Poetry Archives - Page 4 of 6 - The B'spoke(n) Word

Alchemy

Riding the west wind
Harnessed by sinking sunshine
Rainbows ARE the gold

Still Life

Shackled by time slippers shuffled
Stooped to the high-backed seat
Queen throned, grey crown ruffled
Prince and Princess at her feet

The Prince takes a marbled hand
But a child’s touch cannot reach beyond
Their birth to a foreign land
To retrieve lost memories fond

In her realm time and place are a synaptic jumble
Behind curtained lids sightless pupils dart
O’er a past decaying to a mumble
As mind and body part

On a pedestal a not-still life
Head set in stone yet body moving
To the heart beat of a mother and a wife
Her monumental presence soothing

This poem came to me after visiting my mother in her care home with my sister, Joanne. It was our first visit in six months because of Covid restrictions and only the second time we’d seen her in a year. I had originally planned writing about how hand holding is central to human relationships and that holding hands through surgical gloves is wholly inadequate – perhaps surprising given that latex is thinner than a sheet of paper. But it turned out there wasn’t much poetry in PPE 😷 and I was stumped until leafing through Poems of Today, an anthology of poetry I serendipitously discovered later that same day on my mother’s bookshelf. In it I was struck by Midnight Lamentation by Harold Munro and in particular by the last verse:

I cannot reach beyond
Body, to you.
When you or I must go
Down evermore,
There’ll be no more to say
-But a locked door.

The locked door image resonated as a metaphor not just for death but for the death of memory that is dementia. Another book on mum’s shelf (and on mine too) – A Shropshire Lad by A E Housman provided the metre.

Please make your selection…

Guinness, lager, shandy, coke
(You can go your own way)
Wisecracks, quips and sexist jokes
(Go your own way)
“This chair taken? No feel free!”
(You can call it another lonely day)
“Your shout Dave I need a pee.”

Please make your selection…

Fleetwood Mac then Britney Spears
(Sometimes I run)
Singles, doubles, mixers, cheers
(Sometimes I hide)
Earnest chats in cosy snugs
(Sometimes I’m scared of you)
Pimms for toffs is served in jugs

Please make your selection…

ELO then Squeeze and Bread
(Mr Blue you did it right)
Abba, the Ungrateful Dead
(And then came Mr Night)
“No of course I ain’t been drinkin…”
(Creepin over)
…on his phone to mum while winkin’
(Now his hand is on your shoulder)
Red braces clipped to pinstripe suits
(Mr Blue Sky)
Blokes in work-stained jeans and boots

Please make your selection…

The pound coin drops it’s Motörhead
(The ace of spades
The ace of spades
The ace of spades)
The juke box dies. The sound goes dead.

I scribbled this on a soggy beer mat in a noisy, sweaty north London boozer pre-Covid and have only just rediscovered it. Reminds me of happier times – apart from the ending which, with hindsight, appears prescient. I hope you can “smell” the atmosphere too.

Vespula vulgaris

Paper lantern queen
Your subjects crawl on their knees
No sting in the sun.

For me the soundtrack of the first lockdown was the bumblebees feasting on the nectar in the blossom of our cherry trees. It’s a different kind of buzz this time round as we enter winter and a second lockdown – wasps. Drones falling like autumn leaves from their nest in the gable end of the cottage roof. Dazed by the cold. Angry like prize fighters losing their prowess. Drunk on the juice of windfall apples. Lurching not flying. But still capable of delivering a stinging blow. They won’t survive the winter. Their job is done. Only their queen will survive. And even that is not guaranteed.

Autumn

Colour-eating cloud
West wind-stacked silver strata
Fading green to black

I love the easy discipline of Haiku. Just three lines: the first of five syllables; the second of seven; and the third back to five. It’s the sort of poetry you can write anywhere anytime you have a few moments to spare. And I often find that the images the words conjure up (if not the words and lines themselves) lead to bigger works – weeks, months or even years later.

Social distancing

Sheila is 85 years old.
Sheila has dementia.
Shelia lives at Ridgeway Lodge care home.

At night she curls herself into ball and sleeps under a single sheet.
Like an ammonite in a museum cupboard.

Visitors need a PIN number to get in.
Just four digits.
But ten thousand possible combinations.

1 2 7 9

First a one and a two, then a seven and a nine
More a pattern remembered, not numbers, a rhyme
But the rhyme is not working. All visits are banned.
I can no longer sit and just hold her hand

1 0 0 0 0

So now I’m holding her hand in my head
And I’m that ammonite curled up in my bed.
Eyes screwed shut against the start of the day
Ears not hearing the birds as they play
But feeling the flesh of my kith and my kin
The warm reassurance of skin upon skin…

1 9 6 4

My earliest memory. Here roles are reversed.
The mother is young it’s the child who’s nursed.
A doctor is summoned. The boy is not well.
Perhaps scarletina he really can’t tell.
And my eyes are screwed shut as they kneel to pray
Ears not hearing a word that they say
But feeling the flesh of my kith and my kin
The warm reassurance of skin upon skin…

2 0 2 0

The warm reassurance of one hand in another
First mother to child and now child to mother
We speak mostly nonsense because how do you say
That you might not be back for a month and a day
So my eyes are screwed shut because I don’t want them to be
Ears not hearing her last words to me
But feeling the flesh of my kith and my kin
The warm reassurance of skin upon skin…

“That’s nice.”

Granite City

He didn’t have anywhere in particular to go. No time to be anywhere in particular. So he walked. Walked past the chain stores in the centre of town. Past the charity shops in the gaps. Past the empty shops on the outskirts. For rent. For sale. For nothing. And on. And on. On into the suburbs. Past neat gardens. Past overgrown gardens. Out. On. Past open curtains. Past windows framing flicker blue screens. Daytime television. The curl of a cat on a sofa. A dog by slippered feet. Outwards. Onwards. To where the city hadn’t yet ended but where the countryside hadn’t yet begun. Field. House. House field. Cows and cars. Not just cows. His pace slowed. His heart stilled. Granite gave way to green. He glanced back. And shivered.

SODA FOR MILK

Where were you when the child was crying, mourning a loss not yet hers, but near, an inevitability?
Were you safely tucked away in a cocoon of comfort, one where ignorance could be a justifiable excuse for your indifference?

Etchings of fear lashed across her face, as though a mad man had taken a machete and crisscrossed it with an instrument designed purely for her pain.
Pain so emotional it rendered itself physical upon her body.
That tiny body is a vessel upon which the detritus of an entire region is transported.

Salty tears slid down a well-worn track.
They seemed to know their path, their destination, a knowledge instilled through repetition of this same activity, day after day, till they reached a well unable to be filled.

Relentless pain of the emotional kind is a special sort of beast.
It weakens the mind but not always the body, and the body is our instrument with which we broadcast our state of being to others.
If the emotional is invisible to those observing us, then our pain, fear and desperation all goes unknown, and the suffering, it continues, shrouded by the okay-ness of our physical bodies.

Why are some chosen for a blessed life, and others born in the gutter and forgotten?
By just the luck of a nation, a parent, a situation, we thrive, drown or die.
That soda for milk, that fear for joy, what life is this to live?

Those children of the mountains, they form part of the landscape.
But it’s funny because eventually, the mountain relinquishes that inky chunky matter that is the lifeblood of Appalachia, hungrily clawed from the belly of that land.
But the mountain will never release these children, they are stuck, their permanence in this land ensured forever.

My daughter, Rose Keating, wrote this after watching a Diane Sawyer documentary called A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains. You can watch it here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8ZfIYAYsgA

Nature’s Alarm Clock

I’m woken by the Dawn Chorus. Not yet the full orchestra. A solitary blackbird playing oboe (chirping is too unrefined a word for it) from the uppermost branch of the wind-stooped apple tree and the dot-dot-dot-dash-dash refrain of a wood pigeon playing Morse code in the rhythm section where the telephone wire arcs up to meet the pole: that tar-barked tree which a bar later reverberates to the staccato beat of a woodpecker tapping up breakfast or test drilling for a new housing development.

I’m up now. Watching as well as listening. A cock pheasant is picking his way across the silvery field like a cross-dressing party goer in high heels. Not wanting to get his feet wet and weaving a snail trail across the dew. All burgundy and wine bottle green with neck curved up and tail curved down. A tipsy tightrope walker turned through 90 degrees.

The hen bird is dowdy by comparison. Brown but not mousey. Making her way up the hedgeline from the stream with an arthiritic strut. More Max Wall than Max Factor.

They’re on a collision course these birds of a feather. Choreographed perhaps? (It’s not just the sap that’s rising). A dance set to music. But if it is, he doesn’t know the moves and she rises entrechat* in a crescendo of ruffled pride. Her alarm muffled like an overwound clockwork toy heard through a blanket. And for a moment the chorus is quietened.

*Entrechat (pronounced: ahn-truh-shah’) is a ballet term which means to jump in the air from two feet – beat the legs together in the air, land either on one or two feet.

Sound affects

I’m sitting face to the sun like a Spring flower listening to the sounds of south Shropshire. A wedge of cold air – a thin blue arrow at the horizon and as tall as the stratosphere itself above my head – has lifted the rain clouds that earlier varnished the already sodden ground with wet snow: tears for the end of winter. Each thread unpicked from the aural rope that anchors me to this spot…

The bleat of sheep.
The breeze stirring the sky-scratching twigs of the black-tipped ash.
The clap of the pigeon’s wings.
The laughter of the raven.

I lose count with the premature hoot of an owl woken from its roost perhaps by the gust of wind that’s dizzied the weathervane and spun the blue sky black.

Winter, for now, has returned. And the sound-deadening snow – more flakes than tears this time round – has ravelled the notes back into one soft symphony.