Tom Phillips (1964) is a British poet, playwright, writer, freelance journalist and the editor of the Balkan Poetry Today. His plays have been produced in Bristol and Bath, and range from community musical Concorde Stories for BBC Radio Bristol to one-man show I went to Albania at Bristol Old Vic. He has published four poetry books. He lives and works in Bulgaria.
European Union
At first it might have been coincidence
that we heard so many car horns
shifting through the Doppler effect,
or checked in at hotels where girls
in Sunday best held hands and sang
interminable folk tunes.
Only, the following day, new coulpes
emerged from scaffolded church
with candles lit, and family groups
assembled in a park for photographs
where filigree blossom coincidentally
obscured the Stalinist backdrop.
Thirty, forty weddings eased
from municipal ceremonies to pose
beneath late-flowering cherry trees,
anticipated pleasures, and advice
they'd hardly need, being of an age
when all has seemed so changed.
Such innocence again around the square,
these brand new starts, this expectation ,
Romanian sunlight on dove-grey dresses.
Egdon Road
Some nights, quite late, the lighted corner shop
sells chocolate bars, toilet rolls and milk.
The long lane stretches to a cafe-bar or flats,
depending on which way you look down it.
Drivers on a crash course lunge at junctions;
houses back away between the streetlamps.
A lone bat barrel-rolls along front gardens,
a pipistrelle, perhaps, that tracks you home.
Disrupted Sleep
Out of a dream of a day by an ornamental lake
where, amongst rhododendra , my father
appears to be offering advice, or his hand
on my elbow at least, I'm fiercely awake,
insomniac between sweat-drenched sheets
and a three a.m. silence that gives way
to cross-city sirens and, closer,
dallying homecomers' chat in the street.
Your absence makes me fonder.
Half-mad with deferred regrets,
as if here in your unindented pillow
were everything we might have been
or what little you've left behind,
the next hour labours like a week.
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