Northern Palimpsest by Penny Blackburn

Bricked back lanes where council-covered cobbles peep

from potholes in the blackened tarmac skin;

rivers where turbine technology pins the ghosts

of shipyards onto Roman barracks; medieval battlefields

buried under farms, whose crops

are wheaten-stoned houses, unaware of any back-garden history;

nature reserves sculpted from spoils – a green veneer

for the lost paths of dark, drowned mines.

Beaches, untouristed – at first sight unpalimpsest.

Yet hid in grit-grey water, under the plane scarred sky

long settled onto the seabed, cold-boned shipwrecks lie.

---

Penny Blackburn lives in the North East of England and writes poetry and short fiction. Her online publication includes pieces in Writers’ Café, Bangor Literary Journal and Marsden Poetry Village and she has appeared in print anthologies by Batley Poets and Paper Swans Press.

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