Starbank Park
Your present has not yet arrived.
In the dark the clay-brown park
is subsea, black, and this vessel,
thumbed and roughly treated,
rolls empty, tipsy through the darkness.
It's glazed, uneven, and I'm wondering
if these fixed and fired deformations
can be smoothed or forgotten.
Stark trees crevasse soft sodium light.
Maybe it's best to let it fall
and, hands cut, remake the splinters,
bearing these fingerprints.
Perhaps sometime hope will come,
tied in ribbons and blooms;
a new vessel enclosing nothingness.
Til then, I am merely conscious.
Phil Miller is a writer and poet based in Edinburgh. His poems have been published in print and online and his novels are The Blue Horse (2015), All the Galaxies (2017) and The Goldenacre (to come in 2022).