Poetry, fiction and other writing
Poems
Here are some sample poems from each of my collections. You can find more of my poems on the poetry p f website
from A House of Empty Rooms
Gertrude by Alice
I knew she was a genius; she did too.
You could tell it from the way she sat there,
thinking thoughts that were more thought thoughts
than the thoughts that other people thought.
My thought was that she was beautiful, majestic.
I fell headlong into those warm dark eyes.
When she asked me to be her wife I cried for days.
Being a genius she didn’t cook or sew
or grow the vegetables or see to the house.
I did everything for her, my husband-mother-child.
When she wrote down those thoughts she thought
I typed them – the typewriter made her scared –
and told the publishers how wonderful they were
so she would have more thoughts. She was a genius.
She talked to people always, people I never liked
coming into our house, taking her from me.
I spoke only to wives; the kitchen was our place,
the altar where for her I sacrificed chickens or ducks,
made her sauces from wine and devotion. I kept her fat
to cherish me, thin as her shadow. And in bed
(maybe I shouldn’t mention it) she was a genius too.
If she was here she’d tell you more, much more
about our life. Forty years it was, of thoughts
and books and fun. Her laugh was bigger than us both,
her words the melody that sang us through the day.
Without her I’m thinner than I ever was,
living these days on memory and cigarettes.
I may have told you this before: she was a genius.
Based on Gertrude and Alice, Diana Souhami's biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas
Bluebells
You wouldn’t pick them but took home
the broken ones. The sad heap
drooped between us on the splintery log,
keeping us apart. You’d made tea
for both of us, carried my flask,
laughed when I said it wasn’t fair.
I saw grass transformed to blue
through your camera’s eye, heard
the birds’ song through your silence.
You gave me this place, shared
your love of its wild inhabitants:
orchid, campion, those white stars
I couldn’t name. Beyond woods
evening softened the sea; behind us
the embrace of green hills. We smiled
at one another. I didn’t say my heart
was a house with all its doors wide open,
or that it was you who’d opened them.
from I never think dark will come
To Pray
You never know when it's going to find you
that moment when sight becomes prayer
nor can you say it will happen
when the sun wakes green hills
or the apple tree's clenched pink buds
release their guarded selves
or the river glimpsed through trees
becomes light liquefied.
Sometimes you don’t know it as beauty,
that moment when song or birdcall
trickles deep through your silence
or the sound of cars or a distant mower
is so much itself you want to worship it
when a sign in a London street
fills you so full of colour
you can only stand and breathe it.
Homeland
Before you came, what we knew were olive trees,
mules scuffling through dust, sweet smoke
of cooking and tobacco, old women polishing
stories generations long. The church bell clanged
the regularity of our life; the language of our land
had not been wrested from us.
You were the refugees, returning to the home
you mourned each year with brine and bitter herbs,
digging through stones, watering your new life
as it grew into our soil. At the beginning it seemed
we could have lived together. Semite was not a word
you applied only to yourselves.
Our home became your right. We gagged on smoke
from burning fields, watched our olives fall
ungathered from the trees as our compliant mules
bore us away from houses you had stolen.
Church bells hung mute; the language we heard
was like ours but not ours. Old women’s stories
were uprooted from the land.
Now we are the strangers. Caged inside
our villages of ash and rubble, our children
do not understand what the future means.
We grow as weeds in your God-given soil;
only hate feeds us in the harsh desert light.
The meat of our life is ripped from its bones.
You have taken from us the right to care.
The Palestinian Christians are a small but significant minority.
from Last of the Line
The biggest meal
Mum, you shouldn’t be standing in the kitchen
trying to make soup you think I’d like,
saying, Is it all right, dear?
looking at me as though
your life depended on it.
I can’t give you life.
Even when you were alive
I kept killing you with silence.
Stop tugging me by the heart.
I don’t want to grieve for you.
I never could;
I don’t know how to manage it.
This is the biggest meal you’ve cooked for me,
more than I could eat if I sat down to it
day after day.
And it’s you. I pushed you away
and you keep coming back,
offering me more,
nudging my elbow so I’ll notice you
and tell you at last
how much I loved you –
love you, I want to say
but don’t know how.
You’ll have to stop helping me
or I’ll never find out.
Of foreign lands and people
My father's thick fingers fumbled through the piece,
sounding the first few bars again and again,
the rising arc that fell each time
into the same gentle yearning.
The music behind the music
enfolded us both
in homesickness for another place
we hadn’t rediscovered.
He'd start once more, this time get as far
as the questioning second tune
that settled back into nostalgia.
Perhaps he felt it too,
the inarticulate pain that comes
when melody twists the heart.
We never spoke about it, never crossed
the border into each other's land.
.
The title is taken from the first of Schumann's Scenes of Childhood.
from Tasting the Sweet Cold
Summer pudding
Right now redcurrants are pale,
raspberries tiny pointed buds
shy under ridged leaves. The sun
hesitates behind milky sky.
Summer hovers in your hopes.
Wait till July for reddened fruit.
Take bread stale enough to stay firm,
some sugar, a splash of water.
You wouldn’t think these few ingredients
could combine into a sweet-sharp miracle
you can never get enough of.
Let raspberries and currants
simmer till they bleed, then stain
white slices huddled in a bowl
a piebald crimson-pink. Spoon in
the pipped berries, the now opaque
beads of red, not stopping until
the basin of bread can hold no more.
Then add its fresh white coverlet
and see juice seep. Weight it down
till all combines in succulence.
Pour over it what remains
of the fruit’s liquid sacrifice.
Anoint with cream.
What I'll wear
I’ll come out of my prison in a hat
of deer-antlers and mossy branches.
The frames of my glasses will be crab claws
the lenses bottle-glass from the sea.
For a necklace I’ll wrap round me
strings of black briony and goosegrass.
I’ll carry a fan of gull feathers
that scream and beat the air as I walk.
My cloak will be yesterday’s saved rainbows
crackling with hoar frost, shining
with spare pieces of sky.
My dress will be a rage of menstrual blood
defiant and fishy. Over it I’ll wear a gown
translucent with frogspawn
a jacket laced with sand-eels
made bright with puffin bills.
My stockings will be the sloughed skin
of a Burmese python.
To cover my feet I’ll draw down
the gleam of the MIlky Way.
After Wardrobe Lady, in Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove’s The Hermaphrodite Album