JOSEPH LONG

For all the daughters (that stick around)

In an effort to know, she jemmies me

from my wing back and I am bored a little more,

sooner each day. But she gets me out. Out

to the estuary, to beat the bounds,

to be bodied by sheet rock breeze

when day shakes out its hair. Where we become cordon

in the kettling winds, things fall from my hands

(so I’m told) – but not hers; the eternal daughter.

She clasps her Father like I clasp rail

as we make old talk and watch the rival county

across an estuary veiled in a gauze

of field hospitals. Me, her and the sandpiper

who pricks the silt sutures which snake out to the pale.

Where timid flashes of dust cart, vaulting carks of crow

serve as a reminder and I hide big water –

tell her that I am nearing vespertine,

and civil twilight, but must remain

to see our alchemy through. Yet

for all the parchment and lead spent

I have nothing to offer her, my heir

but my clean name to take into her middle eight.

I tell her; I am Prospero, Hokusai, Dee

and she; she is the eternal daughter.

My Miranda, Katherine, my Katsushika.

My championship season and ever present

in bone damp days; where she shall remain

until my marrow wonders aloud, to no one.

Joseph Long lives and works on the Medway as a father and Engineer, writing poetry between shifts. He has a passion for works which reflect working class life & culture and his main influences are John Cooper Clarke, Christopher Reid, John Burnside, Seamus Heaney, Ian Hamilton & Douglas Dunn. Joseph has been published by Stand, The Dawntreader (Indigo Dreams), Blackbox Manifold, Snakeskin Poetry, Littoral and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Poetry in 2025.

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