Phil Vernon

Biography

Phil lives in Kent, and retired in 2024 after several decades working internationally in the humanitarian and peacebuilding fields. His three collections of poetry are Poetry After Auschwitz (Sentinel, 2020), Watching the Moon Landing (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2022) and Guerrilla Country (Flight of the Dragonfly Press, 2024). His updated English language version of the mediaeval anthem Stabat Mater has been set to music by Nicola Burnett Smith and performed internationally. He was a Hawthorn Literary Fellow in 2022. In 2024 he guest-edited the e-zine Flights, and also judged the Eastbourne Poetry Cafe’s annual poetry prize. He is a member of the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society. www.philvernon.net

Samples

El Tres de Mayo The edge of town. A lantern lights the man about to die. His comrades clasp their eyes. He kneels: arms spread like sails aloft, he wills defiance but it's terror which obtains. The friar murmurs blessings, swears and damns the French. The waiting chorus moans and cries, then 'tirez!', muskets fusillade; he spills beside the corpses slumped among the stains. Low fearful wails behind the victims' hands, the panicked mumbling of the priest who shrives the doomed, the terse command, the gunshots – still they resonate, among the faint remains of ancient susurrus of surf on sand, dead families' and lovers' truths and lies, muezzin, birdsong, rain on rooftiles, peals of laughter, angelus and lonesome trains. Each wave, since noise and atmosphere began, continuously pales but never dies: each instant as it passes, pares and steals a half, and then a half, and half again... reducing history from the first big bang towards a point it will not realise: attenuated, yet its core prevails, diminishing, but nowhere vanishing. What's past is present: faded cryptogram of sound – no matter if we try to prise a meaning out of or ignore it – fills our ears with its abiding, quiet refrain: the edge of town. A lantern lights the man about to die. His comrades clasp their eyes. He kneels: arms spread like sails aloft, he wills defiance but it's terror which obtains. (Published in Kent & Sussex Folio, 2016) Foreign correspondent The uplands deadened him the more: where people neatly laid in rows called louder than in other wars, by simple geometry; he closed his ears but year on year the song joined whispers from elsewhere, to drown the voice insisting we prolong our lives. He hears no music now. Daybreak unrolls – without a sound the empty landscape is unmasked, the wind has dropped; and far from sea, the gulls fly, quiet, above the town. How wide, the space between what passed and what he told of tragedy. (Published in Poetry Salzburg Review) Eyes For Goya You painted duchesses and kings as who they were – not whom they wished to be – and gave them what they wanted nonetheless. You drew the inner contours of their souls; engraved in permanence their fleeting light and shade to share a tincture of humanity with who would see. With care you weighed and made each mark in a seditious tracery of progress. Chronicler and refugee of war, your inner turmoil matched your times: from deep within your silence you perceived and stilled the moment, and with tints and lines you offer us a glimpse through people's eyes of history as its brushstroke touched their lives. (Published in Pennine Platform)

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.