i.m.

All Billy Shiel's boats are called 'Glad Tidings'.
The last will ferry me across to Andrew Waterhouse
Where he is writing now, with an upside-down coble
For a home and an office on his own unnoticed Farne.

There, terns' eggs litter stones that are also eggs
Under the millennium party of the northern lights,
Themselves a gigantic lid of the Blinking Eye Bridge.
He'll tell me again what he told me in the Bridge Hotel,

How individual pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels,
If left too near a fire, shrink from it and start
To re-assume the shape of the calves they parted from,
And I know if I ask he'll tell me all their names.

 

 

 

Ian Duhig won the National Poetry Competition in 1987 and 2001. His next collection The Lammas Hireling is due from Picador in May 2003.

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