Circus
We are the leave-takers,
rolling our hearts in tents.
Rootless, our life is soil, any soil.
With the first flutters of red we drive a stake
in a ground, peg ourselves to the here and now.
Harlequin knows the grist of a place,
instantly: takes his bugle and blows.
Then, as the vane turns, we twist from the grip of the Strong Man,
scuff our feet in sawdust. For we have all there is:
keeping the net whole, the fire at arm’s length.
Listen. We have to move on.
Tanya Parker won the 2008 Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition and the 2013 Ryedale Poetry Competition. Her work has appeared in Orbis and London Grip at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome. Her first poetry collection, with Stairwell Books, was published in 2015.