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 | Yorkshire Times Weekend Edition |
Steve Whitaker
Features Writer
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
12:00 AM 4th October 2025
arts
Poem Of The Week: Leeds 1975 By Faith Lawrence
Leeds 1975
This night-day, day-night bus is the first, last,
only emissary of the lighted world,
the thin-as-care suburb of lino and candlewick.
A sigh, a stutter, a final choke.
Two slippered figures at the stop
step forward, then back.
They don’t know how cold they are.
This night-day, day-night bus is the first, last,
only emissary of the lighted world,
the thin-as-care suburb of lino and candlewick.
A sigh, a stutter, a final choke.
Two slippered figures at the stop
step forward, then back.
They don’t know how cold they are.
The only illuminant in a twilit tableau, Lawrence’s rather beautiful phrase, ‘emissary of the lighted world’, casts extraneous detail into shadow like a Pre-Raphaelite lantern, and ‘thin-as-care’ lino and candlewick into a washed-out relief of a suburban 1975 of the imagination.
The poem asks more questions than it cares to answer: the verses’ stuttering rhythms add to a sense of uncertainty, as uncertain as the tentative step(s) of the slippered figures leaning into the bus and retreating, whose return to warm houses will shortly follow. The hollowed-out echoes of noises-off - the bus's sigh and stutter and the concluding choke – dripfeed inference in a poem already brimful of possibility.
More information here.