share


Flatlands

Horses and geese in a sodden field.
Solitaries with luggage on a wet platform.
Postage-stamp house on a bit of land,
a copse, a fold, a quadrant of wood,
lines of beech, lines of poplar,
miniature commentary magnified
in the glass, winter streaking the window,
the train bearing, not bearing the weight
within. Let this not be thought
(one thought to oneself), non-
thoughts of passengers on the way forward
backward through the hour.

 


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

Saskia Hamilton is the author of As for Dream (2001), Divide These (2005), Canal (2005), and Corridor (forthcoming 2014). She is also the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005) and co-editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008). She teaches at Barnard College, Columbia University.



READ NEXT

Interview

September 2016

Interview with Garth Greenwell

Michael Amherst

Interview

September 2016

Garth Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs to You has won praise on both sides of the Atlantic. Edmund White...

fiction

April 2012

They Told the Story from the Lighthouse

Chimene Suleyman

fiction

April 2012

I found Margate watching the sea. And I walked the streets thinking they had left it sometime in the...

Prize Entry

April 2015

Posman

Nick Mulgrew

Prize Entry

April 2015

After a while you memorise the steps. You read the addresses and your calves just know, hey. They just...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required