Honshū bees by Dorothy Yamamoto is a Templar Portfolio Award winning pamphlet launched at Keats House on 26th April 2018
Lighthouse
Although it’s late, we haven’t drawn the curtains so our pale blue TV screen is parked on the beach, tip-balanced with the angles of chairs and your sofa
and when I ask you (brushing your hand) Do you want a coffee? the green and purple tiles behind the cooker also migrate as I do too, lifting the jar from its cupboard among the darkened rockpools.
Across the bay a wavery star which could be water jiggled in a glass, or a wayward bulb puzzles my short sight: I push my specs higher up—it becomes the lighthouse.
If there’s a moon you might go out and photograph it, rising above Strawberry Hill. Either way, it’s not important: there will be light and our small patterns upon the world, all night long, while we sleep.
From Honshu Bees by Dorothy Yamamoto
ISBN 9781911132387
Dorothy Yamamoto grew up in Barnet, north London, where her Japanese father and English mother settled after the war. That divided background is the source of many of her poems. She now lives in Oxford, and writes non-fiction books about animals as well as poetry. Her collection Landscape with a Hundred Bridges (Blinking Eye Publishing) came out in 2007. Since then she has edited an anthology of poems, Hands & Wings (White Rat Press), in aid of the charity Freedom from Torture.
