(bird, bell, tree, fish)
to the shrill of the bird and the plop of the fish
and the clang of the bell
and the stories they tell
the stories they tell,
Molly, the tree, the bird, the fish and the bell.
Liz Lochhead
Ode on the Whole Duty of Parents
The spirits of children are remote and wise,
They must go free
Like fishes in the sea
Or starlings in the skies,
Whilst you remain
The shore where casually they come again.
But when there falls the stalking shade of fear,
You must be suddenly near,
You, the unstable, must become a tree
In whose unending heights of flowering green
Hangs every fruit that grows, with silver bells;
Where heart-distracting magic birds are seen
And all the things a fairy-story tells;
Though still you should possess
Roots that go deep in ordinary earth,
And strong consoling bark
To love and to caress.
Last, when at dark
Safe on the pillow lies an up-gazing head
And drinking holy eyes
Are fixed on you,
When, from behind them, questions come to birth
Insistently,
On all the things that you have ever said
Of suns and snakes and parallelograms and flies,
And whether these are true,
Then for a while you’ll need to be no more
That sheltering shore
Or legendary tree in safety spread,
No, then you must put on
The robes of Solomon,
Or simply be
Sir Isaac Newton sitting on the bed.
Frances Cornford
When I Was a Bird
I climbed up the karaka tree
Into a nest all made of leaves
But soft as feathers
I made up a song that went on singing all by itself
And hadn’t any words but got sad at the end.
There were daisies in the grass under the tree.
I said, just to try them:
‘I’ll bite off your heads and give them to my little children to eat.’
But they didn’t believe I was a bird
They stayed quite open.
The sky was like a blue nest with white feathers
And the sun was the mother bird keeping it warm.
That’s what my song said: though it hadn’t any words.
Little Brother came up the path, wheeling his barrow
I made my dress into wings and kept very quiet
Then when he was quite near I said: ‘sweet – sweet.’
For a moment he looked quite startled –
Then he said: ‘Pooh, you’re not a bird; I can see your legs.’
But the daisies didn’t really matter
And Little Brother didn’t really matter –
I felt just like a bird.
Katherine Mansfield
School Parted Us
from Brother and Sister, Sonnet XI
School parted us; we never found again
That childish world where our two spirits mingled
Like scents from varying roses that remain
One sweetness, nor can evermore be singled.
Yet the twin habit of that early time
Lingered for long about the heart and tongue:
We had been natives of one happy clime
And its dear accent to our utterance clung.
Till the dire years whose awful name is Change
Had grasped our souls still yearning in divorce,
And pitiless shaped them in two forms that range
Two elements which sever their life’s course.
But were another childhood-world my share,
I would be born a little sister there.
George Eliot
Timetable
We all remember school, of course:
the lino warming, shoe bag smell, expanse
of polished floor. It’s where we learned
to wait: hot cheeked in class, dreaming,
bored, for cheesy milk, for noisy now.
We learned to count, to rule off days,
and pattern time in coloured squares:
purple English, dark green Maths.
We hear the bells, sometimes,
for years, the squeal and crack
of chalk on black. We walk, don’t run,
in awkward pairs, hoping for the open door,
a foreign teacher, fire drill. And love
is long Aertex summers, tennis sweat,
and somewhere, someone singing flat.
The art room, empty, full of light.
Kate Clanchy
A Glass of Tea
(after Rumi)
Last year, I held a glass of tea to the light. This year,
I swirl like a tealeaf in the streets of Oxford.
Last year, I stared into navy blue sky. This year,
I am roaming under colourless clouds.
Last year, I watched the dazzling sun dance gracefully. This year,
The faint sun moves futurelessly.
Migration drove me down this bumpy road,
Where I fell and smelt the soil, where I arose and sensed the cloud.
Now I am a bird, flying in the breeze,
Lost over the alien earth.
Don’t stop and ask me questions.
Look into my eyes and feel my heart.
It is bruised, aching and sore.
My eyes are veiled with onion skin.
I sit helplessly in an injured nest,
Not knowing how to fix it.
And my heart, I’d say
Is displaced
Struggling to find its place.
Shukria Rezaei
How to Cut a Pomegranate
‘Never,’ said my father,
‘Never cut a pomegranate
through the heart. It will weep blood.
Treat it delicately, with respect.
‘Just slit the upper skin across four quarters.
This is a magic fruit,
so when you split it open, be prepared
for the jewels of the world to tumble out,
more precious than garnets,
more lustrous than rubies,
lit as if from inside.
Each jewel contains a living seed.
Separate one crystal.
Hold it up to catch the light.
Inside is a whole universe.
No common jewel can give you this.’
Afterwards, I tried to make necklaces
of pomegranate seeds.
The juice spurted out, bright crimson,
and stained my fingers, then my mouth.
I didn’t mind. The juice tasted of gardens
I had never seen, voluptuous
with myrtle, lemon, jasmine,
and alive with parrots’ wings.
The pomegranate reminded me
that somewhere I had another home.
Imtiaz Dharker
Bridge
Between here and Colombia
is a pontoon
of fishnet tights filled tight
with star fruit and green, salted mango.
From here to Colombia
is a pageant
of carnivals and parties
and 1 a.m. celebrations and girls
in homemade wedding dresses
twirling on their great-great-uncle’s toes.
Between here and Colombia
is a green wave
of parrots tumbling in cages no bigger
than their beady, red-glass eyes.
From here to Colombia
is a necklace
of gourds frothing
with brown nameless soups and fried
everything and big bottom ants and
sauces from everywhere and roadkill armadillo.
Between here and Colombia
is a zip line
of stretched elastic marriages
to high school boy friends.
Between here and Colombia
are stepping stones
of thousands of lost relatives weaving
down hot pavements dangerous with carts
ready to pinch your cheeks and say
You are too thin, what have you been doing?
And I will set out to travel
from here to Colombia
I shall step out
onto the stretched-tight washing line
which links our houses
and wobble on to
the telephone wires
which dangle in the mango trees.
I will ignore the calls
from great-aunts and great-grandmas
great-cousins and first cousins,
and hold out the corners of my dancing skirt.
I shall point my jelly sandals
towards the Colombian sun
and dance cumbia, cumbia –
until I get there.
Aisha Borja
I Am My Own Parent
I love my red shoes
all of the shoes I have loved,
they are.
I swing my legs against the wall,
scuffing them slightly.
My dad is not here to pick them up
by the scruffs of their dirty necks
and leave them shining in the morning.
And now, the arc of my swing
is not quite so high,
the shoes every day a little duller.
At night I leave them in the hall like hope.
In the morning,
absentmindedly dreaming of old loves
and reading poetry until it hurts.
I spring suddenly out of bed
and decide to roll up my life into a fist,
smelling of patchouli and roses, and then
unroll it. And to my surprise,
it becomes a snail’s yellow shell, unravelling,
On and on it goes. It’s gorgeous.
I tap tap my red shoes
to find I’m already home.
Deborah Alma
Huge Blue
(For Jack)
You were three when we moved north,
near the sea. That first time
you took one look, twisted off your clothes
till, bare as the day you were born,
you made off: I had to sprint,
scoop you up just as you threw the whole of you
into its huge blue – or you might be swimming still,
half way to Murmansk, that port you always dreamed of seeing:
I once flew, about your age:
strong arms held me hard,
hauled me down so my salted eyelashes
stuck together, sucked blue dark:
I didn’t know how to remember
until you opened your arms that day,
sure that the world would hold you
and it did: grown now, and half a world away,
I hope your huge blue
is beautiful with stars
as you leap, eyes wide open,
no ghost of me on your back.
Pippa Little
Song
A scholar first my love implored,
And then an empty titled lord;
The pedant talked in lofty strains;
Alas! his lordship wanted brains:
I listened not to one or t’ other,
But straight referred them to my mother.
A poet next my love assailed,
A lawyer hoped to have prevailed;
The bard too much approved himself;
The lawyer thirsted after pelf:
I listened not to one or t’ other,
But still referred them to my mother.
An officer my heart would storm,
A miser sought me too, in form,
But Mars was over-free and bold;
The miser’s heart was in his gold:
I listened not to one or t’ other,
Referring still unto my mother.
And after them, some twenty more
Successless were, as those before;
When Damon, lovely Damon came,
Our hearts straight felt a mutual flame:
I vowed I’d have him, and no other,
Without referring to my mother.
Lady Dorothea Du Bois
To My Daughter On Being Separated from Her on Her Marriage
Dear to my heart as life’s warm stream
Which animates this mortal clay,
For thee I court the waking dream,
And deck with smiles the future day;
And thus beguile the present pain
With hopes that we shall meet again.
Yet, will it be as when the past
Twined every joy, and care, and thought,
And o’er our minds one mantle cast
Of kind affections finely wrought?
Ah no! the groundless hope were vain,
For so we ne’er can meet again!
May he who claims thy tender heart
Deserve its love, as I have done!
For, kind and gentle as thou art,
If so beloved, thou art fairly won.
Bright may the sacred torch remain,
And cheer thee till we meet again!
Anne Hunter
Flight Radar
From the top of the Shard the view unfolds
down the Thames to the sea, the city laid
by a trick of sight vertically in front of me.
At London Bridge Station, trains slide in
and out in a long slow dance. It is not
by chance that I am here, not looking down
but up to where you are on Flight 199,
coming in to land. I have learned to track you
on my mobile phone. However far you go,
I have the app that uses the radar to trace
your path. There you are now, circling down
around this spire where I stand, my face reflected
over your pulse in the glass. You cannot see.
You have no radar for me, no app to make you
look back or down to where I am lifting my hand.
Darling, I will track your flight till it is a dot
that turns and banks and falls out of sight, looking
into the space where you were. Fingers frozen
on the tiny keys, I will stay where I am
in the dying light, the screen still live in my palm.
Imtiaz Dharker
Heirloom
She gave me childhood’s flowers,
Heather and wild thyme,
Eyebright and tormentil,
Lichen’s mealy cup,
Dry on wind-scored stone,
The corbies on the rock,
The rowan by the burn.
Sea marcels a child beheld
Out in the fisherman’s boat,
Fringed pulsing violet
Medusa, sea-gooseberries,
Starfish on the sea-floor,
Cowries and rainbow-shells
From pools on a rocky shore.
Gave me her memories,
But kept her last treasure:
‘When I was a lass’, she said,
‘Sitting among the heather,
‘Suddenly I saw
‘That all the moor was alive!
‘I have told no one before.’
That was my mother’s tale.
Seventy years had gone
Since she saw the living skein
Of which the world is woven,
And having seen, knew all;
Through long indifferent years
Treasuring the priceless pearl.
Kathleen Raine
/> Mali
Three years ago to the hour, the day she was born,
that unmistakeable brim and tug of the tide
I’d thought was over. I drove
the twenty miles of summer lanes,
my daughter cursing Sunday cars,
and the lazy swish of a daily herd
rocking so slowly home.
Something in the event,
late summer heat overspilling into harvest,
apples reddening on heavy trees,
the lanes sweet with brambles
and our fingers purple,
then the child coming easy,
too soon, in the wrong place,
things seasonal and out of season
towed home a harvest moon.
My daughter’s daughter
a day old under an umbrella on the beach,
Latecomer at summer’s festival,
and I’m hooked again, life sentenced.
Even the sea could not draw me from her.
This year I bake her a cake like our house,
and old trees blossom
with balloons and streamers.
We celebrate her with a cup
of cold blue ocean,
candles at twilight, and three drops of,
probably, last blood.
Gillian Clarke
The Pale Horse
At twilight she is still sitting with the book in her hand,
staring through the window, looking for snow.
Have you seen my horse? she says, eyes wild
with loss. I smile, brush her hair. She purrs.
She cups my face. I know you, she whispers,
have you stolen my horse? I cover her hands with mine
and we stare a while, nose to nose. I know you.
Her lips twitch, try to find the forgotten shape
of my name. I tell her, but she shrugs and turns
to the window, expecting snow.
Lesley Ingram
On Forgetting That I Am a Tree
A poem in which I am growing.
A poem in which I am a tree,
And I am both appreciated and undervalued.
A poem in which I fear I did not dig into the past,