My friend Kathleen Kummer recently had her 95th birthday. We have had a weekly telephone call since the start of the first lockdown in March 2020. Kathleen’s poems from her collection Living below sea level have featured here before.
Flying a kite refers to the ‘90s, as the grandson is now in his thirties. He lives abroad, but regularly visits. A variation on the villanelle form, the poem successfully blends the personal and the universal.
Flying a kite
My grandson and I are flying his kite. Though we stand on the earth’s green rim in spring, there’ll be talk of wars on the news tonight.
We have climbed the steep meadow, have not taken fright at the notice, Beware of the Bull. Larks sing as my grandson and I are flying his kite.
We have coaxed it upwards, where wind and light give life to what was a limp, gaudy thing. Time enough for reports of the fighting tonight.
Its streamers rippling, the wind just right, it rides the skies, a jocular king. My grandson and I are flying his kite.
These skies are empty, but for the flight of buzzards and invisible larks on the wing. The skies they will show on the news tonight
will be apocalyptic, eerily bright with the clever ways of destroying and killing to which the whole world claims the right. I am watching my grandson wind in his kite.
It’s good to get an acceptance and even better when it’s prompt! Thanks to Paul Brookes for accepting this poem and two others for his online poetry journal The Starbeck Orion. You’ll find it here: the 880.substack.com. Issue 4 is themed. Current contributions are open themed.
You will be asked what your favourite constellation is. I bought the domain name acaciapublications in the early 90s, so you won’t be surprised that Camelopardalis is mine. It is a large but faint constellation of the northern sky representing a giraffe.
The poem was written from a prompt on the Boxes workshop with Graham Mort. WordPress wanted to make it a list, which messed up the numbers the lines had. We like a non-sequitur…
Boxes
I declined it. The man in black nodded, walked back to the horse.
Boy, am I glad I can feel my legs.
There must always be doors for the pleasure of opening them. Cats know this.
Boardroom brown, expensive pens, hand-rolled cigars, promises on parchment.
On display in the glass case: the motorbike, black-and-white photos, three bullets.
This post is a tribute to my brother Theo who died early on Tuesday morning in hospital. On the evening of Friday 28 June, he went out with his wife Ancilla to celebrate their 52nd wedding anniversary. After a lovely meal he had a fall in which he sustained serious brain damage. I spent time with him on the Saturday. Ancilla and my nephew were with him when he died.
It was only last autumn, when a MRI scan was taken for other purposes, that my brother learned that he had the rare condition of multiple cavernomas. This explains the paralysis and subsequent sudden hearing loss. The poem 1962 was published in my debut collection Another life.
My brother had a rich and full life. The photo was taken in 2019 when he and Ancilla both received honours (Member of the Order of Oranje-Nassau) in recognition of decades of charity and community service.
1962
Alexander Eduard (coppersmith in the bible and van Beinum, the famous conductor). Our Irish setter had been given the names of an unborn child.
A ward of six, our parent’s daily drive, almost an hour each way. Neurologist, paralysis, lumbar puncture, nausea.
Grandfather owned an electrical shop (double-fronted on the main street), gave my brother a beige-brown radio.
The specialist allowed our red Irish setter to visit my brother, celebrating his fourteenth birthday in the academic hospital in Leiden.
Three months later he arrived home, just in time for Sint Nikolaas. My brother still limped and his crown was marked by two scars at right angles, the space between dipped and dented. A few days later grandfather came to take his radio back.
As the church bells began ringing, we were off – like thoroughbreds out of the starting boxes. We’d arrived on Saturday, inspected the spacious and comfortable rental property. Then enjoyed a delicious fish dinner at No. 1 Cromer Upstairs.
My morning flight from Schiphol landed at Norwich. The views of the coast and the Broads reminded me of other times. The poem was first published in The Pocket Poetry Book of LOVE (Paper Swans Press, 2018).
With love to my five talented poet friends…
Cromer, August
Curved around Cromer Pier a twitching mass of legs, sturdy calves, socks, sandals. Fathers scoop up bait, wind black thread onto pink plastic spools. An old couple, in matching anoraks, watch a thin man, wheelchair-bound. He shakily lifts his thermos flask.
I thought of you then and the creaking stair lift, the plastic roll-up seat, raising her in and out of the bath. The small wooden cart you made so she can travel through the orchard inspecting the new fruit with her crooked hands.
It’s a pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Jon Miller. We met some years ago on a poetry workshop. His biography is at the end of the post.
Jon was winner of The Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Award 2022 and his latest pamphlet Past Tense Future Imperfect (2023) is published by Smith|Doorstop from which these three poems are taken.
They Made A Crime Series Here
We are miles off Hringvegur, American satnav garbling ‘Fjardarheidi’: a high pass, a blizzard shreds the windscreen,
then down to Seydisfjordur, where the road stubs itself out against the fjord; like us, it has given up fighting the inevitable.
Past the fish factory, its yellow flag cracking the wind. Corrugated sheds, oil tanks. Houses stare into themselves.
This town has let out all its breath, waits to take another next century. For the lonely, binoculars stand on windowsills.
A thought bubble: Stay low. The world is not your lobster. Tie everything down. Run for port. A beard hides a lot of guilt.
Picnic benches crouch like crabs at car parks and supermarkets; husbands keep engines running in case wives make a break for it.
A camper van – rented – drifts by, turns down the wrong road, bikes shrouded in grey, a child’s face at the window.
Beside the filling station three farmers lean into a trailer, debate the efficacy of bladed implements. One looks up.
Nothing connects until everything does. We have tickets, drive into the ferry, its belly, its deep machine hum, extras no longer.
Lost Child
Not the brazen trumpeters or the flittering sailboats or in the minds of mariners with their white-washed eyes is there a button of hope.
Neither in the small boys roaming the fogged avenues called home for tea returning with birds’ nests and the ruins of puberty.
You become a twitch in the fingertips of newscasters or out here where it happened the midnight click of the latch the song in the five-barred gate.
This Way to the Observation Lounge
Out through the placid archipelagos they go at ease in their daylit aquarium moving over water at the pace of a slow car.
The sea is flat on its back. The flag barely mutters at the mast. All are hypnotised by empty sea and sky, by the line where nothing meets.
They have left the world to turn without them. and sit with hands clasped in laps as if listening to a sermon on vacancy.
Asleep, they twitch to escape their clothes. They know themselves the way the blind feel what they cannot see.
I could tuck in chins, settle a head on its neck, retrieve dropped novels, while their eyes read dreams the way an unborn child pushes against its mother’s belly.
They are at rest. Someone is on the bridge. Over the horizon is harbour. Weather is busy somewhere else. Who they are has fallen away like rain over islands.
Biography
Jon Miller lives near Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands and has had poetry published in a wide range of literary magazines as well as being a contributor of book and exhibition reviews and literary journalism. He formerly editor of Northwords Now, a magazine featuring writing from the north of Scotland. He was short-listed for the Wigtown Poetry Prize in 2021 and awarded joint First Place in the Neil Gunn Poetry Competition 2022.
It’s a great pleasure to introduce our April guest poet Doreen Gurrey. We met on a writing workshop some years ago and belong to a group that meets regularly online. You can find Doreen’s biography at the end of the post. I have chosen three poems from her new pamphlet A Coalition of Cheetahs, just out with smith/doorstop. It was a winner of the 2023 Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Prize.
Zoo
From the lit hall, I slide back the hardboard panel to find you under the stairs, crouched like an Indian street seller in front of the toy animals you’ve fumbled into a ring.
Hands and knees on chipped linoleum, I crawl in, smell the turps and boot polish, the must of apples separated until next year.
You’re listening to the slow clicks of the electric meter, your heart monitor, sharing the sound with the broom which shoulders the corner like your guardian angel.
I haul you out, pick up the polar bear, giraffe, the big elephant and the little elephant, then soothe the smouldering print, reddening on your thigh.
Yarn
I was learning to knit when you left me, decoding the language; stocking stitch, moss, knit2tog., twist; the wool a filigree
snaking through my fingers across the floor. The note was cold: In Italy – don’t write or ring. Needles knit up my loss,
a pink anaconda down to my knees. I learned to pick up stitches I’d dropped, then all my friends said pink suited me,
asked would I carry on or had I stopped? I said I’d started another in green, that casting off was easier than casting on.
Guest
You came with all you needed, your car a metal suitcase,
the boot full of booze the back seat housing a portable grill.
Temporary you said, but I forgot how little you need to live.
You kept mostly to the garage, the beer stacked next to the tool box,
the radio tuned in to the French news; you smoked your roll ups and grilled
your côtes de porc. My washing took on a Gallic smell.
Now you’re gone, I’ve got the garage back, but sometimes mistake
the growl of the tumble drier for your phlegmy cough,
the washing machine’s whine for your whistling.
Biography
Doreen Gurrey trained as an English and drama teacher and for several years ran her own Youth Theatre Company. She went on to become an Adult Literacy Tutor writing and delivering Family Learning courses for the local council. Latterly she has worked as a Creative Writing tutor at York University. Her work has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The North and The Yorkshire Anthology. She has won prizes in The McClellan, Bridport and Troubadour poetry competitions. Doreen lives in York and has five grown up children.
It’s a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Matthew Stewart, with three poems from his collection Whatever you do, justdon’t. It was published by HappenStance Press to their usual high standards in 2023. The background of the jacket is an old map of Extremadura, Spain. The poem Gostrey Meadow was published in Stand. See below the poems for Matthew’s biography. I admire the attention to detail, precision, and economy of his poems: so much between the lines…
Banana
Come to think of it, she didn’t tell us who’d got hold of the banana, or how, and we forgot to ask, stunned by the news that at ten years old she’d never seen one.
She was still proud her class had raffled it for the war effort, still slightly mournful at it turning black on her teacher’s desk long before they drew the winning ticket.
She wouldn’t talk about gas masks, the Blitz, the doodlebugs (how they changed to V2s) — but she always recalled her fury at the waste of bloody good food.
Wendsday
Halfway through the word and the week, my pen used to pause and stumble, tripped up by my eight-year-old tongue
and even now I still delight in having learned at last to swap the n and d and add the e.
I stumbled, too, after coming to Spain. Shook off routines and rules. Let a new language soak through me.
Two more hassle-packed, tensed-up days till vino tinto y queso instead of cod and chips.
Gostrey Meadow
Showing my son round, I notice a father taking a picture of his wife and son who’s melted half an ice cream on his fingers and the other half on his face.
It’s a copy of a photo in our album. Same river. Same heat-laden sky. Same roles. Same spot on the bank. Same pose. Our trees were ten feet shorter.
Biography
Matthew Stewart lives between Extremadura in Spain and West Sussex in the South of England. He works in the Spanish wine trade as a blender and exporter. His blog site ‘Rogue Strands’ is a respected source for poetry lovers, and he reviews widely for a range of publications. His first full collection was The Knives of Villalejo (Eyewear, 2017). Before that, there were two pamphlets from HappenStance: Tasting Notes (2012) and Inventing Truth (2011).
It’s a great pleasure introducing this month’s guest poet: Rod Whitworth. We first met, probably, a good decade or so ago. His poems have been widely published and successful in competitions. One of these, the poignant Demobbed was featured here on 30 May, 2021. Rod recently launched his first full collection My family and otherbirds. I’ve chosen a selection of poems on the themes of family and birds and, of course, jazz.
Tandem in Holland
On that day, your smile hung like a sunrise over the polders.
And on that day, your voice greeted me like blackbirds singing to claim and to yield.
And on that day, your touch thrilled like a breeze from the pine trees.
And that day brought the knowledge of itself and knew that it was this day.
Portrait of my grandfather, accompanied
The daft smile, wide as a spiv, tells us Sunday afternoon, after a slow left-arm morning and Chester’s Best in the Cotton Tree. You’re sitting in the sun on the donkey-stoned front step of Number 51 in undone waistcoat, collarless shirt, felt slippers, a Capstan Full Strength drooped from a trailing hand. This is happiness: transported from your brother Llewelyn who never left the Somme, from crying all the way home after delivering jam and marmalade to shops in Coventry the day after it was blitzed.
On your right knee: me, plump as a queen’s cushion, wide-eyed, in Auntie-Louie-knitted rompers, not knowing any of this.
Names you know, names
It was Rod, the other one, the one who listened to American radio on his Communist dad’s short wave, who, one bright April morning between the 53 bus stop and school, said You’ve got to listen to this bloke, a pianist, Thelonious Monk. He’s something else. Another world. I told him no-one could be called Thelonious Monk. It took me two years to find out he was right, on both counts. What he didn’t know though was that Monk’s middle name was Sphere. By the time I knew that, the car Rod was travelling in had crashed into the lamp post.
One for…
He was walking away when I noticed the wings.
Furled they were, but still visible against the dark blue
hoodie. I don’t believe in angels but it does make you think.
I called him back, asked him to intercede. You’re asking a lot from a magpie
he croaked, then flew off. Made me feel sorrowful.
I wished he’d had a friend.
Biography
Rod Whitworth was born in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1943, and has done a number of jobs, including teaching maths (for 33 years) and working in traffic censuses (the job that kept him on the streets). He currently works as a medical rôle-player. Rod has been writing poetry for a few years and has had work published in a number of journals and anthologies. His first collection, My family and other birds, was published by Vole Books in 2024. He now lives in Oldham and is still tyrannised by commas.
This month’s guest slot is for poems from To Live Here, an anthology of haiku published by The Wee Sparrow Press. The Press was founded by Claire Thom. 100% of the proceeds of their anthologies are given to charity.
The anthology is edited by Giorgia Di Pancrazio & Katherine E Winnick. The lovely cover and illustrations are by Scottish artist Colin Thom.
To Live Here is “A collection of haiku on the theme of home, which explores the many facets of human experience, from the mundane to the sublime. Featuring the work of talented poets from around the world, this anthology invites readers to reflect on the beauty and complexity of the world we inhabit.”
Salford Loaves and Fishes, a charity supporting the homeless, has already received over £600. The anthology is available through Amazon – ISBN 9788409528165. I’m grateful to Francis Attard and Julie Mellor for permission to share their haiku.
sandy beach turtles lay clutches of eggs off-shore breeze
Francis Attard, Malta
three cornered field the generations who farmed here
It’s a great pleasure to introduce our December guest poet Jill Abram. Jill and I met several years ago on a writing workshop. I have chosen four poems of Jill’s pamphlet Forgetting My Father. The beautiful cover was designed by Aaron Kent and was inspired by rhododendrons in the last of the poems. You’ll find Jill’s biography and links after her poems.
This is the last post of 2023: Season’s Greetings to you; thank you for your support.
How To Belong
At Jewish youth club we all wore Rock Against Racism badges and danced to Glad To Be Gay – girls in one ring, boys in another.
They ate ham sandwiches when their parents weren’t looking yet scorned me for Smokey Bacon crisps and going to school on Yom Kippur.
The Evangelicals lured us into their church hall with ping pong then tried to keep us with singing and prayers and Jesus. They wanted all of us.
Words Are Not All We Have
Words are all we have. – Samuel Beckett
Don’t get into debt with anyone but me! Dad’s sole instruction when he left me at university. When we did the reckoning he took the hit on my car’s depreciation. And because I’d sold it, he drove 300 miles in his to bring me and all I owned home.
We argued over SI units once. I fetched all my A-level text books, showed him proof after proof. He wasn’t having it. He’d grown up with imperial; I knew metric, and that I was right. Next day he brought a page he’d found at work, looked at the floor as he handed it to me: I withdraw.
Now he can’t say anything because of the tube in his throat and maybe – we’ll know when they remove it – that blood clot. When I try to leave his bedside, he grips my finger and won’t let go.
My Sister Is
a gold coin: She is precious. Her style is simple and elegant. I’d like to exchange her for something of equal value.
an alarm clock: Controlled by radio from Rugby, accurate to a fraction of a second. If she were by my bed, she’d go wrong and wake me at 5am.
a mid-morning beverage: Green tea fits her philosophy, black coffee her personality.
a steamroller: She’d say that was more appropriate for me, being heavier than her. I’d say she has a greater power to crush.
a bear: Will she be a ferocious, mama grizzly or cuddly teddy? We never know until she gets here.
a window: Round, square or arched? Hmm, certainly arch
a hand thrown pot: Finest china drawn out thin, glazed in lustrous copper and cobalt. In the kiln, a bubble formed on her rim.
a coffin: Made to measure, lined with silk, a velvet cushion, and no shortage of people to carry it.
Slow Orphaning
Images slide across my lock screen at random: hot pink rhododendrons at Kew last May, glasses of rum and ginger on a hotel balcony. Here’s Mum, pensive and beautiful as she gazes at the skyline from a Thames boat when she came to see me. The last time I tried to visit her, she said she was busy.
Dad teeing up on the ninth at Dunham in an orange cagoule. Rain never held him back. A heart attack slowed him. A bypass stopped him at a stroke. His body survived fifteen years while his mind died and I grieved for so long. So long I was surprised there were still tears for his funeral.
Biography Poet, producer and presenter, Jill Abram is autistic, has Jewish heritage and lives with fibromyalgia. She grew up in Manchester, travelled the world and now lives in Brixton. She has performed her poems, which have been widely published, across London and beyond, including Ledbury Poetry Festival, StAnza, Paris, USA and online. She was Director of the influential collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen for twelve years. Jill’s debut pamphlet, Forgetting My Father, was published by Broken Sleep Books in May 2023. Jill has a newsletter. You can sign up via her website or directly via this link and here is the link to Broken Sleep Books, if you want to buy a copy of the pamphlet.
Acacia Publications 