Rory Waterman

Three Poems

Sots Hole
 
He forgets the Fenland hamlet where willows slumped at the dyke
and lapped from both ends, where a ten-year-old lad on a bike
could get in an hour, without the grown-ups knowing,
and drink from a bike-bottle on the bank, the unfettered wind blowing
the fronds in loops, and the parched fields spread like bread,
as flat as the sky, with the moorhens coming and going…
 
Twenty years later, to the day perhaps,
he leads her to that bank, down that metalled cycle track
and takes her on a bench-rail, hid in a hide.
The latch opens onto a world that couldn’t worsen,
where willows comb the water and unseen mallards meander.
And she pulls him close – all he once knew he wanted.
 
 

 

 

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