TIM JONES

 

Landscape with Poets

 

It starts with two poets walking on a beach
tossing a ball between them.
There’s landscape in the background:
rocks, the sea, black lines of cloud.

Then overseas: Dante is talking with Petrarch
Marina Tsvetaeva with someone
South American, so I can introduce
the fragrance of forgotten cities

requiring acute accents
over half the letters in their names
whose blind librarians
pluck random symbols from the wind.

Comes back home for the final stanza.
The beach is deserted, the poets
pecking at their laptops, committing
words to memory before the kids get home.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Jones’ short fiction was collected in Extreme Weather Events (HeadworX, 2001), and his first poetry collection, Boat People, appeared from HeadworX in 2002. He took the IIML Short Fiction Workshop in 2000, and wrote ‘Landscape with Poets’ just before taking the 2003 Writing the Landscape Workshop with Dinah Hawken.

 

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