Issue > Poetry

Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson is the author of over thirty books of poetry, aphorisms, translations, interviews, and literary criticism. Recent titles include The Returning Sky (Shearsman Books, 2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Nine Stories (Two Rivers Press, 2013), Like the Living End (Worple Press, 2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Like A Railway Station

somewhere, on the edge of landscape
abstracted by deep autumn mist,
a grey-ness in the troubled woods'
threatened ash and remnant elm
as from a local train or platform,
its blur is this slow reminder—
'depending on your nearness,
forgive me, to the grave,' he says.

But I have had that thought already
with the various aches and pains;
and carrying my own inside me,
look out across deserted tracks
past people waiting on connections
to where fields fade in distance.
A voice announces some delays
and the distance takes no notice,

not having that much time for time.