Tag: poetry

Mags & Blogs/

Invasion

It took three rows of barbed wire coiled round stakes,
hammered at angles into sand and shingle. The beach
packed and leaking like keddle nets of cockles in green
buckets, for six summers.

Wading off in gumboots, baitdiggers beyond the rocks
held occasional wakes, observed by boys belly-down
in the dunes with binoculars, swapping quiet jokes
and stale crackers.

Over on the mud flats lugworms blew their coiled casts
as shellfish slept peacefully, and tides took time to warp
the weed-wrapped posts, as crippled as the knees
of sentries denied their leave.

After the war, low-slung homes stood watch: black-eyed,
slammed cold up against marram grass and buckthorn,
demanding their sea defences. Then came Pontins
and the caravans.

 

published in Interpreter’s House, February 2012

 

Mags & Blogs/

River Ouse, Rodmell, 1941

The first she prises out, clenched in bindweed:
reluctance adds to its appeal.

And there: not so large as to burst pockets,
several flints conspire

their surfaces glass-perfect, all the better
to slip in without fuss.

From mud, she frees a stump of the fat chalk Down
walked each day, as worn

as the worsted that parcels up her reedy body
ready for anchoring.

Pebbles lean into her, take us they say, take us,
the floods are coming

but like Noah she must leave some behind,
the unbelievers.

 

(first published in Agenda Vol 46 No. 2, Sept 2011)

Uncategorized/

Three minute poem

On Saturday I was at a writing day at the Poetry Society, led by Ann and Peter Sansom, who put us through our paces in a series of rapid fire exercises. In one, we were asked to imagine an abandoned item, something forgotten or neglected, and write in its voice. Unfortunately I find myself turning to slapstick on these occasions.

Hello?*

I am that knick-knack
you picked up in Spain
You know –
The thing you laughed over
and couldn’t resist, that afternoon
when you were probably
drunk
on the local Sangria
or too much blue sky

Yes, I am the shoe horn
made from bull horn
decked out like a matador
red ribbons and brass buttons
I was just one tinkly gift
on a crowded shelf

You could have hung me in your kitchen
or in the hall, with pride
a perpetual reminder of
one night in Mojacar

Hello?
Don’t you have any shoes?

 

*of course it should have been Ola – as pointed out by Ann

Uncategorized/

I was once the Pope

This is not what I expected.
Red was my colour, or white,
white as a virgin’s skin. Robes
hung from me as delicate
as the smooth charcoal tissue
that floats from the fire.

Each year I am reincarnate.
Children press their fingers
to my frame, glue and paper
swaddling these new bones
of wood and chicken wire.
In six months I am fleshed.

My face grows more grotesque
with the passing years, ears
larger, cheeks greyer. Knock
your knuckle on my body
and hear my hollowness.
But I am not without substance:

I am laced with the stuff of death.
At first, the heat agonised me.
Now I welcome it, I am ready.
Red is my colour – red as earth
scorched through and bloodied
red as a child’s gaudy toy.

And when this shell explodes,
splinters of me will grate the sky,
the crowd will be sated.
You can look for me if you must –
trodden into mud, dusting trees –
go on, stare. I am not there

 

 

* first appeared in Iota 89, Spring 2011