Great welcome mat
bled on, pissed on, dressed up
in the rain-slicked dark’s lurid
dabble of lights, or midsummer’s
long-legged shadow-puppetry —
treadmill, hard mattress,
you take the daily weight of us
and our absence: dawn cities
littered with gulls, blue light
leaking like Revelation, the slow
mechanised whine of road cleaners
gathering in the sheaves —
Mark Granier’s “Ghostlight: New & Selected Poems” is published by Salmon Poetry
[See more: The NS Poem: Civet de Cerf]
This article appears in the 02 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Labour’s Britain