Poetry - recently published
You can also read thoughts to do with inspiration and creative practice here
The Mountain’s Voice
Slate smooth.
Amber through darkness.
Tannins of peat and sheep
cropped turf.
Water of rock
and rain
rushed - to stillness.
In this dark pool
under the sky
rock body
holds time
in liquid form.
The mountains’ voice.
Its quiet insistence
ripples my listening thoughts
Wrapping its cold question
So neatly around my offering
of warmth
I would dissolve
For its answer.
I swim.
In a dim liminal memory
of time kept silence.
And the quiet grass
and the shining sky.
Published in Watermarks - Writing by Lido Lovers and wild Swimmers, Frogmore Press, 2017
Wake to Listen
I dream of rock form
and hear the river.
I wake to listen and
walk the curved back
of the ridge.
The intensity
of mass
rising. Chalk bone
under soft skinned
grass.
I walk palimpsest here
among the Hawthorn
in the hollow track
footfall as gift
footfall as question.
The soft blue
of a flint flake shines
out of the tuned earth
my thumb smooths
a silent orbit of its limits.
Surrender, you said.
Persevere.
I am here
on the wind’s edge
Quietly gathering
things
back to myself.
Low down
Listening
stone shape
in sheep space
An instinct of stillness.
Through grass
written tall
against the last of the light.
Something here
whispered
gifting its strength in the dusk.
The quiet song
of our familial
bond.
I wait for the sky
pooling black
star - full
in warm darkness
and feel the rock form
and hear the river.
Published in Unpsychology Magazine Climate Minds Issue 4, March 2018
Call
Know this soul
that burning hard
as rocks
that fierce iron ache
that blinding face
of sky
behind a loved
line of hills
that bone chill
and rook’s call
is only the shell breaking.
That longing that has you
running to feel
your physical body
that cannot be stemmed by blood
or what you call love.
Don’t try to find
a pain to match it
It is wide
as a storm
full sky
taking each
face to earth,
back to flint
fingers to fire.
That clarity.
I call you.
Published in Unpsychology Magazine Climate Minds Issue 4 March 2018
Words from an exhibition
These three poems came out of the art making, thinking process for my installation in the exhibition 'Matter' at Glynde Place this year. The video, sculpture, poetry and process all informed each other and became 'entangled' as the installation and were meant to be read both as fragments and a whole. You can see/read more
in my blog 'At the Sweet Shop'
Listening
in the silence of the peripheral
the broken
heap
for your soft
gloaming
the warm beat
of a familiarity
tangent
in my proximity
the pull of matter
invisibly held
supple between knowing
and known
our boundaries
of awkward movement
a meandering task then,
the push
to understand
stillness
to lean the
weight
silent
to watch
the birds
wheeling in
sky grace
and the curve of the hill.
winding in
the loping curves
roping
in trees
drawing in
the soft fall of
their pliant wrapping
a tenderness
in the motion
of hands
untangling the
spooling rills
in the quiet
flex
weaving
small threads
and turned ideas
windblown
to silence.
Shifting skies
and rook calls a whirl
of black
on the bare trees
and spring
on the hill behind
is given in time.
Oak and Chestnut mainly,
some Pine gathered
from the woodpiles
of boatbuilders and carpenters
all just not, quite
the little flock of outsiders
watching me paint
in left out quiet
from the corners of my studio.
Gradually they watched
insistently, together
fragments hummed
with being
unseen
much silent noise
on our unknown frequencies
gathered their vibrance
in object presence
to the elements of painting
to hum
their being