In The Poetry

An unfinished poem which I’ll finish sooner or later but I’d like to read the first half of now. [This is indeed an earlier version of the text of this poem and differs considerably from the final published text and as such is of considerable historical interest. The transcript below is of the version used [...]

Seashell

Shell at my ear -
come share how I hear
busy old sea in whispers.

Moans rise from ancient depths
in ocean sighs
like crowds of ghost monsters.

Waves lash and fall -
in roars and squalls
with all a mystery ahhh!

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain [...]

Belfast Confetti

Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation
marks,
Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the
explosion

Itself – an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of
rapid fire…
I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept
stuttering.
All the alleyways [...]

After my mother died when my father came to live with my family – three sons, my husband – it suddenly became apparent how little we still had in common. I didn’t behave very well. After he died I was desolate. And this is a poem written, I suppose, about a year after his death. [...]

‘R-and-R Centre; An Incident from the Vietnam War’ – R-and-R being a “Rest and Recreation Centre” set up in countries near to Vietnam, neutral countries. A short holiday resort for GIs.

R-and-R Centre: An Incident from the Vietnam War

We built a palace for them, made of bedrooms.
We even tracked down playmates for them
(No easy job since [...]

Tune

When I came back from Europe late last year
a new tune kept running through my head.
It still recurs at odd times of the day,
haunting like a perfume or a face.
Its clean string of notes obsesses me.

I cannot write it down; I have no key.
I can’t translate it to another code.
I cannot even hum [...]

This poem got written as the result of a conversation with an eight-year-old girl, Josephine Mackinnon, about Christmas trees. She said this: “If you don’t have a real tree, you don’t bring the Christmas life into the house.”

The Christmas Life

Bring in a tree, a young Norwegian spruce,
Bring hyacinths that rooted in the cold.
Bring winter jasmine [...]

Snow Water

A fastidious brewer of tea, a tea
Connoisseur as well as a poet,
I modestly request on my sixtieth
Birthday a gift of snow water.

Tea steam and ink stains. Single-
Mindedly I scald my tea pot and
Measure out some Silver Needles Tea,
Enough for a second seeping.

Other favourites include Clear
Distance and Eyebrows of Longevity
Or, from precarious mountain peaks,
Cloud Mist [...]