Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

... I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river

one step-width water
of linked stones
trills in the stones
glides in the trills
eels in the glides
in each eel a fingerwidth of sea

in walking boots, with twenty pounds on my back: spare socks, compass, map, water purifier so I
can drink from streams, seeing the cold floating spread out above the morning,

tent, torch, chocolate not much else.

Which'll make it longish, almost unbearable between my evening meal and sleeping, when I've
got as far as stopping, sitting in the tent door with no book, no saucepan, not so much as a stick
to support the loneliness

he sits clasping his knees, holding his face low down between them,
he watches black slugs,
he makes a little den of his smells and small thoughts
he thinks up a figure far away on the tors
waving, so if something does happen,
if night comes down and he has to leave the path
then we've seen each other, somebody knows where we are.

For those of my half-dozen readers interested in such things: Alice Oswald has won this year's T.S. Eliot Prize for her long poem Dart; details in this story in the U.K. Guardian. (E.A. Markham was on the shortlist for his book A Rough Climate; read my short review of this here.) Read an excerpt from Dart at the Poetry Society's website.