Day Two

Clapping

You can hear your own clapping
louder than anyone else’s.
You are not matching the rhythm
of anyone in this room.
Soon they will be looking at you
willing you to stop.
You try to change the way
your hands hit one another
but you cannot unhollow the sound.

-Sue Finch

-Sarah Reeson

Lodger

Even after some time, she was never seen as part of the family.
When they remember her
at all, it is through a mobled veil of muffled memory: never
quite able to recall anything
definite about her features, her voice.

She lived unremarked, unreal. If she had been a colour,
she would have been a drab shade;
musty olive-green, the utility-grey of a government building
with fly-blown, thick-frosted
wire-glass windows.

Later, after she had gone, they cleared away what remained
of her vestigial presence, gifting
her with unwonted attention, finding hard evidence
of her inherent quiddity in an unlikely
cupboard, where the third-best sheets once lived. Neatly shelved:
a-hundred-and-thirty pickle jars, empty now
save for clouded vinegar.

Empty now, save for the full-hearted attempt to preserve
something forgotten, a bitter memento
of something lost, embalmed with the dead
mustard seeds, the slime of baby onions,
the faded red pimento.

-Louise Longson (These poems feature in her upcoming pamphlet Songs from the Witch Bottle: cytoplasmic variations by Louise Longson, Alien Buddha Press 2022)

Judith
Losing a best friend far too early

‘All Things bright and beautiful’ dresses,
that’s what we wore on Summer days,
Judith and I,
They even had matching knickers too!
Wearing them we were true princesses,
playing hopscotch under the sun,
for back then the sun shone all summer long –
(Or maybe that was that just how it seemed?)

We walked together to school each day,
Judith and I,
wearing the same blue macs with hoods,
white ankle socks, Clarks t-bar shoes.
Our hairdresser couldn’t do trendy cuts,
she only had one style she really knew,
so both of us sported the same prim bobs
adorned with cute silk bows on top.

During the six-week holidays
We’d skip together down Hardy’s Lane,
Judith and I,
hand in hand, teddies under our arms,
we visited Billy the Bull on the farm,
dared each other to climb on his pen
and tickle his back with mare’s tail grass.

In later life, though living apart
we always made sure that we kept in touch,
Judith and I.
Each time I had news, whether good or bad,
I would rush to the phone to call her up,
hear her say ‘North Kelsey 490’.
We were twin souls who belonged together.

And still I want to rush to the phone
and hear her say – ‘North Kelsey 490’
But then I remember she’s no longer here…..
Life has moved on and the whole world has changed.
Twenty years on I still miss her so much –
I just wish I had told her how special she was!

-Margaret Royall

Distinctive

I and one other told join the top class
only for History, finds us betwixt
and between, defined as strangers we pass
from world to world, always apart, a mixed

reception. We must use Ordinary
level text, not CSE. All their eyes
say, tha thinks tha better n’ us. Wary
make effort not to be noticed, our try

highlighted by teacher always asking
one of us our opinion. Our Mam
and Dad’s fought for this, for us, arguing
with school were bright enough, should be top rank.

Our parents want, work towards best for us.
We are separate in distinctiveness.

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

-Louise Longson

cleared enough space in her spare room and head to start writing ‘properly’ during lockdown 2020. She is published by One Hand Clapping, Fly on the Wall, Nymphs, Ekphrastic Review, Obsessed with Pipework, Indigo Dreams Publishing, The Poetry Shed and others. She is a winner of  Dreich’s chapbook competition 2021 with Hanging Fire. A qualified psychotherapist, she works with historic trauma and the physical and emotional distresses caused by chronic loneliness. Lives with an orange cat and a silver Yorkshireman. In her head, sky is always blue, grass always green, leaves always golden. Needs to get out more.

Twitter @LouisePoetical  

-Teresa Durran

was born in London and lives in Hampshire but has rarely felt less English; the blood of Celtic ancestors flows through her veins. Being the daughter of immigrants has entirely informed her world view and she has always instinctively empathised with the outsider and the ‘other’.

She writes delicate poems for fragile times because she has to. She wanders and wonders and dreams, and she is always lost in music.

-Sue Finch’s

debut collection, ‘Magnifying Glass’, was published in 2020. Her work has also appeared in a number of online magazines. She lives with her wife in North Wales. She loves the coast, peculiar things and the scent of ice-cream freezers. You can often find her on Twitter @soopoftheday.

 –Margaret  Royall

has six books of poetry published. She has appeared widely in print, in webzines and  poetry anthologies. She has won or been short-listed in several competitions and her collection ‘Where Flora Sings’, published by Hedgehog Press, was nominated for the Laurel Prize in 2021. Her latest collection, ‘Immersed in Blue’ was published in January 2022 by Impspired Press. She leads a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire and takes part in open mic sessions online and in person. She is currently working on a third poetry collection.

Website: https://margaretroyall.com/ Twitter:@RoyallMargaret

-S Reeson [she/they] is 55, bisexual and married with two children: they have suffered anxiety for all of their life, and started telling stories as a ten-year-old in order to help them cope. Now, they write and record poetry, short stories and episodic fiction, whilst dissecting their unique creative process using both video and audio as the means to continue coping.

A considerable lived experience of mental health issues, a passion for niche arts and media and an undimmed enthusiasm for environmentalism combine, to allow creativity to emerge, and new stories and projects to be created. They love to experiment and push creative boundaries, and gain a huge amount of motivation and inspiration from talking about both the journey and continued evolution as a creative.

After winning a Poetry Society members’ contest (and reading that piece at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden) they attended the inaugural Mslexicon in 2019 and took part in their first ever Open Mic event. In that same year they wrote 24 poems about their home town for the Places of Poetry online initiative, one of which is included in the official anthology published for National Poetry Day in October 2020 by Bloomsbury and subsequently reproduced by the Sunday Telegraph.

Their work has been published by Flights / Quarterly ejournal, Green Ink Poetry, Fevers of the Mind, Acropolis Journal, Selcouth Station, Black Bough Poetry, Flapjack Press and Dreich, plus there have been performances at Gloucester Poetry Festival, Flight of the Dragonflies and the monthly event at Wordsworth Grasmere. They have read alongside countless poets, including Caroline Bird, Steve Camden, Deanna Roger, Jeremy Dixon, Julia Webb and Wendy Pratt, and in 2021 they read at the Essex Book Festival. They’ve also learnt and grown creatively via poetry courses run by Apples and Snakes, Kevin Higgins, Wendy Pratt and Jonathan Davidson. A self-produced poetry chapbook was produced in November 2020 (available to buy here).

In October 2021 they were nominated for the Best of the Net Award.

They enjoy living online, but also find great joy from lifting heavy weights, running and cycling in the meat-space. When not doing these, they are pursuing an ASD diagnosis on the NHS.

Lachrymose

It has become customary for me to spin;
To change my perception of events.
To reframe my worldview, to begin
To build a positive narrative sense.

So, in that vein, let me not dwell
On all that I am not, all that I haven’t got.
Instead, let me enumerate and spell
Out all that I am. Recite the lot.

I am tired. I am burdened and old.
I am low, alone. I am sick of clinging to hope.
I am bowed, cowed, unloved, cold,
Sick of always having to cope

Alone. Enough of being brave. Drained.
Sick of my solitary sentence for a crime
I don’t recall. Hollow. Tear stained.
Broken, adrift in a heartless sea of time

© Teresa Durran 170612

-Sarah Reeson

Ghost in an Empty Chair

Sometimes it is just a flap of wings in a lonely meadow,
or a child’s shoes and socks left by a pond

Sometimes it is the intensity of darkness
or the emptiness in the kitchen at harvest

Maybe the laughter ascending from the street below
or the ‘stepford wives’ promenading past with their pugs;

the elation of cheering crowds at a football match,
the vicar’s wife fraternising with the village elite…

Whatever triggers it, you instantly know,
that lonely ghost in the empty chair is you,

as though you are marked out with a blood-red bindi….
folk turn away, rejecting the discomfort of your grief

The world tumbles to wrong conclusions
and your sealed lips shout ‘I am still here!’

You cannot fight the inevitability of it;
you ask yourself why grief is such taboo….

Sometimes all it takes is the wind kissing your hair,
the cyclist turning to smile as he pedals past,

moonlight catching the svelte stem of your wine glass,
or an unexpected call from a complete stranger…..

Just small things, singular, unremarkable, yet they have
the power to transform your world…and you are grateful

First published in The Blue Nib journal

-Margaret Royall

 

#MentalHealthAwarenessWeek Loneliness Sonnet: 1. Holgate

New uniformed, trousers, shirt, tie, bag, shoes.
mam’s warning nailed in my head: Woe betide!
He said Your new. What’s your name? Mine’s Brookes too.
No one’ll hurt thee. He’s tall, broad, on my side.

Never see him again, the stranger who helps.
I learned in another school last year.
Now I see a boy forced down cellar steps.
A crowd look down on him, hawk spit and jeer.

Spice, laikin, all words I don’t understand.
Shy. Afraid to say a wrong word I’m called posh
from Ha-RR-ogate. School’s a cruel land.
My accent ridiculed, so quiet, at a loss.

Mam says I’m mumbling or shout when I speak.
I need to stay silent. Any words break.

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

-Teresa Durran

was born in London and lives in Hampshire but has rarely felt less English; the blood of Celtic ancestors flows through her veins. Being the daughter of immigrants has entirely informed her world view and she has always instinctively empathised with the outsider and the ‘other’.

She writes delicate poems for fragile times because she has to. She wanders and wonders and dreams, and she is always lost in music.

 –Margaret  Royall

has six books of poetry published. She has appeared widely in print, in webzines and  poetry anthologies. She has won or been short-listed in several competitions and her collection ‘Where Flora Sings’, published by Hedgehog Press, was nominated for the Laurel Prize in 2021. Her latest collection, ‘Immersed in Blue’ was published in January 2022 by Impspired Press. She leads a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire and takes part in open mic sessions online and in person. She is currently working on a third poetry collection.

Website: https://margaretroyall.com/ Twitter:@RoyallMargaret

–

S Reeson [she/they] is 55, bisexual and married with two children: they have suffered anxiety for all of their life, and started telling stories as a ten-year-old in order to help them cope. Now, they write and record poetry, short stories and episodic fiction, whilst dissecting their unique creative process using both video and audio as the means to continue coping.

A considerable lived experience of mental health issues, a passion for niche arts and media and an undimmed enthusiasm for environmentalism combine, to allow creativity to emerge, and new stories and projects to be created. They love to experiment and push creative boundaries, and gain a huge amount of motivation and inspiration from talking about both the journey and continued evolution as a creative.

After winning a Poetry Society members’ contest (and reading that piece at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden) they attended the inaugural Mslexicon in 2019 and took part in their first ever Open Mic event. In that same year they wrote 24 poems about their home town for the Places of Poetry online initiative, one of which is included in the official anthology published for National Poetry Day in October 2020 by Bloomsbury and subsequently reproduced by the Sunday Telegraph.

Their work has been published by Flights / Quarterly ejournal, Green Ink Poetry, Fevers of the Mind, Acropolis Journal, Selcouth Station, Black Bough Poetry, Flapjack Press and Dreich, plus there have been performances at Gloucester Poetry Festival, Flight of the Dragonflies and the monthly event at Wordsworth Grasmere. They have read alongside countless poets, including Caroline Bird, Steve Camden, Deanna Roger, Jeremy Dixon, Julia Webb and Wendy Pratt, and in 2021 they read at the Essex Book Festival. They’ve also learnt and grown creatively via poetry courses run by Apples and Snakes, Kevin Higgins, Wendy Pratt and Jonathan Davidson. A self-produced poetry chapbook was produced in November 2020 (available to buy here).

In October 2021 they were nominated for the Best of the Net Award.

They enjoy living online, but also find great joy from lifting heavy weights, running and cycling in the meat-space. When not doing these, they are pursuing an ASD diagnosis on the NHS.

Saltburn in August

Twenty months ago I last saw the sea,
and it was here, on the last day of the year.
It’s many more months since I saw it in summer,
I can’t remember where.

Today there are sunbathers, surfers and donkeys,
the chalets are full. It always seems
to be sunny here, though today
you can just make out the turbines

at Redcar; Hartlepool’s lighthouse is hidden.
I don’t regret coming back inland
through the Italian Gardens, missing out the town,
but I do wish now I had walked on the sand.

-Peter J. Donnelly

Bios And Links

-Peter J Donnelly

lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary. He has a degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies including Dreich and Writer’s Egg, where some of these poems have previously appeared. Last year he won second prize in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition.

Day Seven

Wife Potted Garden 2 – photo by Paul Brookes

Heaven in a Spring Garden

Alice clasps her laundry load
as she steps out onto cobbled ground.

Cuplike red and yellow tulips
stand tall, silken heads nodding
in the breeze.

Wisteria threads cloak the cottage wall,
Alice anticipates their lilac bloom.

Hazy sunshine hints heat
as she pegs washing
on the line,
             white terry towels fly
in the sudden gust of air.

Cherry blossom drapes
patchwork paving–

high in the tree, red, gold
and green finches trill,
reaching a perfect cadence.

Alice leans into golden forsythia,
smells its sweet fragrance,
sunlight warms her face.

Pottering along the path to a flowerbed
by the fence, she stops, bends, sniffs,
smiles at the burnt-red azaleas,

sinks into a striped deckchair
next to blue mood pansies peeping
from terracotta pots,

picks up her paper and pen, gazes
at violas behind a white picket fence
and writes

Heaven in a spring garden

-Patricia M. Osborne

After ‘Happy the lab’rer’

My bookshelves with none of her prose
would be like a garden with no rose
bush. As the shrub grows
flowers again, I re-read her books, unlike those
of Dickens or Trollope, which I only suppose
I may. I know their plots as the gardener knows
his plots. I am glad she chose
not to marry, but wrote about love’s woes
instead, as well as its joys. Her life came to a close
too soon, perhaps in the throes
of Addison’s. A new portrait is proved by the Austen nose.
Like Emma’s and Bingley’s ‘ideas’ her poem flows.

(First published in Reach Magazine: Indigo Dreams Publishing (2021).)

-Peter J Donnelly

April reveals her new spring clothes

Breath held, tongues tied in our mouths,
we are mute observers, admiring the lustre
uncloaked before us in these clandestine woods.

Stepping from a time capsule, hesitant at first,
we stumble upon a passing dream, hear new
rhapsodies playing, experience a paradigm shift in blue.

As privileged viewers we sneak a peek at April’s new
clothes, infused with the fragrance of bluebell breath,
We will preserve these treasures, safeguard her rebirth.

-Margaret Royall

The Loneliness Of A House Plant

Above me one fish moves downward
over my head a summer returned.

Light through windows warms the floor,
the air.

I can’t flower.
Isolated in a pot.
My owner head in her hand,
A cold winter

She can’t receive my nutrients.
When she moves her air
lifts my leaves, her voice excites.

She swabs dust from my leaves.
Waters me just enough not to drown.
She opens a window and I am sensitive
to outside gusts with messages I can’t decipher.

When she laughs my leaves lift
makes them upward fish
and my buds ready to open.

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

-Patricia M Osborne

is married with grown-up children and grandchildren. In 2019 she graduated with an MA in Creative Writing (University of Brighton).

Patricia is a published novelist, poet and short fiction writer. She has been published in various literary magazines and anthologies. Her poetry pamphlets, Taxus Baccata, The Montefiore Bride and Sherry & Sparkly were published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press.

She has a successful blog at Whitewingsbooks.com featuring other writers. When Patricia isn’t working on her own writing, she enjoys sharing her knowledge, acting as a mentor to fellow writers.

-Peter J Donnelly

lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary. He has a degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies including Dreich and Writer’s Egg, where some of these poems have previously appeared. Last year he won second prize in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition.

-Margaret Royall

Margaret  Royall has six books of poetry published. She has appeared widely in print, in webzines and  poetry anthologies. She has won or been short-listed in several competitions and her collection ‘Where Flora Sings’, published by Hedgehog Press, was nominated for the Laurel Prize in 2021. Her latest collection, ‘Immersed in Blue’ was published in January 2022 by Impspired Press. She leads a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire and takes part in open mic sessions online and in person. She is currently working on a third poetry collection.

Website: https://margaretroyall.com/ Twitter:@RoyallMargaret

Day Six

Her Fence Pot – Photo by Paul Brookes

Nuances

Such beauty takes my breath away!
Sitting there, tall and proud,
inviting adoration.
At first glance flamingo pink,
But never be too quick judge!
This amaryllis is rainbow-hued…
Closer inspection tells a greater truth,
Fragrant strands of colour
Blending seamlessly together

At birth displaying gentle tangerine
With inner bell of warmest apricot pink
Toiling majestically upwards
towards the weak light of first Spring….
Much bolder then the shades become,
Blood red tendrils interspersed
With splashes of coral and ruby red

Then all too soon the glory starts to fade
Yet still a nuanced cadence sings its tune;
The withering petals glow defiant crimson
As though they’re holding back a loss of blood
And clinging to last vestiges of life.
This sweet enchantment fills the morning space,
Warms up the chilly draft of March
Sweet memories of this colourful profusion
Will stay forever locked within my soul.

*First published in my collection Where Flora Sings

-Margaret Royall

Norton Conyers

I wonder whether Charlotte visited the gardens,
discovered the door in the wall
hidden like the one to the staircase in the house
that led to mad Mary’s attic.

In May she wouldn’t have seen
blue and white Agapanthus, purple Asters,
a beefsteak fungus growing on oak bark,
heard honey bees sucking nectar

from sedum and lavender.
There’d be no ripe red apples
on the grass, no lemons
in the orangery as there are

on this last day of August. But were they the model
for Rochester’s grounds, the scene
of recovery from a disturbed night,
later a proposal of forbidden marriage?

I wish I had Jane Eyre with me now,
the only other sound water
of the fountain in the ornamental pond.
I wouldn’t feel the loneliness of author or heroine,

or the fear I first felt
when I read of the red room,
the third storey,
the witching hour at Thornfield.

-Peter J. Donnelly

A Clock Watch

When clock parts of the lion’s tooth are blown
apart, I see first and second hand their
fertility flight numbers broadcast sown
gusted chaotic in warm summer’s air.

The exploded mechanism flits over
close cut lawns, weeded borders, neatly
fenced, dips over powerhosed driveways, stir
of cats on rooftops, prey hunting sweetly.

Organic time tamed, all about decay
not growth. Imagine accurate time based
on a gradually emerging way.
However, all things reduce to waste.

Our Dandelion’s blown clocks are seeds.
to be uprooted as unwanted weeds.

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

Peter J Donnelly

lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary. He has a degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies including Dreich and Writer’s Egg, where some of these poems have previously appeared. Last year he won second prize in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition.

-Margaret Royall

Margaret  Royall has six books of poetry published. She has appeared widely in print, in webzines and  poetry anthologies. She has won or been short-listed in several competitions and her collection ‘Where Flora Sings’, published by Hedgehog Press, was nominated for the Laurel Prize in 2021. Her latest collection, ‘Immersed in Blue’ was published in January 2022 by Impspired Press. She leads a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire and takes part in open mic sessions online and in person. She is currently working on a third poetry collection.

Website: https://margaretroyall.com/ Twitter:@RoyallMargaret

Day Five

Wife Garden Potted by Paul Brookes

Aunt Emily Gathers Sweet-Peas

They move with grace, these sweet pea blooms, so beautifully at ease
Skirts ruffled and frilled, like ballet dancers with their dainty moves

Layer upon layer they whirl and twirl among the fresh-blown leaves
You almost hear the brisk swish of the soft pink ballet shoes

A blaze of glory, stunning in their very magnificence
A merry-go-round of prima donnas in the gentle breeze;

So striking are they that her guests pause by the rustic fence,
Drinking in the heady perfume luring in the bees

To listen out for birdsong, maybe hear a white dove call
Just lingering there is heavenly, a Summer treat for all.

Aunt Emily has brought her guests to view the summer show
To pause among the blooms and pick a bouquet of the stems,

As cascades from the neighbour’s fountain shoot up from below
Then bathed in sunlight splash down in the crystal pool again……..

These pink and purple bells foretell the glory on its way,
When myriad dazzling colours will explode around their feet……

The fountain’s leap crescendos as the ballerinas sway,
Her summer guests the first to view this cottage garden treat.

Aunt Emily remembers here a husband gone too young
She tends his plot with love and knows his memory will live on……

Shortlisted Crowvus competition entry, published in Pictures Paint a Thousand Words

-Margaret Royall

My African Violet

It was like it knew
its pot was needed
by the pot-bound spider plant
whose own was required
by the pot-bound ivy;
that I had no more space
for another pot,
though I could have bought one.

It was my oldest plant,
it came from the Topiary Tree,
never failed to flower
or grow new leaves,
wasn’t fussy where it was put.

It seemed to like the corner
of my bedroom under the window
until this winter, when it no longer drank
its weekly water, its once broad leaves
grey and withered. Anything but pot-bound,
its roots had disappeared.

I spent years thinking
It was an African primrose,
but it seems it may have been
a violet after all. It lives on
through the spider plant
now adjusting to the still damp compost
it fed, in the terracotta pot
a cordyline came in.

-Peter J. Donnelly

Lawn Cutting

Wife likes our lawn to be cut in straight lines.
A mute boy next door in fascination
Keenly watches the geometric times
I reach the edge, marks the delineation.

He has a toy lawnmower of his own.
Sometimes his mam kindly allows him grip
her hands on their mower, grass mown
by both, her feet follow his as they strip

the wildness out of their lawn. His toy won’t
cut grass but safely glides over its length,
so he stamps and bawls when his world don’t
conform to his straight lines, because it’s bent.

My wife says “Better” to our short shorn lawn.
We all want the wild to be uniform.

First published in Glomag, November, 2021

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

Peter J Donnelly

lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary. He has a degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies including Dreich and Writer’s Egg, where some of these poems have previously appeared. Last year he won second prize in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition.

-Margaret Royall

Margaret  Royall has six books of poetry published. She has appeared widely in print, in webzines and  poetry anthologies. She has won or been short-listed in several competitions and her collection ‘Where Flora Sings’, published by Hedgehog Press, was nominated for the Laurel Prize in 2021. Her latest collection, ‘Immersed in Blue’ was published in January 2022 by Impspired Press. She leads a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire and takes part in open mic sessions online and in person. She is currently working on a third poetry collection.

Website: https://margaretroyall.com/ Twitter:@RoyallMargaret