Poem of the Day: "October" by Jacob Polley

For a change, I'm bringing you a work by a living author. Jacob Polley is one of the leading lights of the UK poetry scene, a Carlisle-born lad who writes of rain and darkness like no one around.

His poetry is widely considered to get the closest at what makes the North of England so...Northern. He brings us the circumstances and the atmosphere which might explain why people of the North are so protective about their separate identities, complete with a different slang and a number of different accents.

While I have avoided selecting one of his many poems about rain and its many shapes, I have found one that shows off his way with a turn of phrase, his ability to skillfully manipulate both the obvious and more subtle evocations of certain words to paint a picture of a place that sounds simultaneously fantastical and all too real.

Enjoy!

October

By Jacob Polley

Although a tide turns in the trees

the moon doesn't turn the leaves,

though chimneys smoke and blue concedes

to bluer home-time dark.

Though restless leaves submerge the park

in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,

and through each tree the moon shows, halved

or quartered or complete,

the moon's no fruit and has no seed,

and turns no tide of leaves on paths

that still persist but do not lead

where they did before dark.

Although the moonstruck pond stares hard

the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe.

Each mind's a different, distant world

this same moon will not leave.

Source: Poetry (September 2006)