Shrewsbury, Friday Morning 27th March 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf57eoJZpLo

Find Darren Mason's animation of this poem here.

 

Taking Off

 

Climbing out of Birmingham, we look down
on runways cushioned by grass fields,
diminishing cars, roads, slate roofs
lined up beside dark trees.

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We retrace ourselves at altitude,
head back north-west,
have hardly started when land gives way
to sea flecked white with foam.

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Up here we note the geography of flight:
the gap of the Mersey, the shore of Ireland,
and in-between, a wind farm, its tiny blades
paddling the air, pushing us further away.

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We see Britain for what it is now:
dense and small—so attached to its edges.

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https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/september-october-2019/taking-off/

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This Is Not To Exaggerate

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Know this catastrophe for what it is:

                                                                 indifference.

Not in the sense that a leaf

                                                    falls oblivious,

nor the way a pebble knows nothing but the wear

               and tear of its shifting.

                                                        This cannot be compared

to a blackbird calling unheard before dawn

                                                                              edges up on it. 

No. 

           It’s none of these.        This is careless,

deliberate;

                      like the act of grasping at an apple stalked

to its green branch,

                                    and, finding it resistant,

                                                                              twisting it

                  against its own fibres till they break. 

Bitten,

               its juice is sour powder, drying out the tongue

which hoped for sweetness. 

                                                    But too late; there’s no remedy

              for a thing

                                     torn from its becoming.

Things could’ve been different. 

                                                            What to do now

but toss it to the grass, the near whole of it

                                                                              unfinished.

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Winner, Café Writers competition 2016 - Judge Andrew McMillan

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Instructions for Making a Child

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Choose a fabric which is practical –

something itchy, shot with nylon.

Colour is important: grey suggests sobriety,

brown solidity, green humility.

Reject red.

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Buy this cloth out of your sense of duty,

bring it home, unroll it on the table,

take a pattern from your book, the black one;

pin on the thin pages, prick your finger,

bleed into the weave.

 

Cut it out like a garment, stitch it up

leaving a hole under its raffia hair.

Make a nose from wood, glue on a mouth,   

select buttons for eyes from your collection.

Sew them askance.

 

When it’s finished, clothe it in paper,

feed it with wood and thorns.

In time, it will walk in silence,

repeat the line of your song.

And all this, separately.

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In its eighth year, bind it with rope,

prepare a bundle of sticks.  Climb the hill

avoiding the ram caught in a thicket.

Show it to the elders, place it on the altar. 

Prepare your knife.

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Runner up, Wigtown Poetry Competition 2017 - Judge, Ryan Van Winkle

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Two Hands

 

He is the man you would have loved.

I see the way you watch him

as he bows the drifts and depths of Elgar

from the curves of his cello; or when

he brings a steaming pot to the table,

casually, there, or lifts your heavy bag,

or chops wood, or embraces you,

briefly, like he would be your son;

I see you thinking, How complete

a man is this, this man with two hands. 
 

From Pretending the Weather

 

So Noah

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Every flood needs a hero stubborn enough

to source sustainable gopher wood,

convert cubits to imperial to metric,

work through the night, that voice going,

going like a hammer inside his head.

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This one’s been working it out for years,

is in love with green,  not just the easy loves -

grass, leaves, square fields of wheat,

growing the occasional marrow -

he loves the complex shades of less, less.

 

He has the looks for this life,

knows a dozen ways with porridge,

sorts glass from plastic, jams windfalls,

climbs ladders to solve the faults

in his rainwater collection system.

 

So think Noah.  Noah up a ladder one day

seeing the city with its lights left on,

pavement heaters, porous houses,

dumped and buried pleasures, 

the noise and heat of waste, waste.

 

Think Noah, tired, his boat nearly built,

the rain, inevitably, falling,

everything coming in pairs for shelter.

And parked, a blush behind the water butt,

his new and shocking freedom. 

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See him climb down, fetch the keys, climb in.

It’s all he’s dreamed of: bright chrome

low seats, the petrol smell, and this:

the slow drive out  before the reckless lanes,

the wind pulling the beard back from his smile.

 

This poem is dedicated to Chris and Sue who run the Old School Hostel, Trefin, one of my favourite places.  And to Chris's red sports car. I'm still hoping for a ride.

 

So Noah was awarded first prize in the Stafford Green Arts Festival Poetry Competition 2015.

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In The Queue In The Waitrose Café, I Meet My Love

The man next to me in the queue is gorgeous.
It starts with him telling me I’ve dropped my pen,

and I pick it up, though it’s not mine.

I’m almost sure he knew that anyway,
so we talk about pens and dropping things.
I ask for a cappuccino, and we’re on to poetry.

As the milk is frothed he says for him
it’s about what rhymes with daffodils.
I tell him about my rhyming dictionary.

He says, So you’re a clever girl then!

I smile, say, No, then, Yes, to chocolate.
We laugh as I hand over a five pound note.

If I were fifty years younger, I’d fall in love with you.

 

He says this as I hold out my hand for change -
all this in minutes, and I already love him.

He’s eighty-five, but I won’t believe it.

He looks at me from the corner of his eye,
gives a nod of knowing, asks for two cups of tea,

hooks his stick over his arm to pay.

I say, Lovely to meet you, walk to a table
past a woman who is smaller than him,

creased into a chair and wearing pink socks.

I look up at them from time to time.

I see their silence.  It’s just been a long time.

It’s been a long, long time. 

 

This is the opening poem in my most recent pamphlet, Mending The Ordinary, published by Fair Acre Press in 2014.  

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Pretending the Weather

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On the second mild day in March,

we get out cobwebbed chairs,

discuss gas and charcoal.

It’s good for the garden,

we say, when the cold returns,

and resume the wearing of vests.

 

We spend the first warm day in May

bedding in tender plants

and drink tea in a patch of sun.

At night, fearful of late frost,

we tuck up the flowers

in yards of white fleece.

 

In August, we talk of heat,

of how even France can be like this,

of getting further south. 

At the beach, the children insist on burial,

play out their skinny toughness

in castles, shells and grainy hair.

 

Our harvest is green and small:

tomatoes, beans, bitter grapes.

We pickle the little sun into jars.

When winter has settled us,

we breathe in vinegar and cardamom,

and consider the value of rain.             

 

Pretending The Weather is the title poem of my first pamphlet, published by Long Face Press in 2011 and now available as a PDF

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A film of a reading from PTW from 2011 can be found here

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Why there are so few female characters in Lord of the Rings, Transformers, Star Wars, and other films through which I have slept

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I have surprised myself by sleeping through decapitations: neither the sounds of metal ripping through an ancient struggle between extraterrestrial clans, nor the swish of a spellbound Elvish sword slicing through Orcmeat, nor even the socky smell of popcorn carried on cooled air to row fifteen, screen six at the Wolverhampton multiplex on a Tuesday afternoon late in the school summer holidays has kept me awake.

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Whilst I’ve had my eyes shut, the world has been saved from the fleshy and cybertronic forces of evil so many times I’ve concluded that I can safely snatch some dark sanity with all the other women who are out of shot, exhausted after weeks of sweeping up glass, wondering what to do about the unexplained holes in the walls, phoning to ask whether scraps of titanium will be accepted at the council’s recycling banks, testing to see whether green blood washes out with non-biological, or, if it has to be biological, what the effect of this might be on the hero’s sensitive skin.  It’s important to sew name-tapes into turquoise flame-retardant body suits and Hobbit cloaks since they are not cheap, and it’s another planet out there.

 

A few women have made it into the films, of course, to be fallen in love with, and to show that the directors are broad-minded enough to have minorities represented as role models.  But they’ve had to fight their way in using sheets of platinum hair, fingernails sharpened on diamonds, eyelashes as long as whips, breasts like bombs, precision-engineered skin, and teeth as bright as the perfect bite.

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This poem forms part of The Seven Rages of Woman, a dramatic reading which is one third of Sweet Thunder - A Show In Three Layers.  I perform this as my alter ego, Someone's Mum, who together with Jay Walker and Ms Beeton, makes up Threesome.

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