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Sunday Morning Poet: Emma Purshouse This weeks poem: Black Country Day Savers

Sunday Morning Poet: Emma Purshouse

This weeks poem: Black Country Day Savers

by OL House Writer,
first published: July, 2023

approximate reading time: minutes

Black Country Day Savers, is taken from Emma Purshouse's latest collection, 'It's Honorary, Bab' (Offa's Press). The last stop on the weekend...

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Black Country Day Savers is from Emma Purshouse's latest collection, 'It's Honorary, Bab' (Offa's Press).  The poem also features in the Poets, Prattlers, and Pandemonialists theatre/poetry piece 'Whose Round Is It Anyway' which is currently out and about at festivals.

Black Country Day Savers

The man with the gap-toothed smile is off back to his flat, 
where he lives alone.  Ya see that tattoo?  he says.  
Him proffering a forearm, me fumbling for glasses
because the devil’s in the detail. Seventy-five quid that was.

Red hearts skirt a woman’s name. For a moment 
he looks lost.  Done dahn Wednesfield one Fridee
bur’ ‘er’d dumped me by Sundee. I joke he needs 
another wench, one who’s called the same.

Fah! He lets out a belly laugh, When ya gunna be back?
Forget tha’! I ay no homin’ pigeon!  He’s wrong of course.  
We both are.  Going home to roost, in our respective city lofts.

I pause to wave when I get off, and he’s there, 
looking out through the glass waiting to wave back. 
Because that’s what we do here, we wave, we laugh, 
we count the cost, natter on buses, cant with strangers,
leak out these little bits of our marvellous, glorious lives.

© Emma Purshouse

OL House Writer

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