The hills and cliffs are rinsed with mist, the green
Is muted, and the brass band sun turned down,
There is a breeze more felt on skin than seen
And roofs are silver in the distant town.
Then now before me is a little boat
Floating aslant the waves and bobbing low
Beneath a sky of clouds which I take note
Whose names and types I used to know.
So little boat, will you take me away
To a far ocean where I can be free
Beyond surging waves of everyday
And I can drift and drift into that sea.
And perhaps there’ll be a lantern bright
To take me out further into the night.

© James M. Nash

James introduces his poem: As a child I loved Robert Louis Stevenson’s  ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’.  Their beautiful simplicity soothed and enchanted me, I think some of that childhood innocence has crept into this sonnet.

James Nash is writer and a poet.  A long-term resident of Leeds, his third collection of poems, Coma Songs was published in 2003 and reprinted in 2006. He has two poems in Branch-Lines [Enitharmon Press 2007] among fifty contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney and U. A. Fanthorpe. In 2012 his selected poems ‘A Bit of An Ice Breaker’ and a new five-star collection, ‘Some Things Matter’, were published by Valley Press. ‘Cinema Stories’ written with poet Matthew Hedley Stoppard was published in August 2015.  It celebrates the history of cinema in Leeds, in a series of poems.  

His next collection ‘A Bench for Billie Holiday’ will be published in 2018.

See The Valley Press website: https://goo.gl/aeeXvT