Veronica Beedham

Night Journey

First there was the gentian violet
purpling a foot, then a child’s face
pressed to the dusty window
of a warehouse I hadn’t seen in years.

Later, descending some steps,
I found a basement bar, where someone
was playing jazz and a poet in jacket
of coarse serge offered me his arm.

All this, before I woke to the world
with its wounds, its lost children;
its poets offering their rough arms.

Veronica Beedham has had work published in a variety of British literary journals and magazines including Orbis, The Frogmore Papers, Acumen, Magma and The Rialto. In 2011, she won The Troubadour Poetry Prize and in 2016 the Overton Pamphlet Prize. Her pamphlet, ‘A Sense of Place’ was published in 2017 by Loughborough University.