Tommy Collins Poetry

Shall I compare thee to Summerville House? Thou art more lovely and more permanent. Dim bulbs do not the dozing student rouse, Echoing rooms are not to good prose lent. Sometimes too hot the central heating runs, And often is one's gold attendance dimmed; And every pun from ear sometime declines, By chance, or good taste's changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal verses shall not fade, Nor lose possession of this craft thou know’st, This Yule thou wand’rest on this gift that's made Of iambic pentameter it grow’st.      So long as men can scribe, or eyes can read,      Long live Alan and the Writers' Society!

Gold and silver fingers reach Pleadingly toward the sky From ivy-tangled soaken sleeves, Trunks wheeze and wail With shuddering breaths for their Splintered and fallen Sisters and brothers Broken, cut, drowned and rotting Where the sun scarcely dares To warm the edges Of dark puddles in the carpet As sheep gather, stranded In the middle of a new island In a cloudy cluster standing Above burst river-banks While the two o'clock January sun Shines like September in The hour before dusk, lying low And seeming through glass Still to be warm, yet warning Of a chill that is to come, It reflects off leafless limbs And bleaches matted patches Of cut grass at edges of fields and Dripping motorway ditches in the Midlands While the West dreams of dry days And sweeps driftwood and dirty deposits After a nightmare of high tides and howling winds.