My Favourite Poem - Gill Rimmer

Rather charmingly, Gill Rimmer has chosen The Cathedrals of Liverpool which is one of the poems that means I could, if I cared to, call myself a 'prize-winning' poet. But she's in it, too. In fact it was her idea, really.

Pictured here is the 'vault of air that broods upon its sinfulness'.

However, before we run through those immortal lines once more, she also gives an honourable mention to Dorothy Parker, and specifically the lines,

I wish I could drink like a lady,
I can take one or two at the most,
Three and I'm under the table,
Four and I'm under the host!

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The Cathedrals of Liverpool

That New Year’s Day eventually
the drizzle changed to rain and back
and just in time we came across
Scott’s protestant cathedral
-a vault of air that broods upon
its sinfulness, the height of bricks
too distant for the camera flash
to properly illuminate
which picked out only you.
So tiny in the universe,
you’d hardly think it mattered what
we did or said or thought about
between that monumental stack
of deep foreboding and the climb
up concrete steps to find ourselves
doing a lap round the next one,
taking another photograph.
Nevertheless you did suggest
that this religion might be best,
more flamboyant and glamorous,
that dares more gladly to express
and trusts in all its artfulness,
confesses out the bleak and drab
and lets late afternoon light in
through torn, dramatic shapes of blue.