The Lighthouse
Markhouse Road

So far from the wine-dark sea, a displaced
monument to faith and absurdity

at the turn of a neat, Victorian street.
Still, the treacherous rocks are everywhere:

poverty, debt, addiction, the old lure
of a luxurious life. So perhaps

Captain King was right, calling the people
to prayer, not with a bell, but with a light.

The Lighthouse is a Methodist Church on Markhouse Road and was built in 1893 by a seafaring man called captain King.

Michael Shann was born in Otley, West Yorkshire, and now lives in Walthamstow, North-East London, where he is a member of Forest Poets. He has written a novel, The Protesters, and his first pamphlet, Euphrasy, was published by the Paekakariki Press in the summer of 2012.

Originally from Germany, Kirsten Scmidt has lived and worked in London since 1987. Studying metalwork and design at Camberwell College of Art led her to etching and other methods of printmaking. Kirsten used her favourite medium – drawing – to illustrate the poems for Shann’s Walthamstow collection.

From Walthamstow; Poems by Michael Shann
Illustrations by Kirsten Schmidt
Reproduced with the kind permission of Paekakariki Press