This episode had the theme of 'losing and/or finding'. Perhaps not surprisingly, I received more poems of loss than of discovery. Some dealt with death, illness, estrangement while others treated the loss of a thing, some nostalgically, some with humour. I was delighted to be able to include a piece by Caroline Maldonado, in which she talks about her book, Mirror and Stone, which was inspired by the work of Michelangelo, and in which she collaborates with the artist, Garry Kennard. Caroline also reads some of the poems and translations from the book. I am also very pleased to have a recording by David Constantine in which he reads his poem 'Carousel', a poem in which the fairground ride becomes a metaphor for the mixture of despair and hope experienced by migrants and refugees seeking asylum in Europe.
Other poets included in this episode are Eugene O'Hare, Kate Young, Lizzie Ballagher, Joseph Long, Claire Parker, Eva Wal, Elizabeth Barton, Helen Overell, Rebecca Wheatley, Fokkina McDonnell, Nicholas McGaughey, Jenny Hockey, Jane Newberry andTrisha Broomfield.
David Constantine is a poet, short story writer, novelist and translator. He was also a founding editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. His work is an inspiring combination of erudition and generous humanity, which always remains open to the contemporary world. He says in a note: 'I was lucky enough to be living in Durham, teaching German at the University, when Neil Astley began his Bloodaxe Books and was looking for poets. I've been with him since 1980. The whole ethos of his press encourages individuality. I've always written as I felt prompted to, for example, right at the start, with poems about my grandmother's loss of her husband on the Somme. I've kept close to what I know about, as a loyalty.' He has published many collections of poetry and translations with Bloodaxe and the poem he reads here comes from Belongings, published in 2020. His most recent book, A Bird Called Elaeus , is a translation of selected poems from The Greek Anthology. |
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Eugene O'Hare
Nobody Knows Where You Are
This afternoon I walked by the green river
then up behind the old naval college
to Blackheath. The good photographers
come to the heath this time of year
to catch the fog on its slow parade.
Plenty of evenings I have been swallowed
into this fog and had to listen my way
toward the road. Four years ago,
mad with your disappearance,
soused up on rum, I came to the fog
to become lost too. Perhaps I thought
in the lost place I could find you
and rub rum into your gums
and place your cold hands
into my arm pits until I could feel
a flutter that was more than my heart.
Nobody knows where you are.
How often does that occur to you?
I think the idea of all the people
who love you – getting drunk and lost
and drunk and lost in fog, in sun, in sleep,
in rain – must excite you in some small way
like a mischievous wish under the hood
of a solemn prayer. It will only be
when I am lost forever that I will find you.
I’ll be old and afraid of nothing then
and you will still be beautiful in the shirt
you left by the green river.
Eugene O’Hare is an Irish writer and actor and was named runner-up in this year’s 52nd Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. His work has appeared in Cyphers, Stand, Rattle and more. |
Kate Young
Plot K2, Row A
I’m good at burying things.
It’s taken ten years to find my brother
unearth him from the yellow rose
and sift the light of him from rubble –
its radiance taking me Cromer-bound.
My sixth birthday on the beach –
friends’ shrieks skimming waves,
abandoned bucket of salt-stink
and the sun heavy with yellowness,
a fruit waiting to be peeled.
A tartan rug, the old wicker basket
abandoned on sand, red gingham
slapped with bladderwrack-slime
kicked up by my brother’s heels
his footsteps sinking in sunset.
The hole I dug was a secret
cavern for discarded clothes,
the picnic debris, the keys to
the family Hillman Imp
mischief tickling my skin.
Sundown, my father’s roar –
sound exploding from a conch,
the scrape of a spade,
nails scrabbling the shingle fade,
the whoosh of fear in my throat.
A big brother hug –
capable hands scrabbling muck
to uncover the leather and silver.
We were close back then
before he lost himself in a hole.
I guess I’m good at burying things.
Kate Young’s poetry has appeared in webzines/magazines nationally and in Canada. It has also featured in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Write Out Loud. Her pamphlets A Spark in the Darkness and Beyond the School Gate have been published with Hedgehog Press. Find her on X @Kateyoung12poet or her website kateyoungpoet.co.uk |
Lizzie Ballagher
Five letter-writers
Pop, 1918
Lost grandfather: head and shoulders taller than all other medics,
Pop wrote the letters of an upright man,
clear-eyed lover aching for her arms,
who—far-sighted enough to know she might—
did not want his wife to think him some amazing hero:
“Just an ordinary chap,” he claimed
in that spacious, generous hand so unlike a doctor’s scrawl:
fluent in open black letters on creamy manilla,
every letter distinct, words chosen
with insightful thought,
weighed as if, tenderly, he took the pulse
of Granny’s slender, rose-skinned wrist.
In the lovers’ month of an unmerry May, he died
as full of hope and friendship as he’d lived:
whole-hearted, thinking of home.
A final letter from the trenches shows the date one day
before he died—the day before his own pulse stopped—
before the ink was hardly dry.
Granny, 1961
Always on ice-blue airmail paper,
her jagged writing grew more faint, yet somehow
no less fierce than the tongue in her head,
the loss in her heart; she was forever sharp, to convey
something biting, critical,
all the while preserving that flowery veneer
as of a Grand Victorian Widow
(in fact, she was Edwardian)
yet with unclosed ‘o’s, curls, hooks, wobbles.
In her fingerless gloves
she lacked, especially at the end,
the command of her pen she willed so sternly.
Mum, 1986
Left fatherless by battles on the Somme
she was dispatched to boarding school
too young to grow a self-belief.
The chaos of those distant years leapt off
whatever paper she could find to hand—
scarce pen control—lines caving in or climbing hills
in search of happier days. Always she was
one to move, to travel, or else sprawl cheerfully
with us, finding fellowship with her daughters.
She sent us letters, postcards, right up to her end:
worry and kind-hearted love
flowered on every jumbled page.
John, 2016
Too well-schooled by nuns to leave the lines,
to let the style flow freely altogether,
his handwriting leaned forward,
bent in onward motion—ordered, open,
ranging broadly across the page
without concern for end stops, capitals:
a healthy disregard for niceties.
Plain, unadorned, the dark point
pressed firmly to the paper.
But age defeated him. His writing halted.
Vacancies appeared in words, in sentences.
He’d stare, clouded, as words jostled… tailed away.
Myself, 2023
Strange trans-Atlantic dweller—neither one thing,
nor the other—I practise two styles of writing
with my right hand’s muscles, joints, and sinews.
One is boxy, utilitarian: a fast print for reminders,
shopping lists, for anything scrawled
in haste, or in a muddled note.
The other longs to create a thing of beauty;
with the soul of a sonnet, dwells on extremes:
of love, of passion, war, or death, or faith.
This hand, lumpy in its excess bone spurs,
makes flamboyant serifs, swooping ‘y’s and ‘g’s;
delights in writing: sending words, good words
across. I feel—without a pen—
armless, useless, lost.
One of the winners in Ireland’s 2024 Fingal Poetry Festival Competition and in 2022’s Poetry on the Lake, Lizzie Ballagher focuses on landscapes, both psychological and natural. She was a Pushcart nominee in 2018. Having studied in England, Ireland, and the USA, she worked in education and publishing. Her poems have appeared in print and online in all corners of the English-speaking world. Find her blog at https://lizzieballagherpoetry.wordpress.com/ |
Joseph Long
Down to the Peas, Down to the Salt
I watch him curiously, through the pane –
The Camberwell Crow. As he hunts, hungry
for patterns, portents. Searching for a shard
of memory to draw blood – stir something.
Another pointless rebellion, looking
for something else to refuse in peals
of thunder. Looking for a number, looking
for a phone. For sugar in a sand dune,
somewhere, in this show home of twenty years.
Behind beanbag shoulders I can still see
that union ghost. Hear, This. This is the day
the DVLA eavesdrop at bus stops.
This is the hour of informants. Everywhere
(and nowhere). He looks past and I clock
shellacked eyes, so shush my whispering bones.
With caught breath and a lashed heart, I watch him.
I watch him upon that spit of shoreline –
The Camberwell Crow, stuck on a sandbar.
His mountain fastness and farmer smarts gone,
now buttoned up the back. I watch this man –
my father. This tabula rasa.
He is down to the peas, down to the salt –
but safe, elsewhere and still the finest
man ever, to stand upon shoe leather.
The Wall of Monday Morning (Library Recording)
Every day I am up against
The whiskered wall of Monday morn,
But come midday I break the seal
To the tomb where I have been corned.
I head to where winds will dare me
To perambulate, but I wait –
Shrink back, into the porch. To brood,
To watch leaves cartwheel; click clack click –
Like the shovel scrape on tarmac.
When I proceed, it is with caution
Into this shamanistic zone.
Here, where winds are a whetstone
And sound waves sharpened to a spike,
Molluscs crack like Xmas baubles
Beneath my built-up Cuban heel.
It’s distorted report triggers
The gates, turns the reel. Something pops –
My ear is unblocked; the tape hisses
Filling my shell-like up, until
I hear (from power fist pollards
Upon which sound systems are strung)
Citizens Band Radio or
A library record – thought lost,
Now found (and last in the county).
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Caroline Maldonado
Caroline Maldonado writes and translates poetry and her work has appeared in books, poetry journals and anthologies, and online. Previous publications include a co-translation,'Your call keeps us awake', a collection of poetry by the Italian poet, Rocco Scotellaro, published by Smokestack Books (2013), 'What they say in Avenale', (Indigo Dreams Publishing 2014), 'Isabella' including poems by Isabella Morra (Smokestack Books 2019) commended in Warwick University's Women in Translation competition) 'Liminal' poems by Laura Fusco (2020) that won a PEN Translates award. Forthcoming are 'Nadir', poems by Laura Fusco from Italian (Smokestack 2022), 'the Creek Men' and 'Faultlines' (Knives, Forks & Spoons 2021/2)s |
Garry Kennard is a painter and writer. He exhibited his paintings and woodcuts in several London galleries during the seventies and appeared in the BBC series 'The Craftsmen'. For ten years he lived in France where he ran his own gallery.Now resident in the UK Garry Kennard has exhibited his paintings and drawings in London, Oxford, Cambridge and Winchester. A selection of Garry Kennard's images and writing can be found at www.garrykennard.com |
Claire Parker
I Lost My Way
Yesterday I realised I’d lost my way. Seriously, it was no game to play. At first, I couldn’t pinpoint when I went astray or find the words to speak the destination that I sought. Perhaps they were too hard to say. But sometimes what is lost is not so far away.
A life or two ago when words were young and futures seemed to live for ever, I thought in metered verse with rhyme that grew quite naturally from ancient work. But pushing through my childhood into teens, the stanzas didn’t stretch enough to hold my dreams. Not then.
I turned my back on old-time verse and blanked it out till it and I felt free, as if my new-time words could finally find me. Sequences of sound. Scattered phrase that wove along the page like haywire down a catalogue of age. Low on form but long on prose. Mobile. Putty in my hands. Honey or lemon in my mouth as best befitted tongue or cheek.
My new-found words and new time me morphed, dark between the ins and outs of poetry, bleeding from the long-lost fire of canon and its measured scales of metered mood. I lost the love I had for simple features, the living lines that turn from edges of a page like furrows in a field, the lines that do not beat beyond their bound or claim they come from higher ground.
Yesterday I named the loss and as I slowly dug its ground, I found a truth. My deepest roots were withering, shivering in the space my father left behind. All those abstract forms, those allusions, delusions and fanciful collusions, had all conspired to mask my lived-in world. For what is lost and what is found, even mercenary loss and gain, is never, really, quite the same.
It was high summer when my Daddy died, and all at once my world was coloured grey. Its reference points were shrouded in a mist that blocked the sunlight from its earlier play. They say the truth will make you free and, though it takes a while, I saw it yesterday. There was choice ahead of me. To stay and mourn or celebrate a life that loved and found its way. I would walk from mourning time and evening shade through night, until I found my dawning day.
And now the morning’s here I turn, this time from blankness back to verse. I know that it will speak the words I try to say- not worse but terse, like truth itself, stripped to the bone. Never feeling quite at home.
Claire Parker writes: have been writing poetry for many years- but never shared it beyond friends and family. My life as a GP, former medical researcher, writer on health and wellbeing and more recently, during and immediately after the Pandemic, as a Wellbeing Advisor in two Oxford Colleges, has left little time to share my poetry more widely. Now, I am taking that step- listening and learning from the living poetry of others and beginning to share some of mine. What a privilege to do so! How lucky we are to be free to do so! |
Eva Wal
Four Poems from Brazil
August-September 2024
1.
In the morning
I bathe my feet in moongravel
and dive through bald trees’ yellow blossom
Right before my eyes in front of my cage
guarded by bees’ baskets made of glass
dances a colibri
I am singing with the powerful voice of the jaguar
in the fragile body of a little bird
8. August
Gallery ATAL, Campinas, São Paulo
2.
preto amarello
running slowly through a jungle of
words that sound like bells made
of rushing water
tangled reality of dreams
you wear me I wear you
the snakes daydream with eyes of
preto amarello
preto: black, amarello: yellow
Meditative Writing Workshop with Eva Wal
22. August 2024
Exhibition Vata Katha - Flecha e Pão
Eva Wal, Alemanha
Gallery ATAL, Campinas, São Paulo
3.
smoke and coffee
moods and birds
orchids in a tree bond
in cables and chains of
electric light
the stem covered by huge ants
working away their lifetime
as cars pass on the country road
towards the big city
the earth is screaming
dried out and burnt
we all should be watering it
with floods of tears
smoke and coffee
moods and birds
coffee and headache
orchids in a tree
18. September, Airport São Paulo GRU
4.
Swan
A poetic journey wanders towards its end – fulfilled enriched enveloped in the mystic veils of
the Atlantic Forest - up there in the Serra do Mar – ferns stretch out – reach out – curl and
crouch – green stars spread along the way – someone ‘s standing at the side of the road
picking weed like flowers – herbs to smoke to swallow to eat to heal – I want to stop the van
– a white swan that is not home here – and nowhere – all the lakes have turned into deserts –
far from here – everything’s far – only the green stars comfort me – inside – there’s a lake
inside me – that doesn’t dry – the ferns grow into my hands – all my fingers – sore from
scratching barks off fallen trees – tangled in fernweed – the green stars shed over my head –
my hair a jungle of lianas snakes and an abundance of hidden lush flowers of all colours – yes
I am going to the airport in a van that is a swan – a stranger – like me – but my home – I
know – is the white forest – white of clouds – where fire only comes from smooth vulcanos
erupting to fertilize soil and renew all the trees that wish to grow anew.
18. September, Airport São Paulo GRU
Eva Wal is an visual artist and a poet who lives in Bonn and on the countryside nearby. She published her first poetry pamphlet Marmorsee, marble lake, in 2009. In 2017 she encountered Oxford Stanza 2 poets in Bonn on the occasion of Diana Bell’s art project as part of the Bonn-Oxford twinning. It encouraged her to write in English and woke her interest in English poetry and also in translations. As the result of an ongoing collaboration she was able to publish the pamphlet Poems In The Hourglass, Gedichte im Stundenglas, with German-English poems in 2022 through the Bonn-Oxford link. Eva runs creative writing workshops for adults at the Arp Museum near Bonn as well as workshops for children and youth. She loves interdisciplinary collaborations with artists around the world and is up to all kind of adventures in art and poetry.
www.evawal.blogspot.com. www.evawal-kunstprojekte.blogspot.com Eva wrote the Brazilian poems on a six week residency and her travels in Brazil, São Paulo, Minas Gerais and to the coast in Rio de Janeiro. There are all together eight poems, long and short. Here you find the poems written in English. |
Elizabeth Barton
Wonder
I imagine my mother, aged five,
hazel eyes, dark curls,
alone in her room — it’s late
but she’s left the curtains open —
she’s standing on tiptoe,
clutching the windowsill,
her breath misting the glass,
watching fairies —
they could be satin moths,
ermines drawn
to the moonglow of her window
but to her, they are real —
she can see their impish eyes,
pale, flickering wings
and for a while, the veil
between the human and the wild
lifts and she feels silk threads
connecting everything —
she is still in that state of grace
where she understands
the speech of swallows in the yard,
chatters with the bees
in lilac bushes, dreams of secret,
underground kingdoms.
It hurts to see her now
confined to the cold cell of reality,
far from home, her window
to the Otherworld barred forever.
Silent Summer
That May, the swifts didn’t come back. We listened out for cries of elation, craned our necks, scoured the troposphere but all we saw were clouds pointing ghostly fingers. We longed for them as we longed for thunder. The heat was relentless — only the quivering of cabbage whites and tiger moths broke the stillness. At dusk, we missed the birds’ harum-scarum flight, their dark rising, as though they yearned to reach beyond earth’s atmosphere, touch the stars. We consulted a shaman to plead on our behalf with the spirits of the upper world. He said we stood poised on a threshold, urged us to learn the dance of swifts, leave the comfort of our nests, leap into the gathering wind.
Elizabeth Barton’s debut pamphlet, If Grief were a Bird, was published in 2022 by Agenda Editions. Her poems have appeared in magazines including Agenda, Acumen, Crannóg, Mslexia and The High Window. She leads ecopoetry workshops on behalf of Mole Valley Poets, for whom she is Stanza Rep, and is editor of their anthology. |
Helen Overell
Finding height
for L McK
I seek out that piece of cotton jersey – interlocked
fibres cool, breathable, kind to the skin – left over
from making up a nightshirt, cut away the silhouetted
curves that informed the shoulder edge of the sleeve,
trim the shape for symmetry, leaving rounded corners.
I take the turban winding in both hands, reach up
to cover your newly shorn scalp, your lost hairline –
your eyes widen, huge now in your unframed face –
this could be a scene Taking the veil in some old film,
we could be actors with bit parts in another life.
I settle the folds, gather in the ends, tie a loose knot,
Oh that's so comfortable you say in your gentle Scots lilt,
We need a mirror. And so we go to find one, your head
wrapped about in swirls of sea-green. There's height
you exclaim, you straighten up, an inch or so added
to the slippered noonday, nibbled losses lost awhile,
such warmth and light singing in the look of you.
Helen Overell has work in several magazines and some of her poems were highly commended or placed in competitions including the Poetry Society Stanza Competition 2018 and the Poetry News Members' poems Summer 2020. Her first collection Inscapes & Horizons was published by St Albert's Press in 2008 and her second collection Thumbprints was published by Oversteps in 2015. A booklet of her poems Measures for Lute was published by The Lute Society in 2020. She takes an active role in Mole Valley Poets, a Poetry Society Stanza group. |
Rebecca Wheatley
Care
I’m here now
She said.
Pulling the wet sheets from the bed.
Swatting damp apologies
Like piss drenched flies.
Jollying off the shame of it.
I’m here now
She said.
Bundling the washing in a hefty dance.
Picking the stinking nightdress from the floor.
Kicking it in with the rancid pile.
A dank goal scored.
I’m here now
She said.
Whistling quiche and salad
And sudden colour.
No quizzing, all smiles.
I’m here now.
I will walk you a little
Take the corners with you gently.
Let this be our sluggish adventure.
She said.
I’m here now.
To unearth the magic grown stiff in you.
To listen to your story.
And listen again.
To remind you of Happy.
To remind myself.
To lift your mood.
To know it.
I’m here now
She said.
Heaving her heart from under heel
In laden strides.
I’m here now.
We can get better together.
I was lost she said.
So lost.
But I found myself
And I am here.
The Edge.
If I forget your name
do not believe you are lost to me.
It’s just a name.
Words that trip trapped
off my tongue so much
they found the ledge
and fell.
Because that is where I am,
at the edge of myself,
the outer reaches.
stretched so far
to thinning,
set adrift searching
For the tune in the clamour.
Rebecca Wheatley is a poet, actress and jazz singer living by the sea in Brighton UK. She has poems published in ‘The tide rises’, ‘Dreitch’, ‘Bindweed’ ,’Porridge’, ‘The New Ulster’, Southlight.’ ‘ Galway Review’ ‘ Salzburg Journal’ and ‘Southlight’ |
Fokkina McDonnell
Lost
I had fallen asleep on the train which was now standing still. Through the large windows I could see the moon and a line of coaches to my left and right. I knew I was in a depot or yard, that no-one had checked, no conductor in grey uniform had walked through and checked the toilets. I knew I was a parcel, that someone would come to collect me, show evidence, pay VAT and import duties. I knew that they wouldn’t be, couldn’t be disappointed. They’d ordered a talking book from Amazon, and I was a living anthology: I could recite poems, even make them up as I prepared him a peanut butter sandwich.
Another of your discoveries
Today, you found an animal with yellow nails.
That means it’s cloned, you said.
It has a greyish curly coat,
a corner missing from its left ear.
It’s sitting outside the vet’s,
the one near the cancer hospital.
A yellow-and-blue Provencal handkerchief
has been tied round its neck.
This gives it a gypsy appearance,
this creature used to a lifetime of waiting.
Procedures
After the film Shoplifters, in the art centre bar
you said There’s always a lot of eating in Japanese films.
On New Year’s Day our playing focus
for the Transformation Game was boundaries.
That afternoon you didn’t want
to walk round the lake in Platt Field.
I’m too old for resolutions.
There’s no room in my life now
for people who don’t love or support me.
Is it true that you said Fucking hell
twice during the colonoscopy?
The last morning of your stay
you lifted the tiny spider
from the bath onto a tissue,
watched it walk off on the white tiles.
Origami
Those were the days when everyone old enough had mastered the skills of folding. Each evening after ten o’clock, doors opened. Orange light spilled onto the cobbled streets. They came out quietly, holding their elegant creations. Cathedrals, troupes of monkeys, small armies, always white, proceeded to the town square. No-one spoke, a silent parade past the masked judges. At midnight, all the church bells sounded. Every morning it was winter: layers of white paper, damp to the touch, being pecked by listless pigeons.
Fokkina McDonnell now lives near The Hague, the Netherlands. Her poems have been widely published and anthologised. She has three poetry collections (Another life, Oversteps Books Ltd, 2016; Nothing serious, nothing dangerous, Indigo Dreams Publishing Ltd, 2019; Remembering/ Disease, Broken Sleep Books) and a pamphlet (A Stolen Hour, Grey Hen Press, 2020). Fokkina received a Northern Writers’ Award from New Writing North in 2020. Fokkina has a special interest in haiku and tanka, and contributes reviews to Presence magazine. She blogs on www.acaciapublications.co.uk where she features a guest poet each month. |
Nicholas McGaughey
Humpty
was christened after the crooner.
Mother painted 59
both sides of his shell in lacquer.
I think he cost a pound.
Like a stone on legs
he groped around the garden.
When the cat poked him,
he’d blink black eyes
and retract into his helmet.
He guzzled lettuce like paper,
shat green slugs on the grass:
a tank on manoeuvres.
Clearing his nares in a sneeze,
he’d gape his toothless beak
like he was laughing at me.
Autumn, he got buried
in a sand-box in the attic,
until the summer came around.
When it did, he went. Perhaps
he met a she who pearled out
eggs behind the hydrangeas?
We never saw them nipping
at our gems or spinach. Maybe
they eloped under the fencing…
Someone said a boy on the estate
was making ashtrays from the shells,
flogging them for two bob to his mates.
Nicholas McGaughey has new work in Stand/The London Magazine/Poetry Wales/And Other Poems/Lighthouse/Bad Lilies and Poetry Salzburg. He lives in Wales. |
Jenny Hockey
And Ye Shall Find
I lost you in Aldi first and more annoying still
mistakenly called up a talkative friend
whose name follows yours in my contacts
then had to explain all over again
to dodge the gospel man’s promise
of an All-Powerful Being
he knew I was searching for
that it was my husband I’d lost
seen last on the steps of the City Hall
watching the fervent dancers
swirl their hips to the beat of a drum
and the gospel man found it within himself
to throw up his hands and laugh.
Jenny Hockey has published widely online. Recent poems include: Grey Sparrow Journal - 'It's Saturday' https://grey-sparrow-press.com/202444-its-saturday-jenny-hockey/ The High Window - 'Endoscopy' https://thehighwindowpress.com/2024/05/14/summer-2024-poetry/#Jenny%20Hockey Ink, Sweat and Tears - 'With Grandad gone' http://inksweatandtears.co.uk/jenny-hockey-5/ Morphrog - 'Borrowing Rights', 'A few trees back', 'Not Working From Home', 'Manningtree', 'the monkey mind', 'Breakthrough' https://www.morphrog.com/jenny-hockey-3/ Toasted Cheese - 'Dr Spock, 1968', 'Melusine' http://tclj.toasted-cheese.com/2023/23-4/two-poems-by-jenny-hockey-3/
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Jane Newberry
The Lost Star
Have you heard? Papa gasps,
struggling with the heaviest holdalls,
Chef Henri has lost his Michelin star.
His words fall on the doormat
as a chaos of unpacking unfolds.
Outside by the car Maman under a bale of
bathing towels is catching up with
a passer-by in a series of gallic shrugs.
Henri has lost his Michelin star.
Marie-Louise opens the kitchen door
where a blended clink of glasses, music
and a whiff of garlic seep in.
Poor Henri – his precious star.
With a paw of Dou-dou and an ear of Marcel
I run up the creaky bare-board stairs.
From the window I see the usual café crowd,
chilled – no lament, no forensic search.
Without his star can Henri conjure
the millefeuilles, the macarons, the madeleines?
I run down for the shrimping net
and put it ready, beside the open window.
When night falls I feel there might be a chance.
Jane Newberry is a children's writer living and working in Cornwall. Her play-rhymes "Big Green Crocodile (Otter-Barry Books) were shortlisted for a CLIPPA award in 2021.
In 2022 Jane published her grown-up debut poetry collection "Hoyden's Trove", (Wheelsong Press).
Jane's latest book "Big Red Dragon" launched in August 2024. (Otter-Barry Books) |
Trisha Broomfield
Losing It
‘I’m saving myself’, Carol said.
We all knew who for though nobody spoke
Carol had a crush on Nicolette Lemming
who had legs like tree trunks
and wore scarves even when it wasn’t cold,
she was French.
‘It’s too easy’ Josie recalled, look at Sylvia,’
there was a hush,
‘she lost hers to Andrew Farley.’
He was the jewel of the first eleven and a heaven sent head boy.
‘Well you’ll lose yours to Dave Buerke,’ Carol spoke.
‘It’ll never work,’ Sandra said,
he’s blond and you know what they say.’
We all nodded sagely without a clue.
‘And you,’ Josie countered will go off the rails
with all that entails.’
‘I’m going to marry Mr Baines, remember.’
‘In your dreams,’ Carol said, ’despite your schemes
he’s not looked your way once.’
And the truth of it was Sandra lost hers to a boy she met
at a disco uptown, said he was in a band,
the baby unplanned.
I waited until after exams
lost mine to Barry on a school trip,
he said we would marry when he got his results
only I got mine first. The positive news did not go down well,
his mum gave us hell and called me a tart
ruining the start of her precious son’s life.
But a negative followed, I was never his wife.
Trisha Broomfield has three poetry pamphlets published by Dempsey and Windle and contributed to many anthologies. Her new collection, My Acrostic Mother, deftly illustrated by Heather Moulson, is now available to order from bookstores and online. Her poems have been included in the podcast Poetry Worth Hearing and on BBC Upload. and appear monthly in the Cranleigh Magazine. She is a member of Cranleigh Writers’ Group and is busy giving author talks locally. The next is at Cranleigh Library December 6th. As a member of the Booming Lovelies, she has appeared at the Spice of Life in Soho, and is looking forward to more performances next year. Instagram @magentapink22 Facebook Trisha Broomfield Poetry |
That concludes Episode 28 of Poetry Worth Hearing. To listen to the episode you can go to Audible or Apple podcasts or use this link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6nUG9XJbIrrn1he5zu6HyC
The theme for the next Episode is 'Words and Music, perhaps', a misquotation from Yeats. I would be interested in receiving work which has been recorded with a musical backing, or a mixed media piece of words and music, or poems which relate in some way to music. I do not want songs, (although I recognise that there is a grey area between poems set to music and songs). The deadline is January 18th.
The following episode will have the theme 'rule making and / or rule breaking. This idea came from reading Claire Cox's recent sonnet series where she made a number of rules for herself through which she was able to generate her poems. So - I am interested in rules which can be positive and in rules which have a negative effect. You might look at different aspects of rule breaking whether it's rising against oppression or running through a cornfield. The deadline for this episode will be February 18th.
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