In Red and White – Gill McEvoy

In Red and White 
 
You could helter-skelter down their columns on a rug or tray,
pretend they’re giant sticks of rock in red and white –

slice thought their middles and you’d surely find
the names of places where they stand:
Strumble, Needles, Bardsey, Portland Bill.

In the wind you’d hear the thin bewildered sighs
of long-forgotten keepers drifting round
the eerie robot systems that transmit the beams;

men amazed that no-one has to trim or light the lamps.

Previously published in Agenda, Vol 50, Nos 1-2.

Gill McEvoy has  2 full collections from Cinnamon Press: ‘Rise’, 2013, and ‘The Plucking Shed’, 2010; 3 pamphlets from Happenstance Press: ‘Uncertain Days’, 2006, ‘A Sampler’, 2008, and ‘The First Telling’ 2014. -This latter won the Michael Marks Award 2015. Gill was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012.