My friend and poet Kathleen Kummer will have her birthday soon. We have visited the Dartington Estate in Devon several times: to hear the then Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion read, to listen to music during the Music Summer School & Festival which was established in 1947. Alwyn Marriage of Oversteps Books invited me to read during the Ways with Words Literary Festival. It was wonderful seeing people out on the lawn, resting in deckchairs, or queuing up to get their book signed by famous authors.
Dartington Hall is a spectacular Grade I listed building. The gardens are grade II listed: a sculpture by Henry Moore, a yew tree that is 1500 years old and a row of sweet chestnut trees believed to be about 400 years old. The gardens are a delight in every season. Here is Kathleen’s poem about the gardens.
The Tiltyard, Dartington Hall Gardens
That summer day
That summer day at Dartington, everything familiar, beautiful: the corrugation of the bark of ancient trees, the sun behind the scarlet maple leaves, the swathes of wildflowers in the glades, warm to the touch the might buttocks of Henry Moore’s reclining figure, the bench, its oak smooth, silver, following the stone wall’s curve, on which we sat. Unexpected, the robin landing next to us, a fledgling, plump, who stayed ten, fifteen minutes until his mother called him. And, in the little wave of sadness which washed over us, because he looked so young, indivisible as water is, this swell of happiness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This month I am featuring poems by Martin Zarrop. We met some years ago through the Poetry School workshops and are also members of one of the Poetry Society’s Stanzas. I start by congratulating Martin: the 2021 Cinnamon Press Pamphlet competition got 450 submissions. The results came out a few days ago – Martin’s manuscript was in the top five!
Martin is a retired mathematician who wanted certainty but found life more interesting and fulfilling by not getting it. He started writing poetry in 2006 and has been published in various magazines and anthologies. He completed a MA in Creative Writing at Manchester University in 2011.
His pamphlet No Theory of Everything (2015) was one of the winners of the 2014 Cinnamon Press pamphlet competition and his first full collection Moving Pictures was published by Cinnamon in 2016. His pamphlet Making Waves on the life and science of Albert Einstein was published by V. Press in 2019. His second collection Is AnyoneThere? was published by High Window Press in March 2020.
The five poems are all from Is Anyone there? Where Martin’s poems refer to science, they do so in an accessible way, often poignant, often with humour. Like Martin, I first came to Manchester in the early 1980s – a place where now around 200 world languages are spoken. I hope you enjoy this selection.
Sci Fi
The aliens are coming. I can see them flicker in the flames as I stare into the coal fire and my mother asks me if I’m happy. Has she been taken over by Martians? I must take care not to fall asleep.
And here I am covered in mud. The invisible predator can’t see me as I try to leave the exam room. Failure isn’t an option but the exit signs are hidden under ectoplasmic goo. The ice cream man ignores my screams.
It is bursting out of my chest cavity, this other me I don’t want to know. Why is my name missing from the credits? Perhaps I didn’t wait long enough for the Z’s. Out in the foyer, zombies are waiting for the next show.
First Impressions Manchester 1980
People talk to you here but not in English and the rain is cold on the grim streets that run for their lives past empty Victoriana, lost empires.
At night, the city strips to its bones, lies unwashed in the glow of fag ends, crushed and dying among claggy debris, northern mouths.
published by The High Window
Missing
She must be in here somewhere. He turns another page and stares at shapes, the outline of a face and almost smiles. The hair’s not right, he says.
Under his thumb, images move, some not even close to human. This one looks like a centaur, this a lion. He knows how much he wants her but he struggles to join the dots.
Across the table, the astronomer, sympathetic despite the late hour, is accustomed to darker matters. Try this one, he grunts, and opens another star catalogue.
Hands
UK’s first double hand transplant awoke from a 12-hour operation with two new sets of fingers (Guardian 23.07.16)
It’s not like wearing leather gloves. This is for real, the weld of tissue, bone to severed stumps; white flesh imbibes the ruddiness of life, then shudders at an alien command –
a finger twitches. It displays no loyalty to donor meat, no tear or thought, no dumb relief not to be ash, no memory of goodbye waves, past loves held close.
The patient chews his nails, flexes each knuckle as if born to it, admires blotches, childhood scars from scraps he never fought, holds out his hands.
To My Nineties
You’d better get your skates on or at least your boots and get out there, old dribbler, before it’s too late.
I may not meet you in the hills struggling through Kinder peat. Thirteen miles, fifteen? No problem!
Or so I thought as hair thinned and Christmas followed Easter as if in a time machine that ate old friends for breakfast.
You stand patient near the finish line as I pull myself up for the final sprint. Nothing lasts forever, not hips, not brain cells. I need a project.
On Friday I had my second vaccination (Pfizer). I have felt ok, a bit tired and feverish. By way of a treat, a good childhood memory.
The “selling fur coats” took place in Amsterdam, in Maison de Bonneterie: a small chain of high-end fashion stores. The building in Amsterdam was designed by a well-known Dutch architect with an interior in the style of Louis XVI (the Sun King of France), an imposing staircase and a glass roof.
It closed in 2014, after 125 years of uninterrupted service to the elegant public. The Amsterdam store is a national listed building and now used as a location for events.
Saturday mornings
We’ve been waiting in silence. It’s just the three of us. Mother’s away in a city, selling fur coats. The radio crackles, but here comes father with blue beakers, hot chocolate, curled cream on top, and the bread he has baked on his day off.
Tomorrow he’ll be on the balcony playing the organ; we’ll be below. Today he is the son of a master baker. We’ll have the bread with butter and jam, red strawberries, shiny against the golden crust.
Credit Skitterphoto on Pixabay – Scheveningen Pier
Greetings on World Poetry Day! At the 30th General Conference of UNESCO in Paris, 1999, it was decided to mark 21 March as an annual celebration. Poetry has “the unique ability to capture the creative spirit of the human mind”.
I’ve chosen a poem with international connections, a lot of people, fruit – a festive gathering on a Dutch beach. It’s from my collection Nothing serious, nothing dangerous.
On the beach after My boat by Raymond Carver
Bill’s last words were always Have fun, so I will. He was a very good father, Bill, though he wasn’t my father. Liz will be there too. And Mary and Brian, the Como couple. Seville will be there, all the places I ever fell in love with. We’ll be on a beach, a wide sandy beach with small white shells, large white gulls and far off, in the distance, the red container ships, nothing dangerous, nothing serious.
At the flood line broken razor clams crackle under our feet. There is Dick, almost 80, and Miep, their cycles parked up against the metal wire by the marram grass dotted on the dunes. Esther, Peter, Theo, Ancilla on their e-bikes, they love this beach. Skewered fruit, Water Melon Men and the three Irish men I loved, and the others, the artist with one eye has come back from Hungary. Boats will be there, beached. We’re all beached. My UK friends have come by ship, a ship with starched officers, a ship from Southwold that I specially chartered.
I invited J S Bach, Schubert and anyone else whose names I am forgetting. I have been given dispensation – hey, that sounds medical, nothing dangerous, nothing serious, the friends who are no longer friends, what’s rejection, abandonment among true friends. Apples, oranges, enough grapes to count in the new year, fresh figs, plums, peaches, kiwi fruit for sleep, passion fruit. With all that fruit we are fit to count our blessings, our nine lives. Have fun. The tide’s out, and it is a long time before it’s coming back in.
It’ll be St. Patrick’s Day next Wednesday, so I found you a poem with an Irish theme.
Thousands of Europeans were emigrating to Australia and New Zealand under the ‘Assisted Passage’ scheme. I took my Dutch, English, French and German across the Channel and joined P & O Lines Ltd as a WAP (Woman Assistant Purser) in 1969.
The following year I joined SS Orcades. The ship was due to arrive in Australia in time for older passengers to celebrate Christmas and New Year with family who’d moved there. Because of the large number of Dutch passengers, I held a daily coffee meeting – giving information about ports en route, as well as translating and interpreting.
Each morning, I also met with a small group of German-speaking passengers. On the photo, you can just about see my language badges, attached to my uniform with Velcro!
The poem SS Arcadia, from my second collection Nothing serious, nothing dangerous is about meeting my late husband for the first time. May you be blessed with the luck of the Irish!
Photo Credit: by Taken via PIxabay
SS Arcadia
I was still in my whites, had just rolled down the shutters on shore excursions, orders for birthday cakes, contact lenses lost in the swimming pool.
I was headed down aft, the Tourist Nursery, rehearsals for Hawaiian Night. Oh, I’m going to a hukilau.
It was a moment of whites and early evening sunlight. That Irishman, feet planted wide on shiny boards, who controlled the English bar staff, Goanese stewards.
I already knew that Junior Officers were not supposed to fraternise with Leading Hands.
Can’t you sleep either? After a dark year, many old friends gone, I thought I heard you sing outside the window inches from my ear. Who are you singing for this time of night? Did I dream you?
This is the first stanza of Ruth Padel’s poem Night Singing in a Time of Plague. You can read the full poem on the Poetry Society’s site here. It is a response to John Keats’ poem Ode to a Nightingale. The poem was commissioned as part of the Keats200 bicentenary – a celebration of Keats’ life, works and legacy.
We are close to the first anniversary of the pandemic. The borders of the Netherlands remain closed to visitors from the UK. I have been sleeping less well for weeks now. Here is Kathleen Kummer’s poem, also about the difficulty of finding sleep.
Lying in bed with my life
I am lying in bed with my life. It is one of those sleepless night when I chafe at its bulk alongside me. It will fill the hours with my clan of northerners and sundry others. I shall speak for them all, the living and the dead.
I know the words, which I’m good at repressing when they were my own and unkind. I shout Cut if the scene is unbearable, switch on the lamp to get rid of it, a shame, as I might still have seen my mother’s harebell-blue eyes and the family wearing each other’s hats at a picnic.
The curtain at last turns grey and grainy, and my life rolls up fast with a click inside me. I’m reminded of that when my daughter says I don’t suppose you’ve got a decent tape-measure?
Acacia Publications 