For Gordon
Phillips
Plaiting a
rope of words, he would have drawn
The Pitman
Poet out from his trappings,
Then, from a
block of thoughts, begun chipping
A verse, as a
sculpture might work his stone.
But, the rope
broke. Now he is an absence,
The missing
poem in a new collection,
A name not
included, an exception,
An
ever-present lost to the past tense.
Still the
Tyne flows to the sea as always
And
kittiwakes screech along the Quayside,
While, in a
nearby pub, poets count the days,
Count the
syllables, count the feet that reside
In every line
they’ve spun, that legacy
Left by
pitman or poet once time elides.
Dave Alton
