Category: New poetry

January stones I found in my back pocket…

…by which I mean I never wrote them up until now (apart from ‘Menhir’, and ‘People’s Library’). 

31/01/14

This morning the tide is breathing

gently with a throaty croodling,

when only last night I saw the wind

lash it into ribbons and roars.

 

30/01/14

The trades union movement is gathered

onto three shelves in The People’s Library –

one room in a building so old

all the stairs lean to the left.

 

29/01/14

I have my back to ‘the big church’

but it offers no consolation for the blood

parching rapidly from my fingertips.

A comfortless chafing as I circle the bus stop

Like some tethered, sacrificial goat!

I’m scared my death will arrive

Before the X35.

 

28/01/14

invisible but for their delicate white scuts,

fallow deer pick a dancing path up

through the sad lank January ramsoms

and the rain-sodden alder boles

 

27/01/14

She’s a menhir on the platform, unmoved

by the banshee shrieking of wheel on rail.

Her daughter leans her good-dog weight,

little thumb-pot eye-sockets filling

with the ground sound caterwaul.

All our faces clenches, temple to teeth,

foreheads gripped between our eyebrows

folded paper fans in the clutch of claws.

Then the tunnel smooths and soothes

the demonic harmonics, so I unwinch –

 

But her frown remains, hung in midair

on an invisible nail driven halfway

from here to some otherwhere.

 

26/01/14

Killer kraken clouds ententacle our small vessel,

Slap suckers on the portholes and drag us down to the duvet depths,

Where we stay, hatches battened, happily.

Is it a small stone? Or is it a poem? Do I care?

Well, others have stayed the distance with a small stone a day, and very lovely they have been too. I haven’t quite managed it, or at least I haven’t always written anything I want to share, which is not quite the same… here’s one from a couple of days ago.

images

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She’s a menhir on the platform, unmoved

by the banshee shrieking of wheel on rail.

Her daughter leans her good-dog weight,

little thumb-pot eye-sockets filling

with the ground sound caterwaul.

All our faces clenches, temple to teeth,

foreheads gripped between our eyebrows,

folded paper fans in the clutch of claws.

Then the tunnel smooths and soothes

the demonic harmonics, so I unwinch –

 

But her frown remains, hung in midair

on an invisible nail driven halfway

from here to some otherwhere.

Another handful of small stones

I’ve been saving them up so I can fling them at your bedroom window like gravel from the hands of a lovesick fool…

20/01/14

Clear veins have crept through the gutters,

Hard frost has scrubbed at the brickwork,

At last we wake up to the gift of edges.

19/01/14

Rapidly snapping their wingtips back into place over their rumps

Like concert pianists flipping their tailcoats over the stool.

Herring gulls. Deadpan.

18/01/14

On the floor of the Battery museum –

A quiet cluster of spent shells,

Dinted and corroded, crude as coilpots.

And one white feather.

17/01/14

On the train I am persuaded to put down my pen

By the clouds, those tatters of pale, blinding radiance.

16/01/14

The galvanised watering can has rolled against the back fence, skittled by the night-long wind, but resting now. In the 7am gloom, it is the only gleam. A shoulder of silver light, pale and passive as a quarter moon.

A handful of small stones

Sorry, I haven’t been posting a stone daily, though I’ve been thinking about them, I promise! What do you mean, you hadn’t noticed? Oh no, don’t make me question who I think I’m writing for, not again!

15/01/14

these fretful days, blunted contrasts

seaglass the only glowstones, trailing the tidal hem

liquid fractures, tiny skyfalls

fractionally panting in the shifting cloudlight

captured and carried, knocking

pocketful of droplets

14/01/14

darkness and our collected breaths press

the single, inadequate panes between them

until the glass is silvered

by the single streetlight beyond

the etiolated plant on the windowsill

inexpertly pruned by day

delicate Japanese silhouette by night

13/01/14

today all things speak to me of their opposites

this soft, open cast smudge on the stained white skyline

thumbed charcoal among the pony-scrubby grass

only whispers how it used to be for men and boys,

the underground faces, the pitshaft to the bowels

the fear between the molars, pressed

tight and hidden as anthracite

12/01/14

diddy little didcot punched from my ticket

travels with me, a black dot resting

on my black skirt

11/01/14

The end of my habitual trudge is the dead pipe

of the magnesium works, where it walks into the sea

on its massive H-and-A frame legs, quercus brittanicus,

barnacles, rust. The terminus is stoppered

by the old seawater silo, the landward point falters, and hangs

over compacted rubble. On a cross-beam

someone has knotted and slung blue nylon rope,

scavenged and tied a driftwood swing.

Now these forsaken things let me lift my feet

out of the sinking sand.

10/01/14

On the way back from the buried staithes there is a place where the banks have been reinforced with bulwarks of housebricks caged in iron mesh. The makeshift buttresses failed years ago, succumbing to rust and unleashing a brickslide that partially covers the long, larva-like scab of cooled slag from the old works. In amongst the solidified bubble-holes and chattered red bricks, Hannah found one that was blue. Just one. Squatter, deeper and heavier than any other, its blue glaze had been cracked and bleached by the sea, its corners rounded. We took turns carrying it home like a baby against one hip-crook and then the other.

 

Later, I looked up from my magazine at her working, and thought of blue bricks, touchstones, and how things begin.

 

 

Small stones and marathons

This pleasing oval is pure black, but flimsy.

This one has weight, but is dull.

A vein of quartz encircles this one like a fallen halo

Slipped over its shoulders.

No small stone is perfect.

No small stone from me yesterday, though I did spend four hours in a writing marathon, where the only sounds were prompts being read, work being shared and crisps being munched. One of the prompts was “at night I listen to the crickets naming their griefs, and let an ancient peace enter me” – this is my response:

After grief, peace.

After peace, grief.

The needle flicking across the dial.

Within grief, peace,

Rising from the skin like smoke from the crematorium chimney.

Within peace, grief,

Glancing up at photos of what has been and remains to be lost.

For no reason, she may look up from her phone to find the train

Is passing the chemical works at night.

Fairy lights strung on the flare stacks.

It looks like the future.

It smells like cancer.

Small stone – 7 January

Mindfulness has been hard to manage today, despite applying all the usual tools – morning pages, meditation, tai chi by the riverbank. Nevertheless, here’s an offering:

When I press palms together and let them rise / I am threading fire through the eye of the sky / In this way I am a needle / And the world is silk

Other people to check out for more mindfulness are

Kindness Blog

Leaf And Twig

Adrift In The Wilderness

Small stones – so far

I said I was disenchanted with blogging, but ever capricious, I am at it again. Stones, small stones, small moments from the day – today it is a scene from the window of the train, my Hartlepool-to-Stockton commute…

6th Jan    on the flooded five-a-side pitch at Billingham / a shopping trolley, wet to the fetlocks / is a zebra at the watering hole

And for those of you who missed the ones I’ve been posting on Facebook, we’ve had:

5th Jan     blinded by frost / cars turn their sleepy windscreens to the sunrise

4th Jan     that fat grey sky just squats there in a mard / but the pink cyclamen ignores it until it goes away

3rd Jan    Daybreak, and the starlings cry like the wind whetting grass blades. Dusk, and the wind moans like a child playing at ghosts.

2nd Jan

off the lacquered sand
drifts of birds
lift away from their shadows
light as ashflakes
blacken and vanish
into the sun

1st Jan    Give over, I’m not writing poetry today!

Love is waiting to come through you

This is a new piece, literally just finished it so it’s a bit wobbly like jelly but I think it’s set. I started the first notes on it about a month back – I had returned from a week-long retreat where I had been writing and meditating every day, Buddhist meditation including metta bhavana practise, which is the deliberate cultivation of compassion. All through the retreat I had experienced extreme pain across my upper back and arms when meditating, a very blocky feeling, and I knew it was all part of feeling a little shut down in my heart. Then on the last day our meditation leader started off a session by saying ‘remember, love is waiting to come through you’ and I immediately felt a bellow of love roar through me from back to front like a fire hose, opening up my chest until I cried helplessly. It left a kind of exit wound so that for days after coming home I was continually finding myself overcome with compassion, in the most unlikely (and inconvenient) places – in this case, late night shopping at Asda.

Love is waiting to come through you

brutal   a wolf wind at the automatic doors it will

shove you   a trolley through their parting and in

to the realm of nested baskets   buckets brimming

bright bouquets destined for vases or lampposts

stacks of flapjacks   black gossip pagodas where

turbine girls stride on the newsprint seas   arms

bent back white vanes semaphoring they too

are on special offer but to who?   love is waiting

to jackknife your sternum and make you see

the young man  twitching without rhythm or

symmetry  agonizing over Icebergs,  Romaines

the old man  palming his wife like a fresh egg

misbuttoned tweed hunched high in sympathy

for her lifelong rocking  cross a scoliotic spine

the biker   trachea shockingly stoppered white

plastic porthole in his windburned wattle   love

is waiting to escape from you   clawing a way

out of the shattered mineshaft   joining them

under inert gases  in closed cup mushroom faces

and the struggle with choices   crunchy or plain

shivering in the aisles of flayed shrink-wrapped

muscles   seeking comfort in the varnished apples

and beyond  the unmanned tills are singing please

please take please take please take your change

What should this one be called…

…and is it even finished? I suspect it isn’t, but I’m going to kick it out of the nest anyway while I try to make  room for some new ones. You may be interested to know that this started out as a very ‘poetic’ poem, all about early morning light on the silver arabesques of snail trails, until I rendered myself so fucking bored with my own work that this little gobbet of ugly spat out. Just like ‘How Many More?’ started as a hymn to jam-making and ended up a bitter half-spell against a boy long-gone incanted by a crone-in-the-making. I rock at the kitchen table, trying to focus on what is true, and currently it is all dark, dark, dark.

fucking snails / shitting babies

in the weeds again / mummy

it’s a little green one, I seed it /

how many times / do I have

to tell you / I’ve seen / or I

saw? / are you deaf or just /

stupid? / the pathetic dramas

when I snuff them with a pinch /

it’s best / to kill them before

they get too big / untameable /

her hair curls like parsley /

round and round the table

with the hairbrush / screaming /

I made porridge / like my mum

the right way / salt and water /

why won’t she sit still

and take it?

How Many More?

It’s an agony of sorts, passing by trees

Unharvested, sagging under the red load

I had a thought, to pick myself monthly

I had a thing in my head, to be made of wood

A wolf-eyed totem, hard lips a slice of memory

That boy I fucked, up in North Carolina

I stood under live oaks by the bank

In my scarlet dress, and he walked past

When he slid inside he moved through me

A river slowly achieving the delta

Hair hung rivulets against my neck

The sweating breeze in the Spanish moss

The shiver of him emptied and died

A whirlpool opened at the back of his heart

Elle n’est q’un trou

He said within earshot, not knowing me

That I understand more tongues than I speak

That I keep clotted things in kilner jars

That I would one day hack his face

Into a found log and smear it moon by moon

With all the children I will never love

Offerings to the god of one night only