This week, four poems. Some take years to find a shape, others arrive fully formed. Their promptness or tardiness to the party, their languishing in my laptop or notebooks in various states of déshabillé - none of these correlates to whether they will be good mixers, or that they’ll skulk in a corner, eyeing the host’s impressive bookshelves morosely.
Also this week, my, what interesting times to be a woman.
(Images this week are life drawings in a now-lost sketchbook from 2016 made with freshly made madder rose water colour paint and iron gall ink, drawn with brushes made in the Mediaeval style, from a goose feather.)
She Has the Better Weaponry
No-one wants to hear about the last few bleeds
or that Cailleach will soon enough
have Brigid buried with all her fine accoutrements
in some deep cave under a cairn
and use her bones for broth.
I bridled against it
identifying with the mother
of whom I had no knowledge
before two Samhains past.
Since she came my fierce face softened
and friends call me out for it, perplexed.
‘Where is your fighting spirit?’
‘It’s right here, disguised as maturity,’ I said.
But I had no such feeling for life
a tearaway still getting away with murder
mirroring lost boys and men
in unlucky fragments.
We hide the first blood and we mourn the last.
I'd only just became a woman
free waterborne infectious
and now they said they had the cure.
‘One sacrifice is enough’, I said
‘What you want is no concern of mine,’ she replied.
She has the better weaponry
and beckons me bear arms.
The men will not go there
nor will I wait for them
now I am stood with her.
April 2018 - March 2022
For SB
What To Call it
I read you
aggrieved in matching manner
sharp histories set my rashes out neatly
nettles became unnecessary
I still strode through them for old time's sake
gathering the elderflowers
for Litha
glancing
far north now
nothing to be done
about weather or climate
no-one knows what to call it
late chill deadly frost
the wells have run dry
‘not in living memory’
mildew
umbellifers
hemlock with its dots
history with arrows eye-deep
towers falling
seeds from your old comrades
grow well in my plot
hunched
ten queasy minutes
removed twenty tiny green larvae
who'd stripped the leaves of four oak saplings
to sparse shadows
sprayed with fatty soap they'll survive
but it shook me
jackdaw-sown accidents long-nurtured
I want them so
to live
June 2018 - April 2025
We put the bodies down
We put the bodies down
on the floor
on tables
on the bare earth
we do not hold them up
if we hold bodies up
something is wrong
there was a landslide a flood
we are furious
we protest
so we put the bodies down
in rows in a gym
as long as those school benches
the ones we ran along
as children
when we climbed thick ropes
and hung like unripe fruit
or failed to climb them
lacking the knack
and required agility
we put the bodies down
because someone has died
or is about to die
or is dying
or is longing
August 2018
The woman prepares her boat for leaving
The woman prepares her boat for leaving
closing curtains one by one
confiding with herself
about her work
which is to love
never sounds enough
said aloud -
makes more strong tea
to accompany this knowledge
sloshing in her guts
heads out again to be
pushed all evening by men
asked to do just that
at a distance
one can appear to yield
but no such thing is happening tonight
she is calling down blows upon herself
for tenderisation
like meat for good eating
and hardening
like steel
keeping tempered is the way
no fear she will lose her edge
April 2018 - April 2025
For CDC
This week’s good thing: The Offbeat Folk Film Festival, London, UK, 12-18 May 2025. I am proud and happy that my partner
and artist Lucy Wright have a had their evocative short film Mirie It Is selected for this festival in the Short and Sweet Folk Tales screening. We’ll be up for the whole week in London to see lots of the festival. Personally speaking, this is the best possible next phase of my return to enjoying the moving image. It’s been 30 years since I went to a film festival, (which included the world premier of The Wrong Trousers), so perhaps it’s rather overdue.
If you would like to help keep Uncivil Savant going and support my work, but cannot afford a paid subscription, feel free to buy me a coffee! Many thanks, Caro.
Blessings to you dear Caroline......each of your poems takes me along, into my memory, my imagination and my hidden strength......and I KNOW it......and am restrengthened......thank you!
I listened through to these quiet a few times the other day. I am just now seeing them on the page. Blind to the letters and by the ear, they felt like a hallway with many thresholds, one after the other. Seasoned. Both ways.
Today I am struck by the poetics of jackdaw-sown accidents gone, if they can slip through, into jackdaw sheltering oaks.
I first met this flotilla with talk of jack-daws in the ruins. The Oaks of us, if at all, will be just a wish of woods until long after us. Still...it seems jackdaw scat is kin to nightingale piss, oak seed and fragments of darksong. To Us! All.