In Red and White
You could helter-skelter down their columns on a rug or tray,
pretend they’re giant sticks of rock in red and white –
slice through their middles and you’d surely find
the names of places where they stand:
Strumble, Needles, Bardsey, Portland Bill.
In the whine of wind you hear the thin bewildered sighs
of men whose long-forgotten ghosts drift round
the eerie robot systems that transmit the beams.
Men amazed that no-one has to trim or light the lamps.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Apple Harvest
Apples cobble the orchard floor;
at my feet the zebra’d gold of wasps.
The basket on my hip is full.
I rest it on the table that
stands beneath these trees,
its grain split like the bursting fruit.
The bones of the basket are brittle.
The trees are cragged and bowed,
but still each year the wasps come,
lurching from the apples into flight,
staggering upwards in the air.
* Gill McEvoy is artistic director for Chester Oyez! the performance section of the Chester Literature Festival. She has two pamphlets out Uncertain Days and A Sampler (both Happenstance Press) with a full collection The Plucking Shed due from Cinnamon Press later this year.
