Event
21st September
Adamantine reading at Chelmsford

27th September
Reading at Fryens Library

Bio
Derek Adams lives in Hullbridge. Widely publish in the UK & abroad, poems in Ambit, Magma, Railto, Smiths Knoll & many others. Winner: BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year 2006. Collections, unconcerned but not indifferent - the life of Man Ray, 2006 , Everyday Objects, Chance Remarks, 2005 & Postcards to Olympus, 2004.

For more info visit:www.derek-adams.co.uk

Poem


Exhumation

Normally it is the one dark place in a well-lit town
where only ghosts and cats roam, but tonight
among the quiet stone rows there is a digger
and a tent lit up like a big top,
police at the gates and cameramen outside.
Later when your black sheeted package
has been delivered to the pathologist,
when you’ve been winkled from your box,
placed on the stainless steel table
and he takes a surgical blade
in his rubber gloved hand
cuts from both shoulders to sternum
then down to the pubic bone,
peels back the skin to reveal the ribcage,
will he call the photographer over
“I think we’d better have a picture of this”
his eyebrows raised between mask and cap,
as he stares at the space behind the breastbone
at that cold black cavity that should contain a heart.