Monthly Archives: May 2021

Horses of a different colour – prize-winning poem

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Anthology, publ. Dempsey & Windle

It was a lovely surprise to get this anthology ahead of schedule, so I could read it before leaving for the Netherlands. Dempsey & Windle organise an annual competition, with options to enter single poems as well as a batch of 10 to win publication of a pamphlet. The anthology has poems by the winners of both categories, as well as the highly commended and longlisted poems. I was glad to have my tribute to a poet friend included. On Thursday 10 June in the evening there will be a reading on Zoom with a number of poets reading. Contact Dempsey & Windle for the link.


This poem by fellow poet Rod Whitworth has it first publication in the same anthology. Rod and I met several years ago on writing workshops. I admire its economy and delicacy. It’s not surprising it gained a 2nd prize.

Demobbed

Go on. Hold his hand. You’ll be all right.
I looked at the man in the new suit
they’d told me was my dad and I walked
at his side, hands in my pockets.

We stepped into the street, his right hand
steering Megan’s pram with ease and command
past Cropper’s with the pigeons, and I walked
at his side, hands in my pockets.

Down Platting Brew, round the curve
over the culverted brook and a hard shove
to the road to Daisy Nook, me walking
at his side, hands in my pockets.

Past the milk farm – Whitehead’s –
and the field with the pond and reeds,
the greying April snow. I walked,
my right hand warm in his left hand.

The day we switched off the machine,
I told him they’d arrested Pinochet,
though he was past cheering, and he lay,
his right hand cold in my left hand.

Bitterne Park, Southampton – charity anthology

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Last year Amanda Steel of Printed Words produced her first charity anthology Words to Remember. It includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry, some of it related to cancer. I was glad to have these two poems accepted for the anthology.

Printed Words has its own Facebook page. Even with the lockdown last year, the anthology has done well, and Amanda was able to make donations to two cancer charities: Marie Curie and Cancer Research UK. Amanda Steel is on https://amandasteelwriter.wordpress.com

Bitterne Park, Southampton

The blackout curtains
don’t let the sun through.
I wake to the small sounds
that come with morning:
squirrels jump around the oak tree
at the heart of our cul-de-sac.
A bus strains up the hill.

At the Triangle, the bank opens
and the smiley greengrocer
limps his vegetable crates outside.
On the river Itchen
John strokes his beard, thinks
about brewing tea.

It is meant to be an ordinary day.
But this month is a long-distance runner,
this month is a marathon.

On the other side of the narrow bridge,
a woman is taking two large black bags
into a charity shop. Suits and shirts,
all washed, dry-cleaned, ironed.
She had forgotten the silk ties.
Now they’re rolled up, placed
in a see-through Biza bag
that once held duty-free cologne.

May

Living one day at a time
will be like walking
through a tunnel, away
from being held by memories.
The smell of petrol, choking.
Cars driving close and fast.
The red rear lights in pairs,
an illusion of safety and warmth.

Do not turn round now, back
towards that day when you viewed
daffodils through a thin black
veil from a car at walking speed.
Decide to live this day.
Summer will slowly creep in,
its light, colour, the company
of bold blue, orange, pink,
the grass that will keep growing.

Item – poem and writing prompt

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Photo credit Stux via Pixabay

This week I am featuring another one of Kathleen Kummer’s poem. It’s short and the neutral title belies the heart-breaking content. The poem is addressed to her adult son.

Item

You left behind: your silver spoon –
there are days when I stir my coffee with it;
the drawing of yourself with the Mona Lisa eyes;
I sometimes wonder how you got the chestnut avenue
from that angle, and I’m suddenly happy, as though
you’d just sauntered in from school and were upstairs
moving your table, shouting down you were hungry;
all the photographs of you – if I flicked the pages
fast enough, would those in the top right-hand corner,
at least, spring jerkily into life?

Item: a bank account – didn’t you need
the money? Your sisters; me. People hope
I don’t mind them asking about you. As if
in a language I’m learning, I say, no, I don’t mind.

Prompt: What item do you still need to write about, even if a part of you doesn’t want to? To whom are you writing?

Journey – a poem

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It’s a great pleasure introducing this month’s poet Pat Edwards. We met on Facebook and then discovered we both have a book with Indigo Dreams Publishing.

Pat is a writer, reviewer and workshop leader from mid Wales. She also offers a poetry feedback service on her site Gold Dust. Her work has appeared in Magma, Prole, Atrium, IS&T and many others. Pat hosts Verbatim open mic nights during more ‘normal’ times and curates Welshpool Poetry Festival. She has two pamphlets: Only Blood (Yaffle, 2019); Kissing in the Dark (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2020).

Today is Mother’s Day in many countries. Pat’s dedication for Only Blood reads ‘For Mum and Dad if only we could all try again.’ Here are three poems from Only Blood, followed by Journey, from Kissing in the Dark, in Pat’s honest and compassionate voice.

The year Mum died

She is cutting tiny pieces of foam rubber
to comfort-cushion her feet in pinch-painful shoes.

There’s that look in her eyes, the one I don’t yet understand,
that gives away the cell-division in her breast.

She has a box of keepsakes I’m allowed to sift through:
the silver clasp for keeping sixpences together;
the golden compact that clicks open to reveal a mirror;
the trace of bronze powder that smells like ladies.

Here in 1963 amongst the fullness of her skirt,
I am barely five and only know I love her.

Gems

I want to find my mother’s jewellery,
to lift the lid on a tin box
of paste and pearls;

to find drop earrings that glint,
necklaces that lie on collar bones,
a charm or two for luck.

I want her wedding band,
brooches that once fastened scarves,
all the souvenirs and sentiment.

But I bet the first went to pay the gas,
the second to buy the weekly shop,
the third towards a gambling debt.

Gee-gees

Teenage me always knew when he’d put on a bet.
The channel would get changed,
there would be an urgent tension,
tight as a fist.

We’d sit saying not a word,
for fear speaking would fracture us.
Then, in the closing furlongs,
I’d know for sure.

Dad would bounce on the edge of his seat,
building from a hushed Come on my beauty!
to blatant demand of it.

We would both urge the horse
across the finishing line,
jockey standing in his stirrups,
cracking the whip.

Then the relief.
Let’s get your hair done.
I can buy you a new coat.
As if I was my mother.

Journey

I draw a blue-black line under my eyes,
trace it across the tattoo on my left arm.
I watch it slide down the veins of my leg,
to settle in a grey graffiti pool by my feet.
That’s quite some journey I say out loud,
so the man on the train looks up from
his screen and glares at me like a priest.
My thin mouth flashes a penance smile
back at him and he absolves me I think.
That’s quite some journey I say silently
so the man in my dream looks up from
his book and smiles at me like a friend.
My full mouth offers him a lover’s kiss
which surely changes something I think.
I draw a blue-black line under everything.

They came at night – a war poem

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Credit Diane Moss on Pixabay

In the Netherlands, on the evening of 4 May, the war dead will be remembered. Here is my friend Kathleen Kummer’s poem about an event that happened in Holland during the Second World War. Kathleen’s mother-in-law was a published poet.

They came at night

Then there was the night they came for the horses.
There would have been no warning before
the clang of jackboots on the cobbles in the yard
of the outlying farm and the hammering on the door.

By the time they reached the edge of the village,
the farmers were up and had slipped their bare feet
into clogs. Behind the door, they were waiting
for the clattering of the hooves on the road to cease.

Not that there would have been silence as this farmer
moved, if need be at gunpoint, to the stable:
the shifting of hooves, the neighing, the whinnying,
he would know, without finding the words, meant betrayal,

his, as far as the horses knew,
which may be why he came to my mother-in-law’s.
I want that poem you wrote, he said,
that’s being passed round, about the horses.

And now I write mine, seventy years since then,
for when I can’t sleep, I often listen
as the clatter of hooves on those roads in Holland
swells in the peace of a night in Devon.