Page 14 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #7
P. 14
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VanEss GEbbiE
Graffiti
I will write my name with a lump of steam coal
on the side of a lorry parked up at a roadside caff.
Or with raw steel, pig iron, scraped on a fence
newly painted. Or fence-paint itself, stolen,
smeared on a sheet drying on a line,
flapping its pleas to the breeze.
Or in black earth churned to mud
with water from the outside tap
that rattles against the bricks.
Or coded in the click of stilettos
tapping the night away on paving slabs,
like the stick of the blind man who catches
the voice of the marshalling yards carried on the wind, and hears the clinking of a chain ferry.
“Graffiti” won the Sussex Poetry Prize, judged by John McCullough.
