Poem of the month

selected by David Underdown, who also writes the footnote

Dandelions

By Jacob Polley

For the time we have left and the times
we’ve asked the time of each other
I pack you a weightless box of fluff, blown
from the roadside dandelion clocks.
Like an arrowhead or spear-tip,
I slip in a hollow-pointed pen nib
to say winter without you will be wordless,
the water coffined and the empty trees
unmoved by the wind as it moans.
Tell me what time it is. Tell me again.
I send you all I could recover
of those frail innumerable summer moons.

Jacob Polley, born in Carlisle in 1975, often makes strong use of rhyme in his poems, which tend to be sparse and sometimes dark. In ‘Dandelions’, taken from his second collection Little Gods (Picador Poetry 2006), an underlying tenderness is reinforced by repetition: ‘Tell me what time it is. Tell me again’. Polley’s latest collection, The Havocs, is also published by Picador.