice Road

He’s late on the ice road over the Lena to Baikal,
with his Zlin transit, yet windscreen ice is still thick,
and the air in this unheated cab is freezing his nostrils.
Timber strapped hard, brakes screech like Baba,
and he’s s missing Nina. Radio seeps dot static.
No signal bars on his mob. White horizon endless.
Trucking mates being fleeced at border police.
 
He has to drive on. Baba woke, pleaded
from the stove bed for kasha just as he left.
Nina faltered, fixed her gaze on him, nodded.
He’s s been paid nothing yet for last month’s s trip.
The piano axed. Burnt well. Nina has fretted,
insisted on repeating ‘s even permafrost melts’s .
He’s s hooked by the kaleidoscope in her iris;
 
his heart’s s locked in her torn velvet skin.
She has to slip out for dropped paper, tickets,
cardboard, even in zastrugi. That’s s how it is.
Good months she earns a pittance of kopeks.
Nina. Her face flushed as she kneels, pokes
horsehair into the maw of that pot-belly stove,
determines to trick heat into Baba’s s bones.
 
Godforsaken transit’s s failing, like Baba’s s ribcage:
a handful of dry sticks. Now what? Loose gear.
Weak connection. This engine is hard to get.
Walkie talkie dead as road-kill spillage.
He should have left sooner. What’s s that, that
clunk? His crazed split-screen window clears,
fogs, clears again: how is a bear on his timber?
 
Thank god it’s s gone. His tyres lock and slide.
There’s s a current rippling under honeycomb ice.
Sunset purple shadows the ridge at the edge.
He’s s alone with an overdue, uneven load
on a never-ending, darkening melt-ice road.
First star. Transmission failure: no cab lights.
A pulse of pale mauve: aurora borealis
 
flares in seen-a-ghost sky. Cab door swings:
fingers grapple. He’s s face down in wet snow.
A from nowhere wolf howls, then nothing.
Veined green bud in an ice bleb. Nina.
River Lena a white metre beneath him.
 

Valerie Bridge

published in Tears in the Fence, Issue 69, September 2019