Tag Archives: moving

D.A. Prince, ‘Leaving’

Leave a reply

The date has come; the boxes are all stacked,
leaving pale squares where once the pictures hung.
The ghosts of photos, souvenirs, are packed,
the clocks are stopped, the pendulums have swung;
familiar noises banished. Here we sit,
nothing to do, for once: suspended time
can hold its breath and let the minutes knit
the final rows, and then cast off. The climb

into the future’s not so very hard
now all the work is done: decisions made,
the papers signed, that border crossed, the yard
cleared of dead plants, and every last bill paid.
The clocks are stopped, the pendulums have swung,
The ghosts of photos, souvenirs, are packed,
leaving pale squares where once the pictures hung.
The date has come. The boxes are all stacked.

*****

D.A. Prince writes: “This is a memory of a house move in 1982 when, somehow, I found time to sit and reflect. Having moved house last month was a rather different experience  –  and not an experience for the faint-hearted –  but I’m hopeful that eventually, there will be time to sit down. If poetry is ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ I look forward to some restorative peace in the future.”

‘Leaving’ was first published in Snakeskin.

D.A. Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her first appearances in print were in the weekly competitions in The Spectator and New Statesman (which ceased its competitions in 2016) along with other outlets that hosted light verse. Something closer to ‘proper’ poetry followed (but running in parallel), with three pamphlets, followed by a full-length collection, Nearly the Happy Hour, from HappenStance Press in 2008. A second collection, Common Ground, (from the same publisher) followed in 2014 and this won the East Midlands Book Award in 2015. HappenStance subsequently published her pamphlet Bookmarks in 2018, with a further full-length collection, The Bigger Picture, published in 2022. New Walk Editions published her latest pamphlet, Continuous Present, in 2025.

Photo: “Moving Day” by jthetzel is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: Gail White, ‘Moving’

2 Replies

How difficult it is to move,
Even from simple place to place.
How hard to pack the books, to shove
The cat into its carrying case.
How hard to sit in Airportland
Through one more endless flight delay
While Trebizond or Samarkand
Wait half a universe away.
How hard to get the papers filed
That separate you from your past,
Newly and legally enisled.  
And yet, and yet my father’s last
Great journey out of self to shade –
How easily and quickly made.  

*****

Gail White writes: “I admit I love this one.  I’ve experienced all of it except the change of citizenship – the trials of moving house, the frustrations of airline travel – and my father’s easy transition, just lying down and quietly going on his way.  It turned into a sonnet before I even thought about it.”

First published in The Formalist.

Gail White lives in the Louisiana bayou country with her husband and cats. Her latest chapbook, Paper Cuts, is available on Amazon, along with her books Asperity Street and Catechism. She appears in a number of anthologies, including two Pocket Poetry chapbooks and Nasty Women Poets. She enjoys being a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine. Her dream is to live in Oxfordshire, but failing that, almost any place in Western Europe would do.

“EEEEEK! CHAOS.” by confidence, comely. is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Quincy R. Lehr, ‘Apartments’

Leave a reply

No ghosts as yet, but just a hint of fever
(the fan’s still in its box) and foreign noise.
A virgin phone squats on its new receiver.
Undusty window sills are bare but ready
for clocks, for brown, anemic plants, their poise
temporary, fragile and unsteady.

There have been other places, across the river,
or oceans, time zones–other furniture,
with curtains cutting light to just a sliver,
those old apartments populated still
with women whom you recollect as “her.”
They haven’t called; you doubt they ever will.

Each lease becomes an act of… not forgetting,
but somehow letting go. Old places live
with different faces in a familiar setting:
lives you’ll never know, but comprehend,
scenes of errors not yours to forgive,
broken hearts no longer yours to mend.

*****

Quincy R. Lehr writes: “I’m trying to remember exactly which move this poem commemorates. I moved three times in three years–Dublin 2006, Galway 2007, New York 2008. It is, from an autobiographical point of view, about feeling a bit deracinated.
But in a sense, that’s renting–you’re never the first person in a place, and you’re hardly going to be the last. You haul your shit from place to place, carrying your permanence with you, but the stuff in its person-specific configurations, like your presence in an apartment, or a city, or just in the world in general, is ephemeral.
The poem appeared in my second collection, Obscure Classics of English Progressive Rock, which was the bulk of the poems written in Ireland that were any good, as well as the first couple of years back in New York. It was first published in the Recusant in the UK.
I imagine I wrote it in the first couple of months after returning to New York, but that’s an educated guess and at least five computers ago.”

Born in Oklahoma, Quincy R. Lehr is the author of several books of poetry, and his poems and criticism appear widely in venues in North America, Europe, and Australia. His book-length poem ‘Heimat‘ was published in 2014. His most recent books are ‘The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar‘ (2015) and ‘Near Hits and Lost Classics‘ (2021), a selection of early poems. He lives in Los Angeles.
https://www.amazon.com/Quincy-R.-Lehr/e/B003VMY9AG

“New Apartment” by artindeepkoma is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.