Planting for pollinators isn’t just about meadows! | Earth Optimism (cambridgeconservation.org)
Month: May 2021
#DementiaActionWeek #DementiaActionAwarenessWeek 2021. 17th-23rd May. Day six. We must urge the government to cure the care system. Have you written unpublished/published work about dementia? Created artworks about dementia? Please contact me if you would like your work featured this week.
Day 6
I’ve Seen Death Come
Raanana, June 4, 2018
I’ve seen death come for some
But not for others.
I’ve seen it drag souls from those they loved
And seen souls pull death’s slippery robes
Begging to be taken with it
Wherever it may go.
I’ve seen death sit patiently by a bedside,
Waiting for some soul to ask to be released,
And seen it rescue others
From the fear or pain of dying,
A thousand times worse than death, once come.
What else can be said of death?
That it’s unknown until it comes
And once it comes,
There’s no time left for wisdom’s gain
-Mike Stone
The Unresolveables
11. Nowhere
“They have photos. It looks like me, Nowhere”
We try to make it somehow like a home
from home. An opportunity to share
their past lives. Their fresh animated tone
the event is in the here and now for
them. It is never them for us. We use
first names all the time. Hold it in great store
as a family. Our wordsmith we’ll choose
to call Pam taps her shoulders when she talks
of her dad who would carry packed sackfuls
of coal on his back. Pam when she slow walks
with you steadies herself against her falls.
Always walk pace of slowest ones. She roars:
“I can recall. How did I reach these shores?”
12. These Shores
“I can recall. How did I reach these shores?”
Pam was transferred from an emergency
care place, after neighbour saw her outdoors
pacing her front garden. Community
welfare came out with police to remove
her, as a danger to herself and others.
Her late husband had already been moved
into a respite place to recover.
She had not been taking the drugs prescribed,
so rapid decline inevitable.
Back on regular medication, slide
to a lower plateau less possible.
We can slow the process, not stop decline.
“Did I come to this place with things of mine?”
-Paul Brookes
Bios and Links
-Alice Willitts
is a writer and plantswoman from the Fens. She is the author of With Love, (Live Canon, 2020 – winner of the Live Canon Collection competition) and Dear, (Magma, 2018 – winner of the Magma Poetry Pamphlet Competition) and holds an MA in Poetry with Distinction from the University of East Anglia (2017/18). She leads the #57 Poetry Collective and is collecting rebel stories in the climate emergency for Channel Mag. Guest editor of Magma 78 on the theme of Collaborations (2020) Author of Think Thing: an ecopoetric practice(Elephant Press, 2020). She’s a founding member of the biodiversity project On The Verge www.onthevergecambridge.org.uk.
-Stevie Mitchell
I want to show my stories simply, but at the same time in an unexpected way…
He is a Derbyshire-based artist and illustrator creating captioned drawings, fragments of stories and uncanny happenings, presented under the collective banner, INKY CONDITIONS. He works with ink and brush and some deliberately lo-grade technology. Amongst a playfulness, themes of personal loss emerge. Part therapy: a loving and cathartic catalogue of everyday life – and death.
Stevie shows and sells INKY CONDITIONS work at arts trails and fairs across Derbyshire and Staffordshire, including the Wirksworth Festival. Alongside this, he works as an independent commercial illustrator, making useful drawings for beer branding, businesses, and for Barnsley Museums, including visitor guides and poetry anthologies.
Website: www.inkyconditions.co.uk
Instagram & Twitter: @mitchsteve / #inkyconditions
Frances Roberts Reilly
is a poet and filmmaker. She began writing seriously whilst working at BBC television in London, England. After making award-winning documentaries, she earned an Honours degree in English Literature at the University of Toronto.
Frances has an international profile as a Romani writer. True to the spirit of the Romani diaspora her poems, short stories, articles have been published internationally in well regarded anthologies in Canada, U.S., U.K., Wales and Europe. Her poetry has been featured by League of Canadian Poetry’s National Poetry Month and Fresh Voices online.
Her books include Parramisha (Cinnamon Press) and The Green Man (TOPS Stanza Series). Chapters from her memoir Underground Herstories have been published in Literature for the People and the Journal of Critical Romani Studies, Central European University in Budapest. Frances was invited as guest panelist on the Gelem, Gelem — how far have we come since 1971? program as well as participating on a literary panel of Romani women writers at the World Romani Congress, 2021.
Frances has been a guest author on CBC Radio and WSRQ Radio, Sarasota. She is the Producer of radio documentary series, Watershed Writers on CKWR FM 98.5 Community Radio.
Frances lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
is a Welsh poet whose most recent writing is in The Crank Literary Magazine, Briefly Zine, Re-side Magazine, Abridged and Green Ink Poetry. She has poetry forthcoming in Dreich’s Summer Anywhere anthology, Songs of Love and Strength by TheMumPoemPress and was winner of Poems for Trees competition with Folklore publishing. She is an MA student in Poetry Writing with Newcastle University and The Poetry School, London.
Twitter @laurenmywrites
Instagram @thoughtsofmanythings
-Val Ormrod’s
poetry has been published by Eye Flash, Hedgehog Poetry, Graffiti, Hammond House, Gloucester Writers Network and in several anthologies. In 2019 she won the Magic Oxygen International Poetry Prize and Ware Poets Open Competition, was shortlisted for the Plough Prize, Wells Festival of Literature and nominated for the Forward Prize single poem award. Her memoir In My Father’s Memory was published in 2020.
–Stephen Claughton
was interviewed by The Wombwell Rainbow in April last year. His poems have appeared widely in magazines and he reviews regularly for London Grip. This is a poem from The 3-D Clock, a pamphlet about his late mother’s dementia, which Dempsey & Windle published in 2020. Copies are available from their website here.
-Fiona Perry
was born and brought up in the north of Ireland but has lived in England, Australia, and New Zealand. Her short fiction won first prize in the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2020 and was shortlisted for the Australian Morrison Mentoring Prize in 2014 and 2015. Her flash fiction performance won second prize in the Over the Edge Fiction Slam 2021. Her poem, “Fusion”, was longlisted in the Fish Poetry Prize 2021, and she contributed poetry to the Label Lit project for National Poetry Day (Ireland) 2019. Her poetry and fiction has been published internationally in publications such as Lighthouse, Skylight47, Spontaneity, and Other Terrain. Follow her on Twitter: @Fionaperry17
Her first collection, Alchemy, is available from Turas Press (Dublin).
-Margaret Royall
is a Laurel Prize nominated poet. She has been shortlisted for several poetry prizes and won the Hedgehog Press’ collection competition 2020. She has two poetry collections:
Fording The Stream and Where Flora Sings, a memoir in prose and verse, The Road To Cleethorpes Pier and a new pamphlet, Earth Magicke out April 2021. She has been widely published online and in print, most recently: Hedgehog Press, The Blue Nib, Impspired & forthcoming in Sarasvati and Dreich.
She performs regularly at open mic events and facilitates a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire.
Website: https://margaretroyall.com
Twitter: RoyallMargaret
Instagram : meggiepoet
Facebook Author Page: Facebook.com/margaretbrowningroyall
–Annick Yerem
lives and works in Berlin. In her dreams, she can swim like a manatee. Annick tweets @missyerem and has, to her utmost delight, been published by Pendemic, Detritus, @publicpoetry, RiverMouthReview, #PoetRhy, Anti-Heroin-Chic, Rejection Letters, Dreich, 192, The Failure Baler and Rainbow Poems. https://missyerem.wordpress.com. https://linktr.ee/annickyerem
-Nigel Kent
is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet (2019 and 2020) and reviewer who lives in rural Worcestershire. He is an active member of the Open University Poetry Society, managing its website and occasionally editing its workshop magazine.
He has been shortlisted for several national competitions and his poetry has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and magazines. In 2019 Hedgehog Poetry Press published his first collection, ‘Saudade’, following the success of his poetry conversations with Sarah Thomson, ‘Thinking You Home’ and ‘A Hostile Environment’. In August 2020 Hedgehog Poetry Press published his pamphlet, Psychopathogen, which was nominated for the 2020 Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets and made the Poetry Society’s Winter List.
In 2021 he was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Reviewer of Literature.
To find out more visit his website: www.nigelkentpoet.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @kent_nj
-Olive M. Ritch
is a poet originally from Orkney. She was the recipient of the Scottish Book Trust’s Next Chapter Award 2020 and in 2006, she received the Calder Prize for Poetry from the University of Aberdeen. Her work has been extensively published in literary magazines, anthologies and websites including Poetry Review, Agenda, The Guardian, New Writing Scotland, The Poetry Cure (Bloodaxe) and the Scottish Poetry Library. Her work has also been broadcast on Radio 4.
Review of ‘Solastalgia’ by Brian McManus
Having read Brian McManus’s memorable debut pamphlet, Liar, Liar, about the pandemic, I looked forward to reading more of his work. His new collection,Solastalgia(Hedgehog Poetry press, 2021) shares the same uncompromising treatment of his subjects but in this work we see a sustained exploration of what it is to be alive in the 21st century.
Writing about events such as, the Lockerbie Air Disaster and Lockdown, he explores the unpredictability and fragility of life. He shows how our lives can be turned upside down in an instant, as he says, ‘we are forever fated to cross at amber’ (Crossing at amber). Life is hazardous: we live constantly on the cusp of danger (aptly symbolized by his reference to the amber traffic light) because we are subject to powerful forces outside our control. This idea is cleverly and movingly conveyed in his poem Where a…
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#DementiaActionWeek #DementiaActionAwarenessWeek 2021. 17th-23rd May. Day five. We must urge the government to cure the care system. Have you written unpublished/published work about dementia? Created artworks about dementia? Please contact me if you would like your work featured this week.
Day Five
-Dementia Has Dad by Stevie Mitchell
DEMENTIA HAS DAD
This is called ‘Dementia Has Dad’, by INKY CONDITIONS. I made these drawings in late 2017. Dad had not long gone into residential care. These daft and disoriented thoughts were what we were left with as a family. Trivial and massive unknowns and worries. Adjustments and anxieties. I later shared the drawings at art fairs and they opened up such sad but strength-giving conversations with strangers. So many people in this same situation. The little stuff that looms so large when dementia happens to families. I am grateful to have been able then to have recorded this in black and white.
AS PRECIOUS AND SPECIAL
When my Dad died last year some people had the delicious sensitivity to suggest, because he had dementia, that it might’ve been a blessing. The years of Dad’s illness were in their way precious and special to me as a son. I miss him exactly as he was then, just as at any time.
The Value of Knowledge
Nelson knows a lot, more than many,
about the Chosin Reservoir,
about December of 1950.
He’s there now, once more, again,
on this May afternoon,
this unseasonably hot,
deceivingly beautiful day
in a commuter suburb of Chicago.
Today we will study Korea, children.
The South is our friend,
the North no one’s comrade.
Yes, I know: Love one another.
Please don’t ever forget those words,
even if you remember nothing else.
I’ve brought you some kimchi fried rice,
some Binggrae banana milk:
You’ll recognize the taste,
but likely not the mix of Hanja and Hangul
wrapped around the bottle.
Nelson doesn’t know about missing toes,
the phantom strike of midnight pain
mimicking frostbite in a fool’s sunshine
that won’t stop fresh piss from icing.
He doesn’t know about missing friends,
their not waking in the snow,
them not getting up after the sniper,
the artillery round, the soulless cold.
In the world he occupies right now,
despite the presence of family right here,
these things are only beginning.
Today, at recess, you will not fear the airplanes
coming to O’Hare and Midway;
we’ll study him and there another time.
You won’t think twice, perhaps not once,
about the backfire and rattle of a truck.
Until then, please pay attention.
These are lessons Nelson wrote for you.
If you get drowsy on this fine May day,
I promise not to slam my hand,
surely not the classroom yardstick,
on the surface of your desk.
-Lennart Lundh (This poem first appeared on the Illinois State Poetry Society web site in August, 2017.)
The Blessing
Raanana, March 9, 2018
Just suppose instead of dying
You kept on living.
You get to keep your mind
But it’s unconnected to any other
Living man or woman’s view of reality.
In your reality the dead you loved
Go on living,
Doing what they always did.
It’s the living loved ones disappoint you
With their separate realities
Not including you in their trips to the beach
Or family dinners
Since frankly your grotesqueness scares the kids.
No, the dead never disappoint.
They call each day
And take you out to lunch.
The place you worked,
Though long shut down,
Still employs you
And your old home where you grew up,
Though long sold to someone else,
Still waits for your return.
But sometimes they do disappoint,
Even the dead,
Like last week when
Mama and your sisters stopped calling you
And no one living gave you their numbers
So you could check that they’re ok
And you thought that they were mad at you,
It made you cry,
You hadn’t wronged them that you knew.
Some days are good
And some are bad
When you live with the dead and the living,
But you can’t see
The time you occupy
Has calved like some ice floe
From the world,
Maybe that’s a blessing.
-Mike Stone
Sue Proffitt has written wonderful preface to her book. This is a small extract:
Here is another poem from her book:
Nonage
“People are always surprised,”
I remember you telling me once,
“when I say how old you are.”
Well, not as surprised as I am,
but why would they think that, Mum?
Were you lying about your own age,
the way you deceived yourself
about how old you looked?
Or was it the habit you had
of referring to us as “the children”,
even though my sister and I
have grown-up kids of our own.
It was always “the” children, too,
rather than “my” children.
Whose issue we were
apparently wasn’t the issue
so much as minority.
You a nonagenarian now
and the two of us still in our nonage?
Who’s going to fall for that?
You just didn’t want to let go.
Only now that you’ve lost your grip
on things in general,
do I know what it’s like to feel free.
When sometimes you look at me
like a stranger you recognise,
but somehow can’t quite place
and think it’s rude to say,
my feeling is one of relief.
What might be a bad day for you
is bound to be better for me —
you were always polite to strangers.
(First published in “The 3-D Clock”, Dempsey & Windle, 2020)
The Unresolveables
9. Only Strangers Now
“Only strangers now, who say they know me.”
She says. I don’t want to add to her words,
only take away some if she lets me.
Her talk blooms with allusion, mystery.
Her son says she has books by Rod Mckuen,
“Listen to the Warm” , Russian Yevgeny
Yevtushenko, “Selected Poems”. When
I mention names, she has no memory.
She sings “The sun has got his hat on. Hip,
hip, hooray. The sun has got his hat on.”
One hand on top of her summer hat lifts
it in time so it flops to the rhythm.
Other times gentleness is hers, and yours
“Hold my hand, take me down long corridors.”
10. Hold My Hand, Take Me
“Hold my hand, take me down long corridors.”
All patients are locked in permanently.
Each has their own en-suite room and their doors
only open to their key cards. Toiletries
are extra fees we access from accounts
set up by their loved ones. Sometimes we ask
for relatives to bring in more clothes. Counts
If we can email, text or phone with facts.
Loved ones updated with latest virus
news, how can visit after negative
test result. Before, windows clean glass
to see them through. We think/act positive.
She waits for them while we show we care.
“They have photos. It looks like me, Nowhere”
-Paul Brookes
Bios and Links
-Stevie Mitchell
I want to show my stories simply, but at the same time in an unexpected way…
He is a Derbyshire-based artist and illustrator creating captioned drawings, fragments of stories and uncanny happenings, presented under the collective banner, INKY CONDITIONS. He works with ink and brush and some deliberately lo-grade technology. Amongst a playfulness, themes of personal loss emerge. Part therapy: a loving and cathartic catalogue of everyday life – and death.
Stevie shows and sells INKY CONDITIONS work at arts trails and fairs across Derbyshire and Staffordshire, including the Wirksworth Festival. Alongside this, he works as an independent commercial illustrator, making useful drawings for beer branding, businesses, and for Barnsley Museums, including visitor guides and poetry anthologies.
Website: www.inkyconditions.co.uk
Instagram & Twitter: @mitchsteve / #inkyconditions
Frances Roberts Reilly
is a poet and filmmaker. She began writing seriously whilst working at BBC television in London, England. After making award-winning documentaries, she earned an Honours degree in English Literature at the University of Toronto.
Frances has an international profile as a Romani writer. True to the spirit of the Romani diaspora her poems, short stories, articles have been published internationally in well regarded anthologies in Canada, U.S., U.K., Wales and Europe. Her poetry has been featured by League of Canadian Poetry’s National Poetry Month and Fresh Voices online.
Her books include Parramisha (Cinnamon Press) and The Green Man (TOPS Stanza Series). Chapters from her memoir Underground Herstories have been published in Literature for the People and the Journal of Critical Romani Studies, Central European University in Budapest. Frances was invited as guest panelist on the Gelem, Gelem — how far have we come since 1971? program as well as participating on a literary panel of Romani women writers at the World Romani Congress, 2021.
Frances has been a guest author on CBC Radio and WSRQ Radio, Sarasota. She is the Producer of radio documentary series, Watershed Writers on CKWR FM 98.5 Community Radio.
Frances lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
is a Welsh poet whose most recent writing is in The Crank Literary Magazine, Briefly Zine, Re-side Magazine, Abridged and Green Ink Poetry. She has poetry forthcoming in Dreich’s Summer Anywhere anthology, Songs of Love and Strength by TheMumPoemPress and was winner of Poems for Trees competition with Folklore publishing. She is an MA student in Poetry Writing with Newcastle University and The Poetry School, London.
Twitter @laurenmywrites
Instagram @thoughtsofmanythings
-Val Ormrod’s
poetry has been published by Eye Flash, Hedgehog Poetry, Graffiti, Hammond House, Gloucester Writers Network and in several anthologies. In 2019 she won the Magic Oxygen International Poetry Prize and Ware Poets Open Competition, was shortlisted for the Plough Prize, Wells Festival of Literature and nominated for the Forward Prize single poem award. Her memoir In My Father’s Memory was published in 2020.
–Stephen Claughton
was interviewed by The Wombwell Rainbow in April last year. His poems have appeared widely in magazines and he reviews regularly for London Grip. This is a poem from The 3-D Clock, a pamphlet about his late mother’s dementia, which Dempsey & Windle published in 2020. Copies are available from their website here.
-Fiona Perry
was born and brought up in the north of Ireland but has lived in England, Australia, and New Zealand. Her short fiction won first prize in the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2020 and was shortlisted for the Australian Morrison Mentoring Prize in 2014 and 2015. Her flash fiction performance won second prize in the Over the Edge Fiction Slam 2021. Her poem, “Fusion”, was longlisted in the Fish Poetry Prize 2021, and she contributed poetry to the Label Lit project for National Poetry Day (Ireland) 2019. Her poetry and fiction has been published internationally in publications such as Lighthouse, Skylight47, Spontaneity, and Other Terrain. Follow her on Twitter: @Fionaperry17
Her first collection, Alchemy, is available from Turas Press (Dublin).
-Margaret Royall
is a Laurel Prize nominated poet. She has been shortlisted for several poetry prizes and won the Hedgehog Press’ collection competition 2020. She has two poetry collections:
Fording The Stream and Where Flora Sings, a memoir in prose and verse, The Road To Cleethorpes Pier and a new pamphlet, Earth Magicke out April 2021. She has been widely published online and in print, most recently: Hedgehog Press, The Blue Nib, Impspired & forthcoming in Sarasvati and Dreich.
She performs regularly at open mic events and facilitates a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire.
Website: https://margaretroyall.com
Twitter: RoyallMargaret
Instagram : meggiepoet
Facebook Author Page: Facebook.com/margaretbrowningroyall
–Annick Yerem
lives and works in Berlin. In her dreams, she can swim like a manatee. Annick tweets @missyerem and has, to her utmost delight, been published by Pendemic, Detritus, @publicpoetry, RiverMouthReview, #PoetRhy, Anti-Heroin-Chic, Rejection Letters, Dreich, 192, The Failure Baler and Rainbow Poems. https://missyerem.wordpress.com. https://linktr.ee/annickyerem
-Nigel Kent
is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet (2019 and 2020) and reviewer who lives in rural Worcestershire. He is an active member of the Open University Poetry Society, managing its website and occasionally editing its workshop magazine.
He has been shortlisted for several national competitions and his poetry has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and magazines. In 2019 Hedgehog Poetry Press published his first collection, ‘Saudade’, following the success of his poetry conversations with Sarah Thomson, ‘Thinking You Home’ and ‘A Hostile Environment’. In August 2020 Hedgehog Poetry Press published his pamphlet, Psychopathogen, which was nominated for the 2020 Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets and made the Poetry Society’s Winter List.
In 2021 he was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Reviewer of Literature.
To find out more visit his website: www.nigelkentpoet.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @kent_nj
-Olive M. Ritch
is a poet originally from Orkney. She was the recipient of the Scottish Book Trust’s Next Chapter Award 2020 and in 2006, she received the Calder Prize for Poetry from the University of Aberdeen. Her work has been extensively published in literary magazines, anthologies and websites including Poetry Review, Agenda, The Guardian, New Writing Scotland, The Poetry Cure (Bloodaxe) and the Scottish Poetry Library. Her work has also been broadcast on Radio 4.
Renga City (2) — gairnet provides: press of blll
(Part 1 of this article is on the StAnza blog here.) 2. Ha (Observing the rules and departing from them) i. As a set of principles Like any art form that has been practised for hundreds of years, renga is systematised to a high degree, and like any art form that has been taken over into another […]
Renga City (2) — gairnet provides: press of blll
Slow Walk Home by Young Dawkins (Red Squirrel Press) — Tears in the Fence
There is a pilgrimage of sorts in Young Dawkins’ writing of these poems and it is evident in reception of them as audience in both hearing them read by the poet and in reading them from the page. That the poems are biographical there is little doubt. Restlessness is arrested over and over by the […]
Slow Walk Home by Young Dawkins (Red Squirrel Press) — Tears in the Fence
#BioDiversityWeek2021 20th May- 26th May. Celebrate biodiversity. Thursday 20th May #WorldBeeDay, Friday 21st -#Natura2000Day , Saturday 22nd – #BioDiversityDay ,Sunday 23rd – #WorldTurtleDay, Monday 24th – #EuropeanDayOfParks, 20-23rd #Globalbiofest. Contact me if you wish me to feature your writing unpublished/published and/or artworks
Are you ready for this #BiodiversityWeek ? 20: #WorldBeeDay
21:
22:
23: #WorldTurtleDay
+ 20-23: #GlobalBioFest
https://globalbiofest.com/schedule Time to get #UnitedforBiodiversity#ForNature
Are you ready for this #BiodiversityWeek ?
20: #WorldBeeDay
21:
22:
23: #WorldTurtleDay
+ 20-23: #GlobalBioFest
https://globalbiofest.com/schedule Time to get #UnitedforBiodiversity#ForNature
#BioDiversity Week #WorldBeeDay 20th May. “An occasion to raise awareness of how everyone can make a difference to support, restore and enhance the role of pollinators.” Have you written published/unpublished poems about bees, or made artworks featuring them. Please contact me, so I can feature your work, today.
I hear
bees in our garden, more every day
gathering pollen, crisscross their way
they haven’t time to linger in the sun
for time is honey they hurry along
or briefly cling in the breeze and sway
they only pause to brush with care
specks of gold dust from their fur
sometimes they will dance a jig
sketching a course mid air
to remember where our garden is
all worker bees must choose
a resting place some nuzzle
on a flower no longer left in haste
to spend their final moments
in a perfumed last embrace.
when Winter has me in its thrall
if I close my eyes to the cold bare soil
it’s you I hear contentedly humming
wild flower memories we chase
and sunshine spreads across my face
-Val Bowen
#DementiaActionWeek #DementiaActionAwarenessWeek 2021. 17th-23rd May. Day four. We must urge the government to cure the care system. Have you written unpublished/published work about dementia? Created artworks about dementia? Please contact me if you would like your work featured this week.
Day Four
Late onset fallibility
He returns from walking the dog
no longer quite your father.
It’s nearly your dog.
He returns from walking the dog;
he’s only been gone two days,
which admits no ready explanation.
He returns from walking the dog
with a jaunty stride
and somebody else’s shoes.
He returns from walking the dog:
your mother leaves without a word–
she has been dead for five years.
He returns from walking the dog
smiling strangely to himself;
scowling at you, your brother, the front room paper.
He returns from walking the dog;
seems like he’s acting younger
and looking frailer than when he left.
He returns from walking the dog;
wants to speak to your sister, oblivious
that she lives in Queensland now.
He returns from his walk
with a cat on a piece of string
and seven tins of the wrong dog food.
There’s some discussion of it and a recording of Ian reading it here:
-Ian Badcoe
Another Time, Another Country
All they have is the pure impulse to eat. . .
— Carol Muske-Dukes
There’s an element of impulse calling
from the candy bowls, soda bottles,
cookie jars, and cakes on the counter.
Graze free now, and constantly. Enjoy.
What can I get you, she asks again.
There. That’s the quirk I don’t get.
If we’re not chewing, she’s unhappy
in some place rooted in her — where?
Soul? Heart? Maybe psyche and history.
Where does impulse hide compulsion?
I’ll never map the landscape. It just is.
A child of immigrants, deserted wife,
she’s never talked about the past hurts.
Now she can’t remember yesterday,
leaving bowls of past forever empty.
–Lennart Lundh (First appeared in his “Poems Against Cancer”, 2018)
Hint of Some Memory Gone
I do not know
what this I want you to read.
A shaft of light scurrying in a room
does not care about
the objects you can see because of it.
I murmur,
“I desire to go home.”
Now don’t say,
“This house has been your home.”
It cannot be so unless I permit
it to host me
in flesh now,
in a memory when I leave.
-Kushal Poddar
If Only
If only
I could take my pen
and write you back the way you were.
I’d play with the words
re-order them
so they made perfect sense
remove repetition and fill in the blanks.
I’d craft every line
and hone every phrase
plug the holes that have appeared
like torn tissue
in your brain.
I’d reach for rich imagery
summon every metaphor
add cinematic vision
to recreate you on the page
with all your former
vibrancy.
I’d halt the slide into shadows
sweep the cobwebs
from those vacant eyes
brighten them
with laughter again.
I’d give you back
all those stolen memories,
capture once more
your incandescent smile.
If only
I could write you in indelible ink
you’d be an unforgettable poem.
(First published in Graffiti, 2021)
-Val Ormrod
-Michael Dickel
Clocks
I already carry you with me
Like you’ve gone
Fitfully, fearfully. A quiet ritual
Of stepping stones, gently.
I carry you with me
As head dipped, aisle step
Wicker, willow, reed for sleep
Beauty in my arms to keep
I am carrying you with me
The time slip, slow droop and drop
The rubbing out the now the not
…
The words are stalling. There’s mental furring,
The hand that reaches out to me, searching
Then there’s the circle back to me too
As I look at myself in a version of you
Lines creeping, face folding
A sky that is racing, air coolly quickening
Seeds burst; roots thrust
Into the earth
With me
Within me
-Lauren Thomas
The Blessing
Raanana, March 9, 2018
Just suppose instead of dying
You kept on living.
You get to keep your mind
But it’s unconnected to any other
Living man or woman’s view of reality.
In your reality the dead you loved
Go on living,
Doing what they always did.
It’s the living loved ones disappoint you
With their separate realities
Not including you in their trips to the beach
Or family dinners
Since frankly your grotesqueness scares the kids.
No, the dead never disappoint.
They call each day
And take you out to lunch.
The place you worked,
Though long shut down,
Still employs you
And your old home where you grew up,
Though long sold to someone else,
Still waits for your return.
But sometimes they do disappoint,
Even the dead,
Like last week when
Mama and your sisters stopped calling you
And no one living gave you their numbers
So you could check that they’re ok
And you thought that they were mad at you,
It made you cry,
You hadn’t wronged them that you knew.
Some days are good
And some are bad
When you live with the dead and the living,
But you can’t see
The time you occupy
Has calved like some ice floe
From the world,
Maybe that’s a blessing.
-Mike Stone
Camilla of Palewell Press writes of “The Lock Picker”:
Sue Proffitt’s remarkable second poetry collection, The Lock-Picker, is about living alongside her mother who was suffering from dementia. Her poems explore the nature of self, memory, identity and what it truly means only to exist in the present moment. There are few collections that cover this ground, and in such a way that the reader and perhaps other carers, might feel changed as a result, wiser, kinder, and as Proffitt hopes in her preface, ‘a little less alone’.
I will be featuring poems from the book the rest of the week. Here is the first:
You can order a copy for £9.99 (excluding postage) from this page. Please contact Palewell Press at enquiries@palewellpress.co.uk if you have any delivery queries.
Ropes
Summer, sun pressing against the window:
a child denied attention.
The fire is on, ‘The King and I’
choruses its story.
Do you remember?
lobbing memories like ropes
begging a catch.
Yes I do!
Your smile returns you
so that even now
six years disappear –
singing Getting to Know You
as I knead the bumps
and cracks in your feet,
resting in my hands
like broken birds.
And I wonder who’s clinging to whom –
you, grasping at the parts
of yourself I throw towards you,
or me, watching
your frantic eyes go under,
scrabbling in the wreckage
for something, anything
to keep you afloat.
By every bedside
in every airless room
so many, half-in, half-out,
flail beseeching hands
and those of us on the edge
hear our voices pleading
let go! let go!
all the time throwing ropes.
Home
Casually, you ask me
if I’ll describe for you
what your old house was like.
I hope my surprise doesn’t show.
It’s frightening to think
that forty years of your life
could suddenly just disappear
down some cognitive sink-hole.
Luckily, I’ve got with me
something I can show —
snaps I took on my smartphone
the last time I was there.
I’m pleased that my “parting shots”,
only an afterthought then,
have come in useful now,
as I swipe through the pictures with you.
Everything looks as it should:
the garden’s neat and tidy,
though autumn has been through
and stripped the poplars bare.
My car parked on your drive
and the curtains we left up
(part of the deal, plus carpets)
help make the place look lived in.
No one would know
that only the day before
the house-clearer had been in
and emptied everything out —
a lifetime’s worth of junk,
stuff we didn’t want,
things you’d forgotten you had,
before the forgetting began.
-Stephen Claughton
(First published in “The 3-D Clock”, Dempsey & Windle, 2020)
*
Seventh and eighth in my heroic crown sonnet sequence for #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek
7. I Find Myself
How did I find myself here, a spindrift?
Not enough tea in this. It’s just water.
Sugar. Can you put more sugar in it?
What’s your name? Thankyou. That tastes much better.
I need the loo. Can you help me? Always
somebody screams in here. You like my hat?.
I need the loo. Where you going? Away?
O, I know her she’s nice. Yes, love. Toilet.
She’s screaming again. I’m going to lie
down on my bed, love. Will you stay with me?
My clothes no longer fit. They need to buy
me more, that aren’t so tight. I like pretty.
Carried coal in on his back. My father.
Water’s edge or earth’s end? Which is kinder?
8. Edge or Earth’s
“Water’s edge or earth’s end? Which is kinder?
What do words mean? Getting more like pictures.
What are they showing me? What is this for?
A pen. What do you do with it? Mixtures
of tiny lines. That’s pretty.” Because she
can’t write, but enjoys the sounds I’m making
these verses up for her. I read so she
can listen, recording what she’s saying.
I have to report how she interacts
with other people in here. Make sure she
takes her medication else, she’ll fall back
and her condition worsen more quickly.
Sentences she says really get to me:
“Only strangers now, who say they know me.”
-Paul Brookes
Bios and Links
–Lauren Thomas
is a Welsh poet whose most recent writing is in The Crank Literary Magazine, Briefly Zine, Re-side Magazine, Abridged and Green Ink Poetry. She has poetry forthcoming in Dreich’s Summer Anywhere anthology, Songs of Love and Strength by TheMumPoemPress and was winner of Poems for Trees competition with Folklore publishing. She is an MA student in Poetry Writing with Newcastle University and The Poetry School, London.
Twitter @laurenmywrites
Instagram @thoughtsofmanythings
-Val Ormrod’s
poetry has been published by Eye Flash, Hedgehog Poetry, Graffiti, Hammond House, Gloucester Writers Network and in several anthologies. In 2019 she won the Magic Oxygen International Poetry Prize and Ware Poets Open Competition, was shortlisted for the Plough Prize, Wells Festival of Literature and nominated for the Forward Prize single poem award. Her memoir In My Father’s Memory was published in 2020.
–Stephen Claughton
was interviewed by The Wombwell Rainbow in April last year. His poems have appeared widely in magazines and he reviews regularly for London Grip. This is a poem from The 3-D Clock, a pamphlet about his late mother’s dementia, which Dempsey & Windle published in 2020. Copies are available from their website here.
-Fiona Perry
was born and brought up in the north of Ireland but has lived in England, Australia, and New Zealand. Her short fiction won first prize in the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2020 and was shortlisted for the Australian Morrison Mentoring Prize in 2014 and 2015. Her flash fiction performance won second prize in the Over the Edge Fiction Slam 2021. Her poem, “Fusion”, was longlisted in the Fish Poetry Prize 2021, and she contributed poetry to the Label Lit project for National Poetry Day (Ireland) 2019. Her poetry and fiction has been published internationally in publications such as Lighthouse, Skylight47, Spontaneity, and Other Terrain. Follow her on Twitter: @Fionaperry17
Her first collection, Alchemy, is available from Turas Press (Dublin).
-Margaret Royall
is a Laurel Prize nominated poet. She has been shortlisted for several poetry prizes and won the Hedgehog Press’ collection competition 2020. She has two poetry collections:
Fording The Stream and Where Flora Sings, a memoir in prose and verse, The Road To Cleethorpes Pier and a new pamphlet, Earth Magicke out April 2021. She has been widely published online and in print, most recently: Hedgehog Press, The Blue Nib, Impspired & forthcoming in Sarasvati and Dreich.
She performs regularly at open mic events and facilitates a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire.
Website: https://margaretroyall.com
Twitter: RoyallMargaret
Instagram : meggiepoet
Facebook Author Page: Facebook.com/margaretbrowningroyall
–Annick Yerem
lives and works in Berlin. In her dreams, she can swim like a manatee. Annick tweets @missyerem and has, to her utmost delight, been published by Pendemic, Detritus, @publicpoetry, RiverMouthReview, #PoetRhy, Anti-Heroin-Chic, Rejection Letters, Dreich, 192, The Failure Baler and Rainbow Poems. https://missyerem.wordpress.com. https://linktr.ee/annickyerem
-Nigel Kent
is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet (2019 and 2020) and reviewer who lives in rural Worcestershire. He is an active member of the Open University Poetry Society, managing its website and occasionally editing its workshop magazine.
He has been shortlisted for several national competitions and his poetry has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and magazines. In 2019 Hedgehog Poetry Press published his first collection, ‘Saudade’, following the success of his poetry conversations with Sarah Thomson, ‘Thinking You Home’ and ‘A Hostile Environment’. In August 2020 Hedgehog Poetry Press published his pamphlet, Psychopathogen, which was nominated for the 2020 Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets and made the Poetry Society’s Winter List.
In 2021 he was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Reviewer of Literature.
To find out more visit his website: www.nigelkentpoet.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @kent_nj
-Olive M. Ritch
is a poet originally from Orkney. She was the recipient of the Scottish Book Trust’s Next Chapter Award 2020 and in 2006, she received the Calder Prize for Poetry from the University of Aberdeen. Her work has been extensively published in literary magazines, anthologies and websites including Poetry Review, Agenda, The Guardian, New Writing Scotland, The Poetry Cure (Bloodaxe) and the Scottish Poetry Library. Her work has also been broadcast on Radio 4.
The Wombwell Rainbow 