Two Poems from Jeff Phelps

Haste to the Wedding
(dance tune – trad.)

They hoist her up, the new bride,
and parade her round at shoulder height.
It’s part of their Morris ceremony -
old and borrowed, the halting, skipping steps,
the jumps and cracking of sticks
stout enough to break knuckles.
A piece of bark comes flying off.
It’s a joke, that’s all,
a jingling end to the afternoon, a climax.
She whoops, astonished
at the view from up here – the pub yard,
the gawping father, the pie-stuffed page boy,
the town and all the future laid out before her.
There with pint glass to his lips
her new husband manages only
a nervous laugh, adjusts his carnation
as she is swept away
still waving, like a surfer
caught by some cross-tide,
far from land.


View from out here

To the east, uphill,
the edge of the town, waist-high grass,
a belt of oak and sweet chestnut.
To the north, between houses,
the tip of the Wrekin
and west at eye level, Telford’s church,
the town piled up like russet bricks,
the Clees, clear and signalling
imminent rain.
A better view is hard to imagine.
Here at the intersection
of ley lines and lines of sight,
a place to sit and do nothing,
a better place to write.