Today’s poem – and painting! – is from A Fold in the River by Philip Gross and Valerie Coffin Price, due to be released at the end of the month.
A Fold in the River is the fruit of collaboration between T.S. Eliot prize-winning poet Philip Gross and the visual artist Valerie Coffin Price. Philip Gross once lived on the banks of the River Taff in Wales and his journals are the source for the powerful poems. Valerie Price revisited the walking route along the river and evolved the beautiful prints and drawings that accompany the poems.
Fireweed
a tipsy pink, a night out
on the palette – mixing
Bloody Marys, lipstick,
a hint of the flare-up to come
*
as kids we played on bombsites,
the badlands of railway lines,
untimely places – back then
there was no such thing as waste
*
always first on the scene,
a bit too soon, after disasters
see us in the background
of the newsreel, inappropriately
dressed
*
one day, all this will be wisps
of white, of seed like grown smoke
forgetting ourselves into the future
wildly, willy-nilly, with a will
