This week I have been revising a book of poetry that has been 18 months in the writing. Sections of the poem have been read by a very good friend of mine, Paul Taylor. I asked him as he was reading to mark the text wherever he found the lines confusing or simply dull. I am now working my way through the pages, sometimes rewriting passages he has marked as uninteresting or simply cutting them out if they no longer seem relevant to me.

It is always useful to have an editor, someone who can be trusted and whose judgment is based on wide reading and long years of experience. On this page I would like to express my gratitude to Paul for the task he undertook with great enthusiasm and completed with great professionalism. The lines  below, written over a year ago, nevertheless echo a poem submitted to the blog mid-August by Molly Rosenberg. According to Paul Taylor, my short poem is actually a metaphor for love. Who knows?

Wild blackberries

Wild blackberry canes
                   barbed brambles
heavy with fruit
                   thrive on the steep banks
of the railway cutting
                   goodness that grows
innocently
                   out of the soil :
but easy access to them is barred
                   by dense patches of nettles
so the berries gather dust
                   ripen and then fall back
into the undergrowth
                   to be eaten by birds
and by the large colonies of fox families
                   that have pitched their tents
at various stations
                   along the line

John Lyons