You too can be Battersea Poetry Home. It’s amazing the treasures you can rescue from potential oblivion, and give sanctuary to in your own head. When you pick up a poetry book and find something you love, ideas, images and phrases take root. You have enriched yourself, as well as rescuing a book that might not be picked up that much, not being a popular novel or a box of chocolates.

Three poems I have never forgotten

From Sky Breakers…

Photo of Mr and Mrs Daft

by Joe Fearn

The sky here

isn’t actually blue

it only appears blue

because it reflects the sea.

Which itself isn’t really blue,

it just reflects the sky.

It sounds daft, but somehow works.

Like the marriage of Mr and Mrs Daft,

shown here in Hastings in 1915.

Mr Daft is stunning in khaki,

Mrs Daft is peaches and cream.

She will run a shop in St Leonards,

he will board a troopship

and be blown to pieces

in the Dardenelles.

From Records, Rivers and Rats

The rock chamber

by Derek Sellen

A steep-sided gully

where the cliff narrows to a spit

and a fallen ram has left its bones;

It’s the ocean compressed in a box,

a cyclone of brine and spume,

a square cut maw,

it’s the breaking turmoil of the world.

From Misfit Mirror

Market Day

by Jocelyn Simms

John Scott rubs square palms across apron stripes.

I finger a solid apple.

Together we regard the sky: sulphurous clouds, nacreous

sun, the moon a cinnamon curl. The Resurrection.

 Apocalypse.  Turner’s Fighting Temeraire?

I bite tart flesh, silver juices spill, the taste of almond

at the core. Removal of any item of school uniform

will result in nuclear fission.

What have we to lose, John Scott? Here at the end of the world …

And you with all these pheasants to sell?