detritus, brick, Compasses

There's a bench on the Common looking down on the London Road, where people sit with some beer and cigarettes of an evening. The worn earth round the bench carries the imprint of their leisure.


No harm in laughing when someone drops a brick which doesn't hurt any one. I guess the editor of Kent County Council's magazine Around Kent, dropped a brick with the cover of his latest issue. It has a good photograph of two empty deck chairs on some shingle facing the sea. The caption picked out in large print is Enjoy Kent this summer. The only problem is that the cover also boldy announces "Competition Win a trip to Brussels with Eurostar".

Some time ago Lucy Kempton and I worked together on the blog called Compasses in which she illustrated my sequence of sonnets called Handbook for Explorers. The site has been lying dormant since. Now, starting to day, we are launching a new collaboration. It is called Questions and consists of a series of poems, each of which is prompted by a previous poem plus a new question. It is a process of exploration and discovery. We do not quite know where we are going, but enjoy the excitement of getting there. We hope that visitors to Best of Now and Lucy's Blog Box Elder, will be able to share it with us.