A Poem by Patrick Davidson Roberts

Hawthorn

You should check the city limits, when only hawthorn grows.
Where salt and stones divide, you will find your hawthorn there,
written just for you: between the white bud and the rock.

Follow the flower and thorn beneath to where the reddened
wreckage chokes the flood, where the exhausted
has beaten air to steel. Descend until you walk among

the subhuman as if in falling Rome: in the din of crowds,
on burning roads, by snarling beasts that turn on you.
The Gaels knew it led to underworld

where you go too, by hawthorn ways. But
theirs did not lead just to hell, as yours now does
from fume and burn, from what is done above.

On acid flows, on boats of ember, let the hawthorn
take you straight, to nowhere that was once the place.
You should have checked the limits, when only hawthorn grew.

Patrick Davidson Roberts was born in 1987 and grew up in Sunderland and Durham. He was editor of The Next Review magazine 2013—2017, co-founded Offord Road Books press in 2017 and reviews for The Poetry School and The High Window. In 2019 he ran All My Teachers, the all-women reading series.  He lives and works in London. His debut collection is The Mains (Vanguard Editions, 2018) and a chapbook, The Trick (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), was recently published.