Peter Lilly: Poems

It’s not only in the colours and outlines of  the soft rounded hills and calabrese trees, and every possible variant of the colour green, under a grey sky. It’s also in the patterns of rust drawing maps on corrugated roofs of trackside farm buildings. It’s in the wells of deep hoof prints in black sodden earth surrounding a trough of water. It’s in the living fence-posts of moss-damp wood, and beacons of fresh-yellow timber where it has been recently mended. It’s in the crown-of-thorns birds-nest visible through naked limbs of a winter oak. It’s in the irregular circles of tiny yellow lichen on the unique fragments of our planet which make up ancient stone walls. It’s in the fragile chandeliers, of frosted spiders-webs that decorate an evergreen hedge. When I return,  I find my home in the details of Britain.  This poem was written in the autumn/winter of 2016, whilst I was visiting the UK.  Since moving to France, it feels like I...

Today's snow is the literal icing on 255,500 yesterdays of this building. The walls give way to weathered cliff-face; the beacon of the capital of the crown of Britain. Snow capped monuments to literature point upwards to the castle, that has bled out the streets of this city in slow running tributaries, not of death, but new life, new redness and new heat. A city that keeps on breathing and looking up to it's frosted castle. Written while looking up at the castle from Princes Street Gardens, in the snow of January 2013.