Saturday 15 August 2015











The Entertainers

We found a clown in the woods
and brought him home.
Now he lives in our chicken coop.
We give him corn to peck.

At first we encouraged him
to lay us some eggs,
but all he’d yield
were brittle little jokes
that crumbled
as they left his lips.

We let him out
from time to time
and he helps us in the garden,
watering the plants
from the plastic sunflower on his lapel,
which appears to never run dry.

At night we hear him trying to lift
the spirits of the poet
we keep hog-tied in the pigpen,
dancing on his hands,
smacking himself in the face with a spade,
mock-bawling like a babe…

But it’s a hopeless task –
the poet’s been dismal
ever since we fished him 
out of that filthy old river.

One day we’re hoping
to get a real pig
and some genuine,
egg-laying chickens.

Then we’ll take the clown
and the poet
back where we found them
and they’ll have to fend
for themselves.















This poem was first published by New Welsh Review 

Saturday 1 August 2015


Joseph Cornell’s Untitled (Great Horned Owl with Harvest Moon)

The owl who wears the moon like a halo
considers himself saintly, and indeed,
compared with many he’s an upstanding fellow,
if something of a voyeur. Not the seedy
kind, you understand – he merely savours
the healthy stare; likes to know what folk
get up to when we think we’re under cover,
blind to the bird on the branch, eyes like egg yolks.
‘When not glutting your relish for scandal,’ he exclaims,
‘you’re drunk on, and drowning in, a tidal wave of farce.’
‘True,’ I reply, ‘there’s plenty to make us ashamed,
but virtue’s a cinch when you’re stuck behind glass.’
He says nothing to this, though his halo glows brighter
and his toes grip the perch just a little bit tighter.


Poem by Benjamin Palmer

This poem was first published in the New Welsh Review