Wonderful to find myself and Jane Cornwell’s wondrous art displayed for the first time in a British Library between RSPB British Birdfinder and @DanJarvisMP .
Month: February 2022
Salt waves and red rowans
For C.
Painting by Monet.
Salt waves and red rowans
There are times and days
when rain falls straight to the quick,
fills hollow bones and bilges
of the boat with white sails,
but the sails are still full, course set.
Sea, wave-chopped, wrinkled,
a silk garment from the days
when riches were a childhood,
a full belly, and dreams
of sailing to the honey land.
On this windswept hill,
beneath rain and bare-leafed trees,
I smell salt waves, hear the north
sing its songs of rowans
red, thrushes and the coming spring.
#ValentinesDay ##ValentinesDay2022 I will feature your published/unpublished poetry/short prose/artworks. Please include a short third person bio.
Music Practice
You close your lips around the reed,
hold it gently between your teeth,
tender as a lover’s nip;
your tongue searches it,
breath searches it;
your fingers move across the keys
and there is music:
the sliding notes of Gershwin,
its slow harmonics
blue and beautiful.
I listen, think,
how it might be if
the thing you played instead
was me.
-Beth Brooke
Duetting with you and Mahler
Place the polished curves so
gently beneath your dimpled chin;
now let your nimble fingers flirt
with the eager well-tuned strings.
Tilt your head, flick back your
flowing mane of chestnut curls,
pick up your resined bow, balance
it lightly in your sensitive hand
and let your music sing out:
pure purring notes of unchained ecstasy
rising up within you, chaste and unblemished
like a fresh spring dawn.
I could be that violin, your Muse,
your heart’s delight and desire,
making music with you, responding
to the plea of the plaintive strings;
strong chords of passion in crescendo,
vibrating, echoing through time and space;
now gentle pizzicato, now with the timbre
of a D sharp minor tryst.
Together we could fashion new melodies,
broadcast Mahler-esque symphonies to the world,
hearts brimming over with pride
as the duet seals our lovers’ knot.
-Margaret Royall
TWO POEMS
Something worth fighting for,
[after a book title, by Reg Gadney]
I’ve been in love before—
I’m old now,
and unsure;
too old, too tired to care.
This loving you is neither
wise nor good, and
I am well content
with my dear melancholy.
There is nothing good in
this new longing
to be near you,
to love you, to hold you dear.
I had no wish to awaken long
dead phantom – lust,
and love you, love you,
love you – as I do. I must.
Estranged from passion,
inured to loss
too old, too tired to trust myself
to ever be in love again.
How can I believe – you do!
that our late-flowering love
is something –
so worth fighting for?
©️ March, 2019
Not that I miss you?
I’m well enough
without you—thanks,
I love my home,
I live alone and
I don’t miss you.
This morning
I awakened alone—
the sun shone!
Why! that’s bliss!
I don’t miss you.
Today: a working
on-my-own day;
I’m not lonely—
I’m writing well—
I don’t miss you.
I didn’t let you go,
never caught you,
didn’t own you;
I left to be alone,
and I don’t miss you.
I found something like
bliss with you –
Did you with me?
I love you. I do,
still I don’t miss you.
Later, this evening
I’ll dine alone,
an open book,
and the radio on—
I’ll not miss you.
I sleep on my own
in a single bed –
the best I have known
was with you! Why
don’t I miss you.
©️ Lesley Storm: May 2018
Old Love
dusts the surfaces,
vacuums the carpets,
mop and buckets the tiles,
scrubs the toilet and bath,
lumps laundry basket to machine,
hangs clothes on the horse,
irons and puts on hangers,
changes bedclothes,
scrubs inside windows,
cooks and serves up,
washes dirty pots, puts wet ones
on draining board, dries and puts away.
Yes, dear,
You forgot our anniversary.
The kids need new shoes.
Roof is leaking.
I need a new car.
Fence has blown down.
Boiler’s broke.
I can manage the steps, thankyou.
I did remember, it was you forgot.
I don’t know why you bother
Asking as you never remember
What I say anyway
I hate you.
I love you.
Our love
is emergency
pull to open.
Used tickets please.
Tickets accepted
as advertised.
Please hold on
to your ticket.
If you have any comments
or concerns.
Our love is service signs
meant to assist onward travel.
Bios And Links
-Lesley Storm
was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1953, Following a thirty year hiatus, she began writing poetry again and performing in her sixties. She is a member go the Edinburgh based ‘Heretics’. Her first full collection. ‘It’s about Time’ was published by Leamington Books in 2021.
-Margaret Royall
has been widely published in print and online. She has won/or been s-listed in several competitions and was nominated for the Laurel Prize in 2021.
Website: https://margaretroyall.com/ Twitter:@RoyallMargaret
-Beth Brooke
is a retired teacher. She lives in Dorset. Her debut collection, A Landscape With Birds will be published by Hedgehog Press this year.
P.W Bridgman on Jude Nutter
*****
Jude Nutter was born in Yorkshire, England, and grew up near Hannover, in northern Germany. She studied printmaking at Winchester School of Art (UK) and received her MFA in poetry from The University of Oregon. Her poems have appeared in numerous national and international journals and have received over forty awards and grants. She currently lives in Minneapolis, and divides her time between Minnesota and Dingle, Ireland, where she has a family home. Jude will be The High Window’s Featured Poet in the second instalment of the spring issue. However, to give you a further insight into her work, you will find below a review of her latest collection, Dead Reckoning, by the Canadian poet and critic P.W. Bridgman and her long poem, “Disco Jesus and the Wavering Virgins in Berlin, 2011”, which he discusses in it.
*****
P.W. Bridgman’s third and fourth books—Idiolect (poetry)…
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Look, Breathe by Chris Powici (Red Squirrel Press)
This 66 page collection of poems arrives with translations in Scots, Gaelic, Doric, Orcadian and a host of other Scots dialects – there’s Flemish and Dutch translations too. The main delivery comes from substantial poems written by Chris Powici which have been transcribed, essentially, by Scots poets into local speech. The result opens a rich soundscape of regional locution.
Chris Powici’s poems find unity through a field of concerns that connect in time, space and locality. His poems put a finger on particular synchronicities of observations, memories and experience that manifest, mainly through acts of nature.
‘Lamlash Nights’ (p.52) begins with gulls settling for evening that, ‘put their faith in café roofs / and car park walls / even the little iron-coloured waves’, the observation broken by the playful thought of grabbing nearby anchoring chains and hauling in a small boat or even the local ferry, complete with a cargo…
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#ItsNotOk Sexual Abuse And Sexual Violence week 7th-13th February. Day Six. I will feature your published/unpublished poetry/short prose/artworks. Please include a short third person bio.
Bios And Links
Bios and Links
Amazon Author Page
Facebook Author Page
https://www.facebook.com/helenlaycockauthor
Pillar Box Poetry
https://www.facebook.com/pillarboxpoetry
@helen_laycock
WEBSITES
Poetry
https://helenlaycock.wixsite.com/marbleintocloud
Short Stories/Flash
https://helenlaycock.wixsite.com/fiction-in-a-flash
Children’s Books
https://helenlaycock.wixsite.com/helen-laycock
#ItsNotOk Sexual Abuse And Sexual Violence week 7th-13th February. Day Five. I will feature your published/unpublished poetry/short prose/artworks. Please include a short third person bio.
Bios And Links
Amazon Author Page
And So The Wind Was Born by Gina Duran (Flowersong Press)
Gina Duran’s . . . And So The Wind Was Born from Flowersong Press, a publisher specializing in the voices of new poets along the border of the United States and Mexico like David Romero, Sarah Joy Thompson, and Matt Sedillo. It is a collection of poetry and flash nonfiction that exist in a borderland in a number of ways. In this collection, Duran comes to terms with dealing with generational trauma, a culture that has ill-defined her identity, and a desire to understand who she is after she has lost a daughter.
As a person on the outside of the dominant culture, the poet is queer and Hispanic, Duran establishes how to understand herself in a world that tries to oversimplify and control her. She describes awakening to who she is out of a religious and patriarchal society through a process of pain. It is only after she attempted…
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The Cowbird Collection~Short Tales from Real Life ~ Tale 2 ~ Divine Justice.
#ItsNotOk Sexual Abuse And Sexual Violence week 7th-13th February. Day Four. I will feature your published/unpublished poetry/short prose/artworks. Please include a short third person bio.
-Paul Brookes (Another dialect retelling of a Classical myth from my out of print “The Headpoke And Firewedding).
Bios And Links
Amazon Author Page
The Wombwell Rainbow 