A poem by Barry Smith

I'm delighted to feature a poem by Barry Smith today, taken from Reeling and Writhing (Vole Books, 2023), his most recent collection, which is something of a retrospective. In fact, it includes work written across half a century, encompassing a range of styles from sonnets and songs to mock heroic satire, spinning off ideas from the Sixties to the Twenties!

The poem's title is ‘Supplicant’. It's technically adroit, accumulating details, layering them deftly, gradually drawing us in. Much of its power lies in its use of reportage, never telling the reader what to think. Instead, it juxtaposes observations and invites us to engage with its religious and societal ramifications, lifting what might first appear a mere anecdote into resonant verse. I hope you enjoy it...! 

Supplicant

As if called to midday prayer he hunches
on all fours, his back turned to the abbey

where angels and pilgrims blithely
ascend heavenwards gripping stone ladders

flanking iron-studded oak doors
while solemn attendants collect entrance fees.

The crouching man kneels in convocation,
vision fully engaged with grey pavement

as a blackly bristling wire-haired terrier
stands guarding his singularly suppliant master,

sole immobility in this crush of busy shoppers
hustling beneath civic Roman colonnade

rising in fluted stonework above.
No-one pauses or seems to witness,

no hasty handful of change clinks by his side,
only the pool of liquid spreads

slowly suppurating the patch
between recusant dog and man.

Barry Smith

(first published in Liminal, a Chichester Stanza Anthology)