Pulling Splinters - Poetry Inspired by Place

Pulling Splinters

The past is an abandoned quarry,
granite memory painted in stone,
smattered with gorse and tidying tits
twittering around a rust-crusted lorry.

Their talk is all elemental,
of wind and the availability of worms,
the baking heather in summer's
clay earth womb, the sky.

The whistling shiver raising
land bourn air, blue and white
sifting through feathers and the
tinny tang of gorse-fed bugs.

The past is an abandoned quarry.
Molasses molehills speckle the crest,
as the west wind sweeps up dust
into spires, that whip through

this graveyard of rotting tyres.
Silent reminders litter the basin.
A one-wheeled BMX lies
half buried in perpetual motion.

Piles of wood lie scattered;
cigarette butts in a railway station,
wasting away with rain’s slow decay
in pools of tar-stained tears.

My past is an abandoned quarry,
not slow and maudlin but a playground!
Sunny days when we would crash
down the hill on mountain bikes.

Descend on the lorry with hammer and pliers,
to pull splinters - lead nails from unwilling
wood. Before bagging our treasure
and scaling the cliff face.

Languish in sun and wind and wonder
at the swallows baiting the clouds.

The scrap yard owner gave us 5 pounds
for carrion metal, foraged from past into present.

All images are either cc license or my own designs.

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