I'm now in my early 50s. I started writing again as a way of exploring the world, and feel that over the last 2 years I have really grown as a writer. By day I work with children and young people with mental health difficulties. I juggle my own two children, my work, my writing practice, generally managing to keep all the balls up in the air.
What could a birch tree be, except a girl? A young girl, poised on the edge of a dance with her arms wide, and her hair uncurled, loose round her shoulders; and her friends clustered around her, whispering secrets, rustling and murmuring in their pale dresses, telling each other which bird did this, and what the squirrel said. Nobody guesses how much they see, the supple birch trees, that sway as they wait, feeling the notes sung by the robin, played by the breeze – they can’t resist. Even when they’re old they sway like that, to music half-forgotten, melodies half-heard, echoes of rhythm.
This is for Grace at dVerse, who is asking us to use imagery and/or personification. there is, of course, a nod to Robert Frost here, and I’m still wrestling with the sonnet form. The rhymes got pretty slant-y in this one.
hard to think about gifts and then the starlings come scattered like letters on a page, moving like words forming phrases
the rustle of pages
hard to think about gifts and then your words like birds coming carrying weather on their wings, the change of seasons the slow roll from winter into spring
the migration of birds is an act of hope
A poem for earthweal where Brendan is hosting and asks us to think about gifts. This poem is dedicated to Sherry, because her comments are always so joyful and so appreciative. She always makes me feel like I’m a better poet than I think I am. I guess I’m using her to represent my online wolfpack – I feel connected to people I’ve never met, just shared words with. The international news has a different flavour now that I have links in Florida, in Australia, in New Jersey, in Pakistan, so many places…you’ve all become important to me.
She dabbles her fingers in his dreams – leaves silvery smears on every surface – trails his desires behind her, like a fox-tail robe. She smiles the way a cat yawns, unconscious of teeth, no malice, nothing personal, just that need to toy a little.
A quadrille for De at dVerse. Our word is “dabble”
You’re slipping through this grey world, as an eel might glide through kelp, sinuous, friction-free. You’re moving, I am still. Still here, still waiting. Rain beads the window. I’ve no view, only the misted glass, the empty platform. I wonder where you are.
You move towards me, cutting a path through nameless towns. The world mutates around you – fleeting images – an empty trampoline, a washing line, a field of flowers – freighted with meaning, vanished in a moment. Me, I’m still. My coffee’s steaming, softening a world of plastic seats, bright, bitter orange, scuffed grey floor, and sugar sachets, split and spilling baby diamonds across the table top. It’s raining, and I’m sheltering and wondering.
You’re movement. A cadenza. I’m a pause.
I’m the host at dVerse tonight. I’m asking you to have a conversation with a poem, write a response to a poem that has touched you in some way. This is my response to Laura Bloomsbury’s poemIn The Rain . I loved the sense of movement in this poem, and the unresolved anticipation. I always enjoy Laura’s use of enjambment. I actually hadn’t realised until I went back to the original that I had mirrored the ending so effectively.
There are lots more poets and poems to view at dVerse. Check it out. Have your own conversation with a poem.
The first sunrise of 2021 was a smear of raspberry pink over a monochrome world that crunched under foot. We discovered a new walk, and that we have made some new friends over the last year. At the top of the hill we looked back over a landscape that we know well, made new and different by a change in perspective. I think that perspective will be the only thing that changes over the next few weeks. Our plans are blown around like so many brown leaves. We’re entering a new lockdown. It’s like we’re not moving, we’re just bobbing up and down, waiting to set sail.
new snow
old landscape
laughter
Lill is hosting at dVerse tonight. We’re at the start of a brand new year, and Lill wants us to think about new beginnings.
One for sorrow. You know me. I’m the bone- marked, evil bird. You bow to me if you should see me when I’m all alone, to turn away misfortune, pay the fee. Don’t forget, though, two for joy – you never call me lucky. Three for a girl, four for a boy – nest-plunderer, fledgling killer – yes, that’s me and five for silver, all those sparkly things, you say I steal them. Six for gold, you hoard it up in necklaces and rings. Seven. The song is done, the secret’s told – Thief. Killer. Evil. That’s how you accuse me, but all these crimes are yours, humanity.
Sherry is hosting at earthweal this week, and asks us to take the voice of an animal. I decided I would take the voice of the first animal I saw. A magpie swooped up out of the hedge, so I went with that. I rather like magpies – I am a corvid fan – but they have a very bad reputations. Corvids in general seem to attract strange stories and to be seen as evil. We are very quick to pin personalities and motivations on birds and animals, when they are just minding their own business. There’s a belief that magpies have damaged songbird numbers, but in fact it’s the anthropocene effects of intensive farming, insecticide use and loss of habitat that have really damaged the songbird population.
My other project for 2021 is to work more with forms. I have a real block about sonnets, so I’m tackling the sonnet first, to try and beat it into submission. This is my first one of 2012. Bear with.
We wait for the light, that one spear of light that will reveal it all. What are we now? Curled and squatting, cramped in this narrow space, this tight-walled passageway. Womb, or tomb? We crouch between life and death, our breath clouding, our fingers busy, busy, hoping for light.
Light to penetrate this winter dark, to seek out the carvings spiralling around us, to dazzle us, our dark-widened eyes, to show us what we may become.
Happy Christmas. Thank you so much to all of you – poets, readers, people who made such kind comments, people who shared and re-blogged. I have enjoyed this so much, I’m so proud to share so many wonderful poems. It has been a joy.
On the downslope from solstice our true December trees
are brazen, bloody-bright. You can keep your dark, doomed pines, all smooth tradition
for the baubles – sadness- -in-waiting beneath fake snow –
that never worked out here on the edge. Our festive day is gaudy
with the tinsel-glare of sun, we grew up ripe to glut ourselves on light this time
of year. The young, the old, they really crave the exact same simple gift. And pōhutukawa,
she shows you every year how to age shamelessly. Carried on her auntie’s back
toward the squalling new year, you’ll hear her last dirty old laugh with your eyes
open (none of your damn grace required), flinging all that made the new gods whisper scarlet wanton
to the hot south wind, spreading fierce naked claim and delight. Every path,
every last road out of here, it pants with spent red. It’s so easy
to get weighed down trying to make light for the whole family. Oh, it’s not what you give.
It’s what you leave, it’s how.
The Pōhutukawa is the Aotearoa New Zealand “Christmas Tree”. This poem is by Ankh Spice. I find his work extraordinarily moving.
Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (New Zealand). His poetry plays with natural imagery, environmentalism, identity, myth, magic, and mental health, and insists on being written despite him. It’s surprised him continuously over the last year and a half by being published almost a hundred times, mostly in countries far away from his beloved island coastlines. Two of his poems have been nominated for Pushcarts and two others for Best of the Net. He’s a co-editor at Ice Floe Press and a poetry contributing editor at Barren Magazine, and was a guest reader for the Deep Time edition of Black Bough Poetry this year. If he’s not out running and brewing poems by the Pacific, you might find him online, talking in flat Kiwi vowels about poetry and goats, surrounded by his sea photography and macro shots of weeds and flowers.Twitter: @SeaGoatScreamsFacebook: @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetrySoundcloud poetry readings: https://soundcloud.com/user-448322296 Linktree: https://linktr.ee/SeaGoatScreamsPoetry At the time of writing this, he’s working on far too many collections of poems at once, recording more audio and video readings of his work (because people bafflingly seem to enjoy them) and getting nervous about his second feature poet slot at Cheltenham Poetry Festival. He’s also attempting to write his first CNF for a solicited publication, and sitting on a couple of exciting but as-yet-secret poetry-related announcements, one for later this year and one for 2021.
It’s Christmas Eve and the kitchen is a mess everything crusted with flour as more pastry is made because someone has eaten all the mince pies already.
The jelly stuffed full of rum soaked sponges has finally set providing a foundation for our Christmas Trifle and the Christmas Cake has been iced with red rocketships rather than holly.
Meanwhile someone is melting dark chocolate to make a Yule Log the way Grandad used to and not looking guilty at all.
I smile and close the door on my adult sons as their chocolate fuelled laughter resounds in my ears. Christmas is finally here!
I think we all know that feeling. The moment when Christmas really starts! This is from Kim.. Kim Whysall-Hammond is a Londoner living in a small country town in Southern England. An expert in obsolete telecommunications, Kim believes, against all evidence, that she is a good dancer. She has been published by Silver Birch Press, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Amaryllis, Total Eclipse, Fourth and Sycamore, London Grip and Crannóg among others. You can find her and more poetry at https://thecheesesellerswife.wordpress.com/
