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The Friday Poem on 28/07/23

‘Snowday’ by Ian Harker is our Friday Poem this week. It’s an End of Times poem, but one which chooses to see beauty rather than horror, and one located specifically in Leeds. We love Harker’s careful phrasing, and his use of the particular, the historical, and the faintly absurd – Shih Tzus?! He controls the tone beautifully as the poem builds from the soft sweep of cars sliding on snow to a strangely reassuring apocalyptic finale. ‘Snowday’ delivers a gentle but serious warning with style and panache.

Snowday

The cars are falling with long sighs
down Monk Bridge Road, their tanks empty
and the beck grinding to a halt 

beneath the tarmac. This is how it ends: 
cars slide to a stop in snow that wasn’t forecast 
or if it was, it wasn’t supposed to stick,

vehicle skids into vehicle, voices on speaker 
slur with the cold, and Mr Matharu
from the newsagent’s watches in astonishment

and so do the monks of Kirkstall Abbey
come to collect their rent 
and so does a unit of Roman infantry 

that is hopelessly lost
and shouting in Dog Latin
at the woman with the Shih Tzus.

This is how it ends: you are being held
splendidly aloft by roots twice the size
of the branches, you are changing the colour 

of the sunset and the smell of the breeze 
while the trees, arm in arm, 
take the weight of it all and there is beauty 

in the sliding, skittering cars 
and there is beauty in the warning lights
but most of all there is beauty in how you fall.

Ian Harker is a poet and editor, co-founder of Strix magazine, and an organiser of Leeds Lit Fest. He won the Templar Book & Pamphlet competition in 2015, which led to the publication of The End of the Sky that same year, and Rules of Survival in 2017. He has been shortlisted for the Troubadour and Bridport prizes, and a runner-up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition. He was also poet in residence at the Henry Moore Institute. His next pamphlet, A – Z of Superstitions, is forthcoming from Yaffle Press. Ian Harker’s website is here.

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