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PN Review 275
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This poem is taken from PN Review 57, Volume 14 Number 1, September - October 1987.

Three Poems John Burnside

The bounds
1
There is a danger here:
herons wading, in the first light,
on smoky waters,
after those stories you heard, of fishermen
hauled into the dark on their own lines;

a danger, in the woodbine and the rose,
and those moss-water pools in alder woods,
brackish and sexual; there is

a danger, when you do collaborate;
lizards and horses populate your dreams
and messages arrive: November winds
shaking the doors, a rush of wings, the wild
speech of a house you knew before the fall.

2
It is a notion of the holy ground:
a saints' land, the scarcer ferns
...


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