Conjured Sunlight

  If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze that it made you want to throw open all the windows ...

Raymond Carver Cool summer nights. Windows open. Lamps burning. Fruit in the bowl. And your head on my shoulder. These the happiest m...

Shane MacGowan Verse 1: Shane MacGowan] It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank An old man said to me, "Won't see another one...

  Rudyard Kipling The Way through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling They shut the road through the woods       Seventy years ago. Weather and ra...

Dannie Abse Not Adlestrop, no - besides the name hardly matters. Nor did I languish in June heat. Simply, I stood, too early, on the empty p...

  Yes. I remember Adlestrop— The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June. The steam...

  “Careful, honey, it’s loaded,” he said, re-entering the bedroom. Her back rested against the headboard. “This for your wife?” “No, too ch...

W. B. Yeats Here's a short video introducing W B Yeats and Bedford Park where he lived  when he first came to London.   View Video

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and lig...

Tim Turnbull Hello! What's all this here? A kitschy vase some Shirley Temple manqué has knocked out delineating tales of kids in cars on...

  Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,        Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express ...

  For the director of music. Of the Sons of Korah. According to alamoth.[b] A song.   God is our refuge and strength,     an ever-present he...

  Alan Jenkins I held her hand, that was always scarred From chopping, slicing, from the knives that lay in wait In bowls of washing-up,...

  Don’t forget me, I whisper to my Father. Give me something to eat, I’m So hungry, I call out to my Mother. The conditional care Of even th...

  And if I speak of Paradise, then I’m speaking of my grandmother who told me to carry it always on my person, concealed, so no one else wou...

T. S. Eliot   After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting ...

  T. S. Eliot I V. Death by Water Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit a...

T. S. Eliot The Burial of the Dead by T. S. Eliot April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desi...

  Julia Copus An Easy Passage by Julia Copus Once she is halfway up there, crouched in her bikini on the porch roof of her family's hou...

History  by John Burnside St Andrews: West Sands; September 2001 Today           as we flew the kites - the sand spinning off in ribbons alo...

Horses by Pablo Neruda From the window I saw the horses. I was in Berlin, in winter. The light had no light, the sky had no heaven. The ai...

Something sets us looking for a place. For many minutes every day we lose ourselves to somewhere else. Even without knowing, we are between ...

A man is singing on the bus coming in from Toledo. His voice floats over the heads that bow and sway with each turn, jolt, and sudden slowin...