This poem grabbed me from the first line. It has action, it has colour, it has place. I could see the purple door, I could see the beach. And I wanted to write my own story about it. This is ‘The Unthinkable’ by Simon Armitage [below], included in his latest anthology The Unaccompanied. 

Here is the first stanza of The Unthinkable. Because of copyright restrictions I am unable to reproduce the poem in full, but please search it out in an anthology or at your local library.

‘A huge purple door washed up in the bay overnight,
its paintwork blistered and peeled from weeks at sea.
The town storyteller wasted no time in getting to work:
the beguiling, eldest girl of a proud, bankrupt farmer
had slammed that door in the face of a Freemason’s son,
who in turn had bulldozed both farm and family
over the cliff, except for the girl, who lived now
by the light and heat of a driftwood fire on a beach.’
Source: Poetry (May 2013)

‘The Unaccompanied’ by Simon Armitage [UK: Faber]

Read these other excerpts, and perhaps find a new poet to love:-
‘Digging’ by Seamus Heaney
‘Alone’ by Dea Parkin
‘A thousand years, you said’ by Lady Heguri

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
A #poem to read in the bath: ‘The Unthinkable’ by Simon Armitage https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3ek via @SandraDanby