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Second Light Network Enfield Poets Shortlands Poetry Circle Cornwall Poets Canada & US Tour

poetry pRO     The White Boat
Katherine Gallagher, free download at CLP

Poets: browse the list

  

ppf SHOP ONLINE      MEMBERS’ EVENTS     MEMBERS’ COMPS & CALLS May25: Frogmore Poetry Prize
 
see/hear: listen to Margaret Eddershaw reading her poem The Mission

donations will be very gratefully received.

latest on site:
   Judith Wozniak
   Alessio Zanelli
   Janet Hatherley
   Judith Wilkinson

latest new pages:
   Maggie Butt
   Jennie Osborne
   Mary Robinson

COMPS & CALLS:
May25: Frogmore

latest comp results:
   Second Light 2024
   Frogmore 2024
   Ware 2023

selection of books:
   ppf shop online

previous projects:
   Blyth Valley Radio
   poetry tREnD

featured poet – Jacqueline Gabbitas


Jacqueline Gabbitas

 

Gutter

I have marked a doorway “vision”
on a map of my house. I’ve named
 
rooms               ‘people’ and ‘nature’, ‘apples’
and ‘light’. I can tell you
 
                            there’s no guttering here:
there’s nothing to guide
                   the rain away, nothing
 
to catch leaves from trees that on my map
are the names
of windows.
 
And because of this, I’ve no sense of roof,
of capping off.
 
Images fill my landing,
                   squeeze under doors I didn’t name –
   there must be
space between some rooms
                   that poetry can’t occupy.
 
And if a room is full of ‘questions’ or ‘blind’, ‘fusing’
or ‘slow’, who could think
 
                            of a channel to trap them,
  a roof to cap them off,  when ‘questions’
and ‘blind’, when ‘apples’ and ‘song’
 
                   know outside these walls there is ‘grass’,
and ‘deep’ and ‘sky’?
 

Jacqueline Gabbitas

first published in Magma, No. 30, 2004;
in pamphlet collection, Mid Lands, 2008,
Hearing Eye, ISBN 978-1-905082-27-4