Jane Draycott Jane's poem as workshopped:
Set like a net for the shadows of telegraph poles
falling over themselves to get home before dark,
this old system of fields receives its dead.
Raising themselves like light, the circus people
imagine themselves, sewing on stars, walking
the ladders and wires, crossing the high pass to safety.
The news will barely have reached us before it's all over,
the juggling of children and plates, the throwing of torches,
the hanging of fathers and sons by their heels in the spotlight.
In the hedgerows the audience fine-tunes its breath
to a filament, listening in to the silence of travellers
catching each other, putting a hand out tonight.
(After the paintings of Christopher Hedley-Dent)
Jane comments.