Tag Archives: poem

Wind phone

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The original wind phone, photo credit Matthew Komatsu



It’s a year ago today that my brother died. If grief is love with nowhere to go, the wind phone can be a place for those feelings to land, even momentarily.


The initiative was started in Japan by garden designer Itaru Sasaki in Otsuchi Prefecture in 2010. Sasaki said: ‘Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind.’ Hence the name Kaze no denwa’ – phone of the wind. The disconnected old-style rotary telephone allowed him to deal with grief after his cousin’s death of cancer.


Sasaki: ‘When your heart is filled with grief or some kind of burden, you aren’t in tune with your senses. You’re closed off like curtains have been pulled around you. After you empty your heart a little bit, you might be able to hear some birds singing again.’


The following year close to 20,000 people were killed by the earthquake and tsunami. In Tokohu 10% of the population died. Sasaki allowed local people to use the wind phone. Over 30,000 people have made the journey to this telephone since, and wind phones have been set up in other countries. The wind phone also provided inspiration for films and novels.


Amy Dawson (USA) lost her daughter Emily to terminal illness in 2020. She learned about wind phones and now devotes much of her time to maintaining a listing of wind phones worldwide, providing advice and resources. The current total is just over 400. Not all calls are to a deceased. People make calls about other losses. Go to her website for more information. There is also an article on Colossal


The first wind phone in The Netherlands was placed in 2019. There are now eight, with a further eight being planned. The locations include Haarlem – the town where my brother and sister-in-law lived before moving to the nearby village of Spaarndam.


I imagine a wind phone, the black cord snipped, in the dunes of Wijk aan Zee – where I’ll celebrate my special birthday this weekend, and where my brother and I spent much time as children during the summer vacation.

empty sky
sand piling up
rustle of marram grass

Mine

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It’s my pleasure to introduce our May guest poet Jane McKie. We met many years ago on a writing workshop and are still part of an email group. You can find her biography at the end of this post. Cinnamon Press recently published her new poems and I’ve chosen some poems from Mine: vivid, clear embodied images with marvellous economy.

Mine

On nights when the wind drops, I hear it crooning softly,
not like a real bomb. A toothless, barnacled silhouette, wittering
to itself when the tide is low. My friends and I sometimes get close,
daring each other to nudge its rust. But what happens when
the music cuts out? Tonight, the mine’s a mute companion:
whiff of brine, cryptic fist. As my eyelids close, that’s when it—

Kevlar


I am the tattoo of a spider’s web
on a sixteen-year-old girl’s calf.
Traced from a drawing of a photo,
in time, I will thread up her thigh,
over her whole torso, in a riot of
silk that is stronger than Kevlar.

She will wear me like armour:
my vest of ink, her toughest skin.
Who wouldn’t fear a woman
fluent in the language of spiders?
Those twitches in cobwebs
that throb like old wounds.

Dreaming in an age of austerity


Not a single one finished: all mark time
until a rich developer completes the job.
Here, stone knuckles. There, exposed metal rods
stab at the sky like a mech-monster’s fingers.

Not vital or hungry, these resort Titans.
But not quite dead either. Gulls like to roost
in the pockets of them. Gulls dabble bills in
puddles that form from the absence of roofs.

Even small children play in the undead bodies
of imagined buildings, sneaking past tape
to be mummies and daddies in beautiful houses
that shelter insatiable, suckling doll-babies.

Polished malachite


on my desk, riven
with almost-blue, a pool
or algal cistern.

I touch it when I’m sad
and its green eye blinks, rippling
with souterrain light.

Biography


Jane McKie is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. She has written several poetry collections, including Morocco Rococo (2007), Kitsune (2015), and Quiet Woman, Stay (2020) with Cinnamon. Her most recent full collection is Carnation Lily Lily Rose (Blue Diode, 2023). She lives in Scotland, but was originally from the Sussex coast, which inspired several poems in Mine.

Exit Strategy

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It’s my pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Patrick Wright. Patrick and I met years ago at Manchester Poets. Earlier this month his poem Archive, inspired by Anselm Kiefer, featured on the blog. You’ll find Patrick’s biography at the end of the post.

Today I’m sharing more poems from his substantial collection Exit Strategy, a ‘vivid exploration of grief and loss’. Tamar Yoseloff said of the collection: ‘Patrick Wright is one of those rare poets who can translate the complex images of visual artists into precise and pitch-perfect language.’

Patrick has been inspired by artists past and present (Rousseau, Klee, Rachel Whitehead, J M W Turner), to mention some well-known names.

The collection uses a wide range of forms (couplets, tercets, stanza, sonnet, ghazal, prose poem) and makes excellent use of white space through columns and indents. WordPress can’t do justice to formatting. Therefore, I’ve chosen poems with a more traditional lay-out.

COLD DARK MATTER

After Cornelia Parker

Thanks to you I am learning to see again
through a sparseness of particles—

like how I learned to listen to an eyelid
twitch once yes and twice no through a coma.

Darkness I’ve come to realise is a privilege—
known at 4am & sleepless

the sun rising like a scalpel
& turning the room purple.

Somehow, we go on & somehow it never ends
& we go on like a double pendulum.

Perhaps love is like this fixed explosion.
Perhaps you’re nearer now than the word belief.

SHADOW OF A GIRL PLAYING WITH A HULA HOOP
After Giorgio de Chirico

It used to scare me, what this girl is doing,
or those around her, off in the blind field.
Seemingly a girl playing with a hula hoop,
or just a shadow, no source, just a shadow
next to a wagon, its backdrop here a dusty
plaza. Somewhere, I feel, from an upstairs
room, an eye looks at me. Somewhere, off
screen, a murder is taking place, this shade
a clue. Even so, things are too belated now,
this girl clearly a phantom and not a muse,
like she’s in a toy shop or inside its puzzle,
no girl playing so nonchalant with a hoop.
The sun, at these times, is no longer a sun,
more likely a lamp. My fingers are syllables.
And this pine table where the postcard sits
is full of knots, staring like gods from above.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG’S UNTITLED

& already I see alpines
prise their way through the brutalist grey
of Chernobyl floors. Through the sarcophagus
they reach for sunlight. Maybe we only learn
what the burn of graphite means once blind.
I know you better after knowing disaster.

I’ve studied the colour theories
of Goethe and Albers where the wheel
& the wheel of life are a way to feel closer.
I am the stalk through the fallout, one that insists
on pushing its way & one that’s been patient.
On the surface we share the mark of detonation.

They say a town like this is void
though one pulse of a deer’s heart
makes it a plenum. A full spectrum will reveal
itself only when you’ve pledged to cease
hurting. Through this I see what you saw
when the sun set & made shades on a radiator.
We are both on the side of art.

WINTER LANDSCAPE WITH SKATERS AND BIRD TRAP
After Pieter Bruegel the Elder


I find no pleasure in the ice.
Everything about me lies still—save for murmurations.

Peasants weave between trees: each crystalline
like coral on a seabed.

I give you a winter landscape in place of a mirror.
The bird trap is my heart.

Soon it will be still, a skull in a crypt, lit by candles.
My hills are a wishbone. They undulate under great tension.

The skaters are insouciant, crows peck their shadows.
My face startles—a chance alignment of stars.

Skaters are on slippery ground
and if they should slip, they have nothing to cling onto.

Biography


Patrick Wright’s poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, The North, Gutter, and The London Magazine. His debut collection, Full Sight of Her, was published in 2020 by Eyewear and nominated for the John Pollard Prize. His pamphlet, Nullaby (2017), was also published by Eyewear. His second collection, Exit Strategy (2025), was published by Broken Sleep Books. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the Open University.

Archive

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Aus Herzen und Hirnen spriessen die Halme der Nacht, 2019-2020. Oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, straw, gold leaf, wood and metal on canvas. Dims: 471 x 841,5 x 36 cm. Collection Voorlinden.

Our guest poet this month is Patrick Wright. As I was reading his collection Exit Strategy (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) I came upon the poem Archive and discovered that Patrick and I are both very interested in Kiefer’s work.

For me one of the highlights last year was visiting Bilderstreit, a major exhibition of Kiefer’s work at Voorlinden Museum, The Netherlands. A few weeks earlier I had watched the documentary that Wim Wenders made about Anselm Kiefer. I was blown away too by the film: it’s in black-and-white and one can watch it through 3D glasses.

Kiefer was born during the bombing raids in the final months of WWII. For him, everything exists somewhere in the cycle of death and rebirth. Whenever he creates a new work, he knows that one day he will destroy it: attacking it with a flamethrower, axe, bolt cutter, or red-hot liquid lead.

ARCHIVE
After Anselm Kiefer

Before his landscapes scorched by war and history, paintings of straw
and glue, your golden hair, Margarethe, before ‘Death Fugue’, I was back at
school, deep winter. In the yard blew a few stray crisp packets; seagulls
pecked at crumbs. The annex and fence had the look of an abandoned
camp, in Polish hinterlands. Through a cloakroom window I peered,
looking for a ghost of myself, then at a ghost of myself, as the sun
poked out from a cloud and the contours of bulimia gazed back, in
sepia tones. I saw the bullies too, with razored eyebrows, piercings,
fists in my gut, spit on my shoulder, the stench of Lynx, using queer
as an insult. With my SLR, I clicked more in hope than expectation.
I fumbled with fixative, the stop bath, the gelatin swell. My negatives
solarised. I kept re-visiting as a witness. Those days, I bit the inside
of my lip, stubbed cigarettes out on my arm. When the dysmorphic
class photos were framed, still as that winter, your golden hair, said the
Kiefer print, your golden hair, Margarethe.

Saved by bankruptcy

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Photo credit: Pieter van Marion, NL

I had booked return flights Manchester – Exeter to visit my poet friend Kathleen. My trip was going to be in the third week of March 2020. On the 5th of March Flybe filed for administration and ceased all operations immediately. I lost £65, but I was very relieved: If I had flown to Exeter, I might well have been stuck in Devon as that first lockdown started…


On Sunday 15 March I learned the British government was considering a compulsory quarantine. The next day I emailed the owner of the campsite asking if I could arrive early. He replied immediately. I booked a flight, transferred money, packed, agonised over which poetry books to take to my ‘desert island’ near The Hague. I flew to Schiphol on the Wednesday. The local buses already had the area near the driver closed off with white-red plastic.


Here are two poems about that first lockdown:

The departure

Half a century condensed into Brexit, pandemic.
At the threat of a four-month’ compulsory
quarantine I fled to my bolthole in Holland.

Six months of safety in a static caravan,
waking to birdsong each morning,
shielded from the sun by the golden elm.
I walked my daily rounds on the grass lanes.

Forsythia, tulips, narcissi, rhododendron,
pyracantha, salvia, rock rose, asters:
the seasons’ steady markers. From a distance
I waved to neighbours finally arriving.

In the cupboard of the spare room
lay the letter confirming my ‘settled status’
on the other side of the North Sea.

The undertakers

A double spread in the paper
features a large photo.

This man, in his thirties, a narrow
horizontal moustache, soft smile.

He sits in a wooden boat, his right hand
resting on a plain white coffin.

People are asked to email text and selfies.
Made into cards, these are placed on the coffin.

He is based in Amsterdam, will transport
you safely through the canals.

That undertaker has just opened a crematorium.
He also owns a chain of hotels.

The pandemic has cut the numbers allowed
to be in the room. There is livestreaming.

People, he says, are glad of it.
The intimacy makes it easier to speak.

At the end of September 2020, the campsite closed. I got a Covid test somewhere in the centre of The Hague and flew back to Manchester.

Late lockdown poem

I wake up and know, of course,
that I am not a morning person.
The sound of rain, of course,
and fewer sirens as people
are supposed to be at home.
My lifelines are the same, of course:
motto, comfort break, medication.
Of course, I think about exercise,
settle for Composer of the Week,
dead, of course.

Marie-Louise Park, Didsbury, Manchester, UK

A postage stamp, Joshua calls it

He’s right and there’s traffic noise
from the main road and people
with dogs on long leads,
but not all the benches
are dedicated to the dead,
Marie-Louise is a pretty name
for a park and the 43 Airport bus
is a hybrid and no-one much
was going to the airport
that autumn: I often had the bus
to myself, both ways.

Friday, 13 March 2020

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Tuesday, 3 March 2020

As I was updating the website recently, I was reminded of the lovely interview that Andy N Poet did that very Friday. He came to the flat in Manchester where I then lived. On the 3rd of March I had launched a pamphlet and my second collection at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The launch was one of the reasons for the interview. Andy has now done several hundred interviews. You can find them all on Spokenlabel.bandcam.com Here is the link to my interview: SpokenLabel

When I listened to the interview this week, it felt spooky at times. Early February 2020 I had received confirmation of my ‘settled status’. I told Andy that I hoped to spend ‘most of the summer’ in my caravan in The Netherlands, that I couldn’t immediately tell him who my ‘desert island’ poets would be. At one point Andy mentioned the ‘virus’.

Here is a poem about that Friday from Kate Noakes who is our guest poet this month. The poem is from her 2024 Chalking the Pavement published by Broken Sleep Books.

The sick spring

Thirteenth March, a Friday with which comes
a most lauded play, Stoppard’s last contract:
Vienna, and a family succumbs,
fortunes and losses in Leopoldstadt.

I am treated to the stalls by a friend
of a friend, a nice man I do not know.
His cancelled cultural holiday ends
with a short email critique of the show.

I give him scenes, chronology, pictures,
timings avoiding history’s clichés;
how I stepped into busy Leicester Square
with foreboding that hurried me away,

and how I scurried home to a semi-death:
headache, sore throat, cough and struggle for breath.

Dimmet

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It is a pleasure to introduce our February guest poet Rob Miles. I do not know Rob personally: we have been Facebook friends for some time. I bought a copy of his recent collection Dimmet which was published by Broken Sleep Books. See below the poems for Rob’s biography.

The glorious cover image of a murmuration was designed by Aaron Kent. Dimmet is a West Country word for dusk, twilight. Katherine Towers notes of the collection: ‘These are poems of great precision and delicacy’. I’ve chosen four poems which demonstrate these qualities.

Dimmet

His hands still bronzed, still
baling-raw. His voice
no longer snared, whisper-low
as decades ago, in this same field, he guided me

to not disturb that horse; circling
quietly, its half-scattered straw
an ingot melting, and my thin flames no match
for such a sunset anyway.

*

On this, another near-to-night, it’s clear
that he has no more kept his mind
from wayward sparks than I
have closed my eyes

before any fading fire, ever since recalled
a slow white shadow
steady on its dial
in the always almost dark.

Café Poem

Just when I think there is nothing
so boring

as someone else’s childhood
a toddler

in dungarees is guided
around our table

by his puppeteer parent, arms
up, in a vertical sky-dive, or

like a drunk, when walking
is more about not falling

every step forward
rewarded with a double high five.

I whispered to the dog

that she’d been a winner
a Crufts champion
 
at least twice. Once
she saw off a Dobermann, burglars, a werewolf
 
even the odd Sasquatch.
I reminded her

as her old eyes darkened     
that she had saved lives.

Making Way

A keeper, you said of the house, but I’d sensed everything
trying to make its way: those errant velvet fingers
from your orchid pots; the oak
putting on its chain mail of ivy and moss
and losing; the birds we fed still pinned
to their shadows; crisp wasps
electrocuted by views
through grubby double glazing, and you
just weeks before, showing your wrists
as if uncuffed, asking for my thoughts on a fragrance.

Biography

Rob Miles is from South Devon, and he lives in Leeds where he is Fellow in Film Studies in the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures at The University of Leeds. His poetry has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, recently in Stand, New Welsh Review, The Scores, Spelt, 14 Magazine, Ink Sweat and Tears, One Hand Clapping, Poetry Wales, and four Candlestick Press pamphlets. He has won various awards including the Philip Larkin Prize, judged by Don Paterson, the Resurgence International Ecopoetry Prize, judged by Jo Shapcott and Imtiaz Dharker, and the Poets & Players Prize, judged by Sinéad Morrissey.

Lucy Newlyn describes Dimmet as ‘the best collection of contemporary poetry I have read in a long while’, and John Glenday writes: ‘When it’s done as well as this, there’s nowhere on earth poetry can’t go.’

Sleight of Mind

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Image via Pixabay, courtesy Gregory Delaunay

It is a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet David Bingham. We first met many years ago through the British Haiku Society. David was President of the Society from 2020-2022, and in 2020 he was the winner of the British Haiku Society International Haibun Prize. His poetry appears regularly in a wide variety of magazines. See below for further details.

The haiku have all been previously published: in Presence, Blithe Spirit, or Time Haiku. The tanka first appeared in Blithe Spirit and the BHS Tanka Anthology 2022, while the haibun was the winner of the British Haiku Society International Ken and Noragh Jones Haibun Award, 2017. I hope you enjoy the selection.

Haiku

a lifetime
overcoming gravity –
still it gets me down

Private Keep Out
molehills on both sides
of the fence

clear night sky –
lights from both the living
and the dead

away
in the wind …
the word-filled air

is there a word for it?
the sound swans make
when they fly

late spring meadow…
within the yellow
the blue of summer

storming
the old hill fort – bluebells  
and celandine

inland sea
the wash from our boat
moves the border

stream through sunlight through stream

closing over
trails in algae where
the ducks have been

I turn
to call the dog …
then remember

Euston Station –
my skin ripples
in the hand drier

an apology…
the predictive text writes
it for me

Tanka

sun shine
and motorway spray –
I drive through
rainbows
to be with you

silently together
after all that talk
watching swallows
hawk for flies over
the meadow

on waking
I turn my dreams
inside out
letting the seams show
for the rest of the day

doors left
wide open revealing
an unlit space
nothing here to steal
but the darkness

Haibun

Sleight of Mind 
 
Some people need to know how he pulls the shining light bulbs from his mouth, levitates above the stage or escapes from a straightjacket.
 
Me, I like the mystery of it; the explanations are always so mundane. True magic lies in the imagination. Switching off the rational mind. Letting yourself go and trusting the conjuror.
 
I do it with words. Like how I brought you here. Even if you asked me, I couldn’t tell you how it’s done.
 
snowdrops …
mistaking ‘what is’
for ‘what isn’t’
 

 
Biography

David Bingham’s debut poetry collection The Chatter of Crows was published by Offa’s Press in October 2014 and in 2020 he was the winner of the British Haiku Society International Haibun Prize.

His poetry appears regularly in a wide variety of magazines, including Blithe Spirit, Time Haiku and Presence and in anthologies, including: the Wenlock Poetry Festival anthologies for 2012, 2014, 2015 and 2016; Beyond Words, 2018 and where silence becomes song, 2019, the International Haiku Conference Anthology, published by the British Haiku Society; In the Sticks, 2021 and Away with the Birds, published by Offa’s Press; In Snow and Rain, 2022, an anthology of tanka published by the British Haiku Society; and Festival in a Book, published by the Wenlock Poetry Festival, 2023.

At different times, he was editor of both Borderlines and Blithe Spirit magazines and joint editor of the haiku and related genres anthologies Ripening Cherries, published by Offa’s Press, 2019 and Shining Wind published by the British Haiku Society, 2024.

He has read his work in arts centres, pubs, theatres, on local radio and poetry and literature festivals. He has read at City Voices in Wolverhampton, Country Voices in Shropshire and as a member of Green Wood Haiku at the BHS International Haiku Conference in St Albans in June 2019.
 
As part of the humorous poetry double act, Bingham and Woodall, he has performed at the Wolverhampton Lit Fest and Comedy Festivals in 2017 and 2018, and at the Ironbridge Festival in 2019.

 


 

An altogether different place

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Cover photo by Ben Robinson


Rachel Davies and Hilary Robinson have been friends for over 20 years. Friends call them the ‘poetry twins’. They are both accomplished poets and you can find their biography below.


An altogether different place, published by Beautiful Dragons Squared, is a joint project. In 2022 Hilary’s husband was diagnosed with vascular dementia; in 2023 Rachel’s partner with dementia and Lewy bodies. In the introduction they write ‘dementia is a catalogue of cruel diseases’. Living with and caring for someone with dementia ‘you come to know grief by slow degrees’. Through poetry Hilary and Rachel ‘found a joint space to laugh, cry, find context and write out their experiences’.


The collection is sold to raise essential research funds for dementia charities in the UK. It is a privilege to share a selection of the poems here: Brainworm and Seven ways of looking at a husband are by Hilary. Rachel wrote Degrees of Challenge and This is not a poem about dementia which was awarded 2nd place in the Hippocrates Prize 2024.

Brainworm


There are many crap poems online for those who care for loved ones with dementia. Dementia has a symbolic flower – the unimaginative forget-me-not. I’ll have none of that shit. I want the gristle of it, the offal, brain-spatter, white matter of it. Show me the MRI with extensive vascular changes, let me count the dead parts of the brain so I can explain, daily, what ails my love. I watch Dirty Great Machines, find Big Bertha in Seattle, tunnelling machine on steroids moving at thirty five feet a day. Something has wormed its way into the tiny vessels inside his head over years and now whole sections of his once-sharp brain have died. It’s our Golden Wedding Anniversary this year. I don’t know who I’ll be celebrating with.

Seven ways of looking at a husband

1
Straight on. Taking in his 2-day grey beard,
his nostril hair and ear fuzz. His smile.

2
Side profile. Noticing his cute nose,
the same shape as our daughter’s.

3
From the bedroom door. Noting
the cocoon he’s made of the duvet.

4
Across the kitchen. See, he’s forgotten
how to toast his fruit tea cake, make coffee.

5
From the driver’s seat. Clocking his wince
as you pull out safely onto the busy main road.

6
Across the care home corridor. Seeing his smile grow,
then his arm around you, his whiskery kiss.

7
On the care home terrace. Look, he can’t turn
his head to where you point. Misses the squirrel.

(L) Hilary with David (R) Rachel with Bill

Degrees of Challenge

I’m watching you struggle to break the seal
on an ice cream wrapper and I think of the time
you redesigned the roof of Piccadilly Station,
worked in millimetres to ensure each pane of glass

fitted exactly into the space you’d drawn for it.
I remember the night you clipped on a safety harness,
climbed onto the roof to inspect each perfect joint,
came home buzzing but satisfied at day break.

Tomorrow you’ll shuffle out to the Age UK minibus,
the driver watching you don’t slip on the wet steps;
but tonight you’re making a major task

of breaking into a Mini Magnum. I know better
than to offer help; eventually you’ll pass it to me,
say I’m sorry, I can’t seem to

This is not a poem about dementia

I am opening the windows and doors
letting in fresh air to blow dementia
down the lane like giant tumble weed

I am clearing out drawers and wardrobes
filling black bags with hallucinations
donating them all to the Age UK shop

I am having the Lewy bodies serviced
unblocking its pipes flushing confusion
down the drain with the incontinent waste

I am partying like there’s no dementia
raising a cake with bicarb of dementia
licking up the fluffy dementia crumbs

I am sleeping peacefully in the quiet night
dreaming a poem that has absolutely
nothing to do with dementia

Biographies


Rachel Davies is a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and a retired primary school headteacher. Her poetry is widely published in journals and anthologies and has been a prize-winner in several poetry competitions, most recently, the Hippocrates Prize 2024. A selection of her work was published in Some Mothers Do… (Dragon Spawn Press 2018). Her debut pamphlet, Every Day I Promise Myself, was published by 4Word Press in December 2020. Since retiring she has achieved an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in contemporary poetry, both from Manchester Metropolitan University.


Hilary Robinson has lived in Saddleworth for most of her life. She met her husband, David, at secondary school. She gained a BA (Distinction) and a PGCE and became a primary school teacher. After a successful career, Hilary retired and started a Creative Writing (Poetry) MA at Manchester Metropolitan University and gained a distinction. Her poetry is published in print and online journals, and in several anthologies. Her poetry has also been set to music by RNCM students of composition. In 2018 some of her problems were published by Dragons Spawn as Some Mothers Do… and this was followed in June 2021 by her first solo pamphlet, Revelation, published by 4Word Press.

After the Rites and Sandwiches

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It is a privilege and a great pleasure to share three poems by Kathy Pimlott from her third pamphlet with The Emma Press, published this month. It is ‘an honest, lyrical and nuanced journey through the complexity of bereavement’. The poem What I do with you now you’re dead was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition 2023. Further down you’ll find Kathy’s biography and links to her website.

Death Admin I

Your demise constitutes a third off council tax;
the removal of a vote you seldom cast and then
only to be contrary; write-off of a modest overdraft;
the bill for an overpaid pension. Tell Us Once promises
it will be a doddle. It is not. I repeat time and again
in spoken and in written words to the indifferent
or distracted, He has died. What do I need to do?

What I do with you now you’re dead

The Queen is dead too and on her way to a proper tomb.
Everything’s shut and there’s nothing on tv, but the sun
comes out so I go to the mimosa tree where, months ago,
I dumped, in a laughing panic, dumped, about a quarter
of your ashes and ran away, the illicit thrill exactly what
you would have wanted. Today, with a flask, shortbread,

I’ve come because, while I don’t love the Queen, it seems
like a fitting thing to do. This royal park is empty, quiet,
allowing me to cry all through its splendid long borders
with their harmonious purple and blue planting until,
on a near-enough bench, I sit. By my feet, Lamb’s Ears
offer silky comfort, as does the pile of pistachio shells,

little coracles, showing someone sat here eating a bagful.
You kept your shells in the pockets of your gardening coat
which I emptied out before taking it to the charity shop
with your best shoes. The mimosa’s not out of course
but its ferny leaves show promise of the glory to come.
A robin perches closer than he should, inspects me,

then accepts a crumb or two. Your ashes have disappeared,
no longer so alarmingly burnt-bone visible, so very there.
They say the old Queen’s coffin is oak, lined with lead.
Three-quarters of you is still in the back of the wardrobe.
A crow chases off my robin. So much peril. It’s enough
to be sitting thumbing Lamb’s Ears, thinking about you.

The Passing Visit

A friend came by from Brussels and we talked of our dead
or rather about what they leave behind, the stuff in storage,

the binding strands. I told him more than I’d told most,
of how (and I said, then rejected, the word tumultuous),

how textured our long, long marriage had been and by textured
I meant bumpy, dropped stitches, amateur darning. I told him

how often you fell in and out of love and how I left and returned
more than once. Perhaps because I didn’t care enough, I said.

And perhaps I didn’t. There was something he wasn’t telling me
but the sun was out and we walked the courtyards and backways

of the neighbourhood, crossed the bridge, watching the sky whiten
and the coloured lamps in the trees come on. We spoke of cities,

their pleasures. The comfort I find in the river. How Brussels’ Senne
is covered over, subterranean. Of moving along and clearing out.

Biography

Kathy Pimlott has two previous pamphlets with The Emma Press: Goose Fair Night (2016) and Elastic Glue (2019). Her debut full collection, the small manoeuvres, was published by Verve Poetry Press (2022). Her work is widely published in magazines and anthologies, and she has been longlisted, placed and has won several poetry prizes.

Kathy’s website

The Friday Poem

Ambush Moments: Kathy Pimlott on writing After the Rites and Sandwiches