Suffolk Poems

July, 1974

N E I L P O W E L L

Summer blossoms in fuchsias, geraniums, hollyhocks, and pointless casual death. The day before I arrived, a local man was murdered: ‘following an incident outside an hotel,’ a youth, the paper tells me, was charged.

And within the same fierce week visitors to the Tower of London were killed or maimed by an unwarned explosion. I think, above all, of friends trapped in embattled Cyprus, hearing only their voices in each day’s six o’clock: news.

It will get worse. This is not hopeless fear or mere despair, but the knowledge that we grow into deeper local grief or international sorrow. So, thanks to the wild east coast, its marshes, wheatfields, relics, all these unlikely havens.