After Hope

intrusive
cold steel
confirms the loss

and the scan
like a probe tracing a planet’s surface
finds only cold space

this place has been evacuated

and left as empty
as a frosted field
under faint moonlight

we can expect nothing

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My latest book is You Are My North, published by Lapwing Publications.

‘Who said journalists don’t have poetry in their souls? … (His) words will echo with anyone who has ever lost or missed a loved one’. The Press, York (read the write-up here)

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All written and photographic content on this website is copyright material, James R Kilner 2024

Frequencies of Light

The sea is drawn back:
a blind from a window.
The sands are amber and open,
half a mile or more
to the water’s edge.

We walk away from ourselves
over sand that feels like new snow,
now like corrugated iron;
brittle shells snap painfully
beneath bare feet.

This will be land for just a little longer.

We stop, tune in
to the silence.

Not even gulls come here
where there is nothing
but frequencies of light.

Here the world exists
on the principle
of the horizontal:

a strip of saffron,
of periwinkle,
of ultramarine.

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The Door

Some days, the door
eases ajar,
just a little –
the creak and push of the wind through the gap,
a handful of leaves
scraping the floorboards,
a swirl of dust,
twisting and settling,
and the door clicks to.

Some days, the door
is a weathered bit of wood
forgotten in a farmyard.

Some days, the door
slams wide
and everything comes piling in,
chairs and tables turn over,
leaves, twigs catch in your hair,
wind drives into your face,
nostrils and mouth filling with rushing air.

It subsides.
The door drifts back.

You restore the room to rights,
sheltering the flame of what happened.

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Wind Turbine (Easter)

Monstrous reaper
thrashing arms threshing air

or snowdrop on the bright horizon.

Spinning like the wheel
of a ship near wreck

or ponderous, arms on a clockface.

Or stilled,
a crucifixion on the hill,

birdsong breaking across the Earth
with the dawn.

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Glimpses

Not the lingering gaze
of a tracking camera

but the glance.

Not the sweeping curve
of the woodland edge

but dark branches
thrown against a winter sky.

Not the swelling satisfaction
of flowing land

but the exposed edge
of a hidden hill
pencil fine
and the sharp tug in the abdomen
that steals the wind from you.

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Childhood Haunt

A gust of wind,
I swing wide the door,
rush in.

I am a child again:
the stairs take my breath,
each step
a giant stride
for little legs.

I turn towards the room where I slept,
the cool metal of the threshold strip,
the towering white wooden door
and, at eye level, the oval handle.

The heavy bed cover is fringed with tassels
that quiver in the draught from the window.

I return to the stairs,
each foot sinking steeply
from step
to step
to step.

I swing round the banister post
and rush off along the hall,
beneath my ancestors’ disapproving looks,
breathless into the light
and space of the living room.

I see again the stained glass in the window
and the spiderweb crack in the corner,
a silent shriek trapped in glass,
fixing the moment
a childhood game went wrong.

I lose myself once more
in the pictures on the walls
(in the mountains of Japan or
the granite houses of a seaside town)
in the same way that I lose myself now
in this visitation
that I stow away again in my mind
with confidence:
a painting
into storage.

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Out of Ox Hill

Out of Ox Hill and into South Moor,
the dead straight road descends
beneath the gaze of terraced houses.
A man looks up as though dazzled,
returns his eyes to the fag in his fingers
to the dark doorstep where he sits.

The dead straight road
disappears downwards,
reappears rising
towards a hump of green
like an ocean breaker stilled,
lying far beyond the bricks.

Does he see it?

In his long life,
has he ever allowed the road
to pull him down
to the trough of the wave
and then to bear him upwards,
accelerating skywards,
past road signs, bus stops, streetlights
that change to hawthorn hedges,
fields of ochre and emerald,

has he allowed the road
to bring him
to the crest of the ridge,
beneath the arms of the turbines,
under a sky that makes you cry out loud,
the stretching clouds
tugging everything ever southwards,
everything ever onwards,
even to the great becalmed vessel of Durham Cathedral?

Has he?

Has he lifted his heavy eyes
to the still, green ocean breaker
lying beyond the bricks?

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Sand Dunes

Sand dunes
are lionesses
lazing in the sun.

Human shapes
cross the ridges
of their backbones.

They stretch to their feet,
break down into particles
shift with the wind

reassemble

reassemble relentlessly
as the sea unfolds
at their feet.

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Wake-up Call

The early sun leans
across the wide land.

Woken by our baby boy,
I picture slipping though the garden gate
and out along the track above the house,
the red sun rising from the pale sea,
to watch the panic-dash of hares
across a bank like No Man’s Land.

This is the poem I did not write
because today it is enough
to be amazed afresh
by the simple light
in our son’s face.

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You Are My North

You are my North:
Quayside steps
and Grey Street’s curve,

you are the bells
of St Nicholas
sounding from their lantern tower,

you are the Swing Bridge turning,
unlocking the Tyne,
the blast of the breeze along Broadchare.

After the long climb up Whickham Bank,
you are the feeling
of coming home.

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