Dervish Days by Sean Woodward [PDF]

“An unmistakable authority" - Glyn Hughes, DH Lawrence Festival Poet in Residence

Featuring over 55 pages of poetry by Sean Woodward. He discovered an empathy in the poetry of Ted Hughes, ee cummings, Thom Gunn, Leonard Cohen, William Carlos Williams and Robert Graves. In the fiction of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Sean McMullen, Brian Herbert, Dan Simmons, Storm Constantine and Kevin J Anderson he developed an appreciation of the riches of the imagination. In the philosophies of SL Magregor-Mathers, Abramelin, Perdurabo and Zendiq he deepened the reaches of that imagination.

His poetry has won prizes in the DH Lawrence Centenary Poetry Competition, the WWF Poetry Competition, the Derby Evening Telegraph Poetry Competition and was Highly Commended by the Derby Poetry Society. He has read his poetry at the Nottingham Playhouse, Leicester Haymarket Theatre, Nottingham Fringe Festival and Wirksworth Festival.

City Of Dolphins

Dusk rides the London Eye,
Drops into the Thames,
Rises upon the Embankment

Wearing the night black body
Of a crouching Sphinx.

In secret illumination
The obelisk beacon is lit
Black light pouting its hieroglyphs

Unseen across the rippling waters.

Fallen leaves,
A desert floor of golden heat
Reaches out

Beneath the feet
Of my Nile Queen

Sleep-walking between
That life and this.

In her kiss I would hear
All my empires crumble

In her embrace.
The world so near

Disappears forever.

Dusk whispers
And in the City of Dolphins,
They slip from river lanterns

They call to the camels,
Sit no more with bench and stone
The desert is calling us

Calling us home.

And I, I know nothing of this life,
Not its shape, not its lie, not its name

I know only
It is for her that I came

To the City of Dolphins
On the edge
Of the River Thames.

©2011 Sean Woodward