Sanctuary. Martyn Halsall

Poets’ Corner, a thin anthology,

      more like theology where absence signals presence.

      No Wordsworth, tidied away in Cockermouth,

      Grasmere, Rydal. No Coleridge – missing, as usual.

      No Southey, with his withered laurel of laureateship;

      Tennyson and Ruskin dismissed among rejection slips.

      Perhaps poets and too much certainty don’t get on?

      Or perhaps, like Duffy, their language is ‘secular prayer’,

      echoes and side-glances; tentative, wary of entrance?