The Old Bridge

How far stone endures,

not in only great monuments –

temples, ruins, castles, cathedrals –

but wonders of the everyday:

how, quarried, split, cut, shaped,

it’s fabricated for houses, bridges,

pocked and scored by climate,

worn-smooth by traffic,

inscribed by time and the impulse

to see what’s on the other bank.

Leaning over grainy parapet,

we’re pausing again to look

down into water furling at pillars,

heading for an elsewhere we can’t tell.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Midsummer

Static heat and a veil of light across fields,

a too-bright sky bring us back to this path,

its attendant hedgerows and here

in the nooks of dry stone walls

pale seasonal flowers as if in hiding.

Between shifts we’d be out in midsummer,

taking to that familiar stretch of farmland

and each other: infinite worlds

among the cornstalks, under pebbles,

in the splash and froth of busy streams –

soon we’ll have to return or move on,

but for the moment, love, here’s

the pair of us, out of harm’s way,

shading our eyes against the sun.

Midsummer’s Day is on 21st June in Britain and 24th June in Bulgaria.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Bloomsday

Judiciously in absentia from rumorous circulations,

Joyce embarked on his reconstructive journey

somewhere beyond the plate-glass windows

and reversing lorries of Zürich bahnhof –

conjured Bloom to wander a Dublin question mark,

and Stephen, his fallen, fearful Telemachus.

Rough magic and heavenly music,

from Sandymount Strand to Eccles Street,

from declarative ‘Stately’ to reparative ‘Yes’,

signatures of all things, words changing colour –

a single day amounting to an odyssey,

refindings of the ineluctably modal.

16th June is Bloomsday – the anniversary of the day in 1904 on which James Joyce set ‘Ulysses’ – a novel written in Trieste, Zürich and Paris.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Apples

Sharp, crisp smells in the packing shed,

another year’s crop despatched

along conveyors, boxed, crated

loaded onto trucks: our village industry

of pickers, sorters, packers,

ladders propped among branches,

trugs of cookers and eaters,

a methodical tree-by-tree advance.

All I would do to take you there –

to those orchards beside our lane,

their close fruit-heavy ranks,

some time towards the tail-end

of a Cold War summer

of beer gardens and mown grass –

all I can do amounts to these words,

the taste of these apples.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips