The Friday Poem on 03/02/23
Maybe we’ve been watching too many Norwegian troll movies recently but ‘The Break’ by Tim Goldstone, puts us in mind of something age-old, folkloric and slightly ominous. We like the way the poem runs long and thin down the page, rather like the dry stone walls that the men are patching and plugging. And we like the way that, as the men take a break, the poem itself breaks into something rather more surreal, and the distant figures – with their unhinged jaws – become something enduring, mythical and ancient. Nicely done.
The Break
You see them from the village
only as tiny silhouetted off grid figures
high on the exposed ridge
bending straightening bending
all day long
patching holes
in crumbling dry stone walls,
hot coffee-splutters
mingling with laughter
while telling jokes too near the knuckle
for ground level
before casually staining
their boot-flattened grass
with dog ends
and their flasks’ dirty dregs,
waiting patiently for a drifting cloud
of sopping mist
to obscure them completely
in which they can unhinge their jaws
to devour a hare,
a stray sheep,
a buzzard that came too low.
Break over,
collars up,
hats and gloves pulled back on,
jaws re-fastened, satiated,
they kneel in a row,
return to stoically plugging
gaps in our planet’s ancient stone.
