Perhaps
January 20, 2026
This poem was first published in The Madrid Review.
Perhaps
Last time I walked this path, where jackdaws skip
and tchack companionably, and search for seeds,
this stubble field was chestnut trees; that pasture,
hops in hanging garlands, dense and green.
I was with you. We stopped to explore the barn,
now gone, that smelled of nettles, absence, damp –
asbestos fragments littering the floor –
then found the floods had blocked the way we’d planned.
We climbed a fence and shuffled awkwardly
across the flooded fields, watching the swollen
river rush the debris on its way.
Did we see jackdaws on that stolen day?
We never made it to those distant hills.
Perhaps the river stopped us, after all.
Spring terror
January 12, 2026
This poem was included in my first poetry collection, Poetry After Auschwitz. Snowdrops are starting to emerge again in our garden, so this seemed a suitable time to dust it off.
Spring terror
Snowdrops revert to merely green
when snow subverts their herald’s role,
but thaw restores their callous poise
and sets in train an ebbing tide
which gathers speed like pressured steam
as each successive flower unfolds
and every longer day destroys
more of the darkness where we hide.
It quietly starts, and then it swells,
this growing distance from the shore –
and as my toes lose contact with
dissolving sand and broken shells,
I want to ask, beneath the roar,
has winter no more cold to give?
Child
January 2, 2026
This poem is included in my book Watching the Moon Landing.
Child
You notice things, it's true:
the wren that hasn't built
a nest to welcome spring,
the trees blown into trees
aslant, across the hill;
our lowered words of war.
You sense our fear, and ask
why we can only see
and hear through misted glass.
You notice things, it's true:
we may not be at war,
but through that clouded glass
we hear the silence in
an unfamiliar key
and - as you quietly say -
the sky's a restless blue.
Message in a bottle
December 26, 2025
Message in a bottle
When inner voices claim they’ve glimpsed a seam
his psyche would prefer were not exposed,
he tells them “Fuck you Freud, hands off my dreams:
a tree is just a tree, a rose, a rose.”
But one can almost know a thing for years
(and meanwhile know it too, of course) and so
he leaves himself small clues he catches here
and there – joins up the dots – until he knows:
describing every day as “wet” or “dry”,
a traveller passed out in a park, from “stress”,
champagne for breakfast by the riverside,
sipped whisky standing for reflectiveness,
the journalist whose soul’s too numb to mourn,
Judas and Jesus drinking through the night,
the drunken farmers dancing in a storm,
self-portraits with a glass just out of sight,
long games of poker in the airport bar
then incoherent flights through jagged time
and waking unsure where or who you are
to scratch away the null with wine, with wine, with wine…
---
This poem appeared in Watching The Moon Landing.
It might be simpler than you think
November 26, 2025
Another poem from my 2024 book, Guerrilla Country, poems about peace and conflict.
It might be simpler than you think
You're asking what would make
things closer to OK.
It might be simpler than you think.
To live again in space
once wrenched away, and sing
again: the songs we wish to sing.
The Beaufort Scale
November 2, 2025
I wrote this poem after attending the Service for the Faithful Departed at St Paul’s Church, Rusthall in Kent, celebrating All Souls Day, 2024 – a year ago.
The Beaufort Scale
A wind is molecules unsettled by
a gradient of warmth and weight.
Light Breeze is wind that rustles leaves,
is felt upon your skin, and on
the Beaufort Scale sits just above Light Air,
which merely hints at ripples on the sea,
and that a plume of smoke may slightly drift.
They walked, together but alone,
towards the altar, where
a host of candles had been placed
on a table, in the shape of a cross.
Unwilling to raise their eyes
from the floor, or the task,
each took the lighted taper in their turn.
She lit a candle, remembered him clearly
and returned to her pew,
unable by then not to watch
as others focused wholly on
the act of lighting, and sobbed
or quietly cried, or appeared straight-backed,
detached from or at one with the rite.
The smoke rose vertically at first,
with barely a trace of drift.
But as the vicar completed his prayer
beside the burning cross, she felt the touch,
the heat and innocence of all the dead
in all the distant lands we pray for,
Sunday after Sunday, on her face,
and fancied she heard the autumn leaves,
not yet fallen, awaiting a first frost,
rustling suddenly outside,
beyond the stone walls and stained glass,
whose images of Saviour, prophets and saints
were dark and hardly visible
against the night.
The two experiments
October 29, 2025
In this poem, taken from my collection Guerrilla Country (Flight of the Dragonfly Press, 2024), I play with the idea that Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), often accused of setting us off on the road towards environmental catastrophe with his image of ‘putting Nature on the [torture] rack’, was in fact more far-sighted than we gave him credit for. The poem is intended as being in his voice.
The two experiments
Nature to be commanded must be obeyed…
For it is no more but by following and as it were
hounding Nature in her wanderings,
to be able to lead her afterwards to the same place again.
—Sir Francis Bacon (Novum Organum & The Advancement of Learning)
That I accepted gifts
as due by virtue of
my offices of State
is not in doubt. The only
question that remains
is did they move—or stay—
my counsel to the King?
And therefore I propose
a pure experiment:
had I accepted gifts
so those who proffered them
might not be found at fault,
then gifts and Innocence
would surely correlate.
The facts show they do not.
The Histories will show
I put the needs of Prince
and State above my own.
But offices can hang.
Let us devise instead
a durable experiment:
we strive to master Nature
by our art and hand,
by turning how she works
to serve our measured ends,
then count the years till springs
and riverbeds run dry—
until she masters us.
Ceasefire
October 22, 2025
Ceasefire
When the lake is pewter, like today,
reflecting leafless trees,
russet, bracken hills,
and a motionless cloud,
we look to the west,
from where the weather comes,
where winds will gather again
to rain in sheets incessantly
and drive wave after wave
to batter and wrench the meadow’s edge,
uproot these leaning willows or
surround and cut them off from shore.
The Command
October 12, 2025
This poem, inspired by a visit to the site of the 1919 massacre in Amritsar, and also referencing the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Peterloo and Tienanmen Square, and with an epigram from Rwanda, is in my collection Guerrilla Country (Flight of the Dragonfly, 2024).
The command
‘An order is heavier than a stone.’
The magistrate, for fear
his fear will come to pass,
sends formal notes to regiments.
The chief of police, sure they
wish bloodshed over peace,
calls out the words that make it so.
The soldier puts in play his plan
to teach these people
what he understands.
***
A simple mark,
a sound or gesture
sets in motion—everything.
Block exit gates with bayonets.
Cut through the crowd.
Fire tear gas, baton, then live rounds
above their heads—
then lower. Aim at where
the densest groupings are.
Don’t shrink—redouble your resolve
when they begin to flee.
Send in the tanks.
***
Inside,
the image of the golden sanctum
barely shimmers,
pilgrims walk in silent circles,
heel to toe, around
the sarovar.
***
How certain must they be,
who utter these commands,
the stage they stand upon
and laud and idolise
is crumbling in the sea?
Where do their shadows go?
And where do ours,
who fail to prevent
their words?
After the forest fire
September 29, 2025
After the forest fire
Because we were four
and I only had strength to carry one
and knew no other way
I carried the one who called out loudest;
threatened us most.
You two were left to walk behind
in the dust of hot, dry summer and
the heavy mud of winter and spring.
Perhaps I thought you’d learn the land –
more likely, I just hoped we’d be OK.
That morning found us silent, slumped
among the charred remains of trees.
The flames, too, were spent after such a night.
But the undersoil still burned, untraceably,
towards where uncharred trees remained.
Phil Vernon 