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Tom Bailey
© Holly Falconer
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the poet
Tom Bailey, a poet from London, has had poems published in The Poetry Review, berlin lit, bath magg, Propel Magazine, Anthropocene, Under the Radar, The North, Poetry News and the Munster Literature Centre's Poems from Pandemia anthology. Recently awarded the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize, he was also one of several winners of the 2024 Guernsey International Literature Festival’s Poems on the Move Competition. His pamphlet, Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses, won the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, and will be published in spring 2025. Tom currently lives in Edinburgh, and is co-editor of online poetry magazine And Other Poems.
the poems
Wheatfield with Crows
The field is on fire obviously. The horizon
coughs up a mouthful of crows
and the dirt track does not seem to know where it’s going.
Funny, how often we are surprised by darkness,
like the frontiersmen who went west for
gold and found oil instead.
Van Gogh once said that a row of pollard willows
sometimes resembles a procession
of alms-house men.
Van Gogh once said The sadness will last forever.
The sky is on fire also but it is
a blue sort of fire,
with a patch of white which is either a cloud or a moon.
Poem
Granada, Spain
Anyway frosts thaw in this spring sun,
and the river comes melt-swollen down the mountain.
Across the valley
the plane trees hold up their hands to the light.
Swallows flit and flicker in rings,
and a pair of griffon vultures float their stillness in the heat.
Something everywhere is surprised,
and the river threads
its noisy voice through the needle of itself.
Somewhere a goat clitters over rocks. Somewhere
a donkey brays in a field,
and morning whittles itself into afternoon.
All day a particular sunbeam
has been searching for your face,
not knowing yet
that you aren’t here, that you aren’t anywhere.
Please do not touch
or feed the horses
Please do not touch or feed the horses.
Please do not approach the horses
or walk within five metres of their circumference.
Do not try to speak to the horses
or look them in the eye, and
please do not attempt to befriend the horses.
It is important not to interpret
the facial expressions of the horses.
Nor should you ascribe human meaning
to the movements of the horses.
Do not imagine the thoughts of the horses,
or ponder the philosophical questions
that the presence of said horses
may or may not lead you to ponder.
Please do not make use of the horses
as simile, metaphor, or other such figures of speech.
Please do not describe the horses
in language inappropriate to their equine
existence. Maybe you think you love the horses,
but you must not lie in bed at night
and let them fill your dreams: the sound
of the horses cropping thin tufts of Timothy grass,
the way their muscle-knitted flanks
tense when a tractor coughs on the hill
or the kissing gate swings shut.
Please, friends, pass through this field.
It is late. We have lost so much already.
Publishing credits
Wheatfield with Crows / Poem: exclusive first
publication by iamb
Please do not touch or feed the horses: Epoch (Vol. 70, No. 1)