poetry pRO
MTTLC 10 Years Old
2016 Delegation, 6 poets anthology, Contemporary Literature Press
ppf SHOP ONLINE
MEMBERS’ COMPS & CALLS 31st May, Frogmore
MEMBERS’ EVENTS/VENUES Feb: Shortlands Poetry Circle: 10th & 24th (live) & 16th (online)
and North West Kent Stanza: 18th
see/hear: YouTube – poetry p f playlist – Vicky Wilson reading her poem, Counting the Strokes
latest on site:
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
Green Wine
He tempts her with Portugal in spring –
I can’t, she says, not having stayed before
in a hotel with anyone but her husband.
He laughs, kisses her, pointing out that
there are four hundred bedrooms, so who
will know or care? This being a question,
for which she has no answer, they go,
oblivious to the Carnation Revolution,
bewildered to find their hotel empty,
its terraces deserted, salt pool unruffled,
to dine alone in a chandeliered ballroom
where a trio of defeated women play
selections from long dead musicals. This
soup’s good, he says; she stabs her plate,
an ill-conceived stew of pork, beans and
shellfish. It can’t get any worse, she thinks
but all week the sun’s too hot, the beach
too far; they trail from one sad bar or café
to the next, weary of fado, the endless
bacalhau, the sickly egg yolk docinhos
whipped up, she imagines, by sour-faced
nuns. We should never go back, he says
on the last night. I should never have come
she thinks, sticky with guilt and sugar
which she tries to rinse away in vinho
verde. And later, it will not be this meal,
his sleeping face and priapic body or his
unfaithful mouth she will remember,
but how, slipping in through shutters,
the sunlight stained everything.
Angela Kirby
published in The London Magazine, summer 2012
© Copyright of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
site
feedback welcome
