Josephine Balmer

Grief clings, clouds skim on

(South Cadbury, Somerset)

i.m Julia Hanlon

A day dense with thistle seed, nets for myths:
at South Cadbyri standith Camalatte…
Above a rusted, mud-shinned farm, the fort
smears into sky, fog-skimmed, diminished.

We’re on our way to honour you, dear friend.
Up on the hill my watch slips from my wrist
(does insurance cover dimension shift?)
its minutes lost – or passing millenniums.

The sleeping knights turn in their quarried vaults.
Once. Future. Here time runs an oval course.
I’m not gone, you’d said. I’m round the corner
waiting to sneak back and catch you later…

This, now, is our requiem: mid-August.
A blur of clouds but the rain holding off.

Josephine Balmer’s most recent collection is Ghost Passage (Shearsman, 2022). Things We Leave Behind: Selected Poems will be published in autumn 2025. Her previous collection, The Paths of Survival, was shortlisted for the 2017 London Hellenic Prize and was a Poetry Book of the Year in The Times. She has also published translations of Classical Women Poets, Catullus and Sappho (all Bloodaxe).

Josephine wrote the following about her poem:

In some places the gap between past and present seems slender. Perhaps because of its association with Arthurian myth, the dead seem particularly close to the living at South Cadbury hill fort. This poem was written about an evening walk on the fort during a long drive to lay flowers on the grave of an old friend in west Cornwall – strange and unsettling in the late-summer mist as my watch seemed to vanish into thin air. But it also brought the comfort that, like Arthur’s Knights, we sleep in each other’s dreams, waiting to ride again.