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TIM THORNE
Bronte Country
- I swear I saw Branwell, young again,
- in a pub in Haworth through the karaoke crowd.
- I remembered Doris Leadbetter's story of the village
drunk
- who sat in the corner "an' Branwell were the village
drunk before me
- an' this were 'is chair." This dark-curled American
tourist, all Pre-Raphaelite
- and solitary with his bitter, not playing the pokies and
definitely not
- looking at the historical prints of railway scenes as
monochrome as the skyline,
- TV antennae and all, on a day no brighter than the
parsonage,
- sat, still as the couch on which Emily died but better
preserved,
- his eyes the colour of the tumbling gravestones up on the
hill
- or the shadows that hide, waiting for the sunlight
- when they will skid like fictitious siblings,
- a source of visible delight
- but unnecessary.
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