The New Writer

In 2011, my submission was highly commended in The New Writer's Collection Competition. This Autumn they published the following 3 poems from that submission. They are all poems set in Crete, and I love the way they set them out all on one page - thank-you The New Writer, I feel honoured!
www.thenewwriter.com

Borders

                                   It was easy to find

the herb garden. A boy, dark-skinned, 

puts down his hoe to show us round 

beds of rose bergamot, cinnamon trees,

five varieties of sage, a bank of blue hyssop. 

He picks us leaves that taste of chocolate, 

sprigs of things to sniff - savouries, thymes and mints -

pointing out subtle differences

like someone born to it. 

‘Did you grow up here?’

No, he’s from a place in Northern Pakistan,

famous for cricket. He’s walked here, 

he says. Had to. Eldest son. 

No, not Afghanistan, he almost laughed,

too dangerous. Through Iran.

Arrived in Thessalonika. No work.

Athens. No work. Terrible, he says.

A friend brought him here.

 ‘So you’re safe here?’

I see him hoeing, watering, harvesting

the healing herbs. ‘It's paradise in Crete?’ 

He shrugs, looks at the soil on his feet.

‘I live over there,’ waving vaguely 

at mauve mountains.

‘I cannot live in village. Police. 

No papers. Papers only by marry.’ 

I pinch out a smile.

Tagetes are piled on the drying nets,

bloody as sunsets, behind him. 

The thyme is on fire, seething

with bees.

Easter Monday

Morning air still

has the chill of spring 

in its veins

but we wake bleary

from too much blood of God

in ours  

still heavy

with Easter’s

spit-roast sacrifices.

We drink the blood of two oranges,

breathe basil

and singed cypress wood.

Spun light pulses

wireless

between geranium and lavender.

Paired doves 

make love with same three notes 

an interval apart.

The single yellow iris 

cuts its quivering chiaroscuro

out of carob shade

waiting

for the baritone drone

of the bee

to sense an entrance, 

lever the velvet sepal, 

bumble in, 

and leave,

perfunctory

in its purpose.

Peaches

September. School is back. 

I'm on the beach, biting the flesh

of a soft, sun-ripened peach.

A cicada tuts from a tamarisk tree.

I think of my grandma, who once, 

on a Greenline bus in Hertfordshire, 

after the war, when I was four,

announced her disapproval of peaches.

'All skin and stone. 

Nowt between worth the money.'

Hanna, sumptious as a peach, 

sprawls sultana golden on a beachbed

borrowed from an old man 

toothless and walnut skinned,

who watches her all day 

from under his tamarisk tree. 

Hannah doesn’t mind. Whatever 

turns him on. She has a bed: 

he, food for fantasy.

Both have their peaches, free.

Autumn 2012

Published in The Interpreter's House 51, October 2012

I love The Interpreter's House because it's a treasure trove of mostly shortish poems, mostly just one per author, and also because they always seem to choose the poem from my submissions that I thought least likely to be accepted!

www.interpretershouse.org.uk

To keep it safe

I could slab up blocks of clay

to sculpt the memory of this bay. 

I’d leave roughcast edges 

jagged against screens of scenery blue.

Lower down, I’d whittle away

a curl of lip, sphincter, vulva,

blow-hole and cave-mouth

for molten glass

precious as marbles, to fill.

Winkle out slithery things:

a scuttle of crabs, a starfish,

a twitching slippage of squid.

Further out in indigo blue,

shoals, oh shoals and shoals

of nib-sized fish would be writing

epic novels of the deep dimension,

illuminating pages with ghosts 

of living oceans past.

Rhyme and Reason Writers have published a beautiful desk diary of poetry and prose on the subject of Seasons, in aid of Ian Rennie Grove House Hospice www.irgh.org.uk. They have been raising funds in this way for 22 years, which is phenomenal! It's a lovely book to dip into through the year, and would make a lovely present at the modest price of £5! Poet Gerard Benson judged the poems, and this one of mine was chosen.

Four Seasons: Notes

Winter evenings sweat wet woodsmoke

and a bitter tar drips from the zomba’s chimney.

Ravens crunch the air like split kindling.

By midnight, sharp moonlight

carries salt on its tongue, stings 

with new snow from the mountains.

I hear Death and the Maiden.

Spring sweeps in with a hiss 

of swifts, unzips its hoard of golds:

sunspurge, crown daisies, Jerusalem sage,

in a Hallelujah chorus. And I’m listening

for jasmine, but what I get is orange blossom:

notes flagrant as the cadences of a kora

or that aria from Tosca.

Summer is brittle, splits pods, spits pellets

to a raucous chorus of cicadas.

A sexy armpit stink slithers

through open car windows, from the sticky 

weed that stays green when the rest is straw.

Mastic oozes. Scents are deep as carob honey, 

dark as Desert Blues.

Autumn’s first drops on hot earth release

pheromones of hope, stir sea onions 

to send out spires of light. But too early

and they spoil the grapes with mildew,

sour the wine. Half-dried sultanas rot.

Fermenting figs drop on the road, stick

in the ribs of our soles. Thunder,

distant drum rolls.

The Sheffield Anthology

The launch is on September 29th (10.30am at The Spiegel Tent) - not to be missed if you're in Sheffield (I won't be unfortunately!)

Here's my contribution.

Saturday Live

This is what boys are for! To strip 

to the hip-sagging baggy pants;

shrug, slouch, then somersault to the brim

of the fountain; cat-crawl the wall,

cartwheel, lazy-vault a stone plinth, 

bend knees and flat foot it free-style, 

frog-fashion, down all seven levels

of stone sliced by blades of water. 

This is what boys do: brace

on the handrail of city steps, spring

so that two feet lunge up to stand 

on the next rail. Let go, drop back, land 

squarely in size 12 trainers on the pavement.

Stroll back to the crowd, unflinching, 

unsmiling, like no one’s watching. Cool

as this cutting edge curve of water on steel.

This is what public sculpture’s for: to mirror

these moves. This is what public spaces are for. 

This is what this Saturday afternoon’s for:

sliding down stone bannisters on one hip, 

September not quite here. This

is what boys are: poems freed in air

above the sandwich wrappers in Sheaf Square

breakfalling among pigeons.

Grains of Sand

This poem had just been shortlisted in a Friends of the Earth competition, Earthwords, and will appear in an anthology (details of how to obtain this when I know!)

Synchronistically, this exquisite photo was posted on Fb by Clare Turner, and the photographer gave me permission to attach it to the poem on my blog. The only colour not in the poem is the blue spiral that unifies them all...I think these photographs could inspire a lot more poetry!

This poem was inspired by being in the desert in Arizona last year and seeing the plants and plant dyes used by the Navajo people for their weaving. That combined with a fragment of poetry I'd written years ago when idly sifting sand on a beach in Greece, and the idea of writing a poem set in the future.

The colour of wet

We had our one blanket, and the colours still

in it had names. Names of the plants from this land

in the times when the desert still flowered. 

So, we could name all the colours of grains of sand.

The yellows: rabbit brush, cliff rose and snakeweed.

Browns were onions, oak bark and tea.

Deep red was juniper, but most precious of all

was a pink from a shrub called purple bee. 

These grains were so few, they were kept in the skull

of a grasshopper the wind had spun in. And we’d ask

and ask, what were rabbits, what were bees,

what was a snake, and what the colour of grass?

A brighter, cooler colour than we’d ever dream,

they sighed. The colour of wet, the colour of clean.

Images and captions by Dr. Gary Greenberg, Author of A Grain of Sand

The tip of a spiral shell has broken off and become a grain of sand. It is opalescent from the repeated tumbling action of the surf. Surrounding the shell fragment are five other sand grains, from top middle clockwise, (1) a pink shell fragment, (2) a foram, (3) a microscopic shell, (4) a volcanic melt, and (5) a bit of coral. Image Copyright © 2008 Dr. Gary Greenberg, All Rights Reserved.

 www.sandgrains.com

Published in 2012

Unhinged

You’re moulded in the hot hole of your bed

like any creature that is not of the night.

But the creaks and crashes that wake you

aren’t of the forest, and you’re not holed

in the stable earth or safely nested 

in the bole of a tree. You are asleep high 

in the pink house on the edge of the hill, 

with flimsy fixtures straining for a fling

with this North Westerly who’s a knack 

of unclasping shutters that slam 

against windows, the trick

of slapping awnings, slinging screens 

and shaking doors that ache to unhinge. 

So, you must drag your sleep-sodden 

limbs from their second skin, stumble 

downstairs, wrench open resistant windows, 

let the beast in, fanged and freezing. 

You must fight to fend off its force

while you clamp the stiff catches closed

again, wrench and secure the latches

in their cold metal beds, then burrow back

to the weak, wasted warmth of yours.

It’s what you do. Wake up, slough off

the sleeping animal, work out

what in the world needs doing.

This one was shortlisted in the Ver PrizeCompetition judged by Mimi Khalvati, and appears in the Ver Prize Anthology. It's not set in this English summer, but in a Cretan January!

Nothing Sacred

The warning tape was scattered ragged in the wind.

Her machete rang on stone, then stuck in space.

She heard stuff hit water.

The language didn’t sound like modern Greek.

Nor were the sounds quite like a modern lute.

A kingfisher skimmed by: they’re territorial.

She knew more about birds than ancient sites.

The cave contained five graves of female saints.

‘For heaven’s sake, what now?’ she heard one sigh.

This poem came out of one of Peter Sansom's more quirky exercises and has just been published in the wonderfully vibrant Other Poetry, of which the editor James Roderick Burns boasts, ' We have never had a house style - poetry is too diverse and surprising for that'. It's a refreshing, sparkling read of poems and reviews 'from the North East of England and the Known World.' Worth more that a fiver! Go to www.otherpoetry.com. 

2011 - a good year for short listings!

It was fun being feted by Holland Park Press at their celebratory event as one of five shortlisted poets out of 900 entries to their Angels and Devils Competition on the subject of family relationships. Also good to be there with Rosie Garland and hear her read her winning poem. Thanks to those lovely people.

I was chuffed to be commended in The New Writer’s Collection Competition - among the top ten entries. As a result, some of my poems will be published in The New Writer later in the year. Definitely progress from the Honourable Mention they gave me in 2010! 

And in the prestigious Cinnamon Poetry Collection Competitiion, my collection was longlisted.

The poem ‘Slackening’ was shortlisted in The Grey Hen Competition, and two poems were shortlisted in The Second Light Competition.

All very encouraging, as is an invitation by Oversteps Books to submit a collection at the end of this year.

Plenty to work towards, then! 

Thanks to all of you who've looked at my published poems from 2011. I hope to add many more in 2012.

Poems in one place 2011

Slackening

Pouring your muesli helps assuage my guilt

while you get dressed to catch the twelve past eight

knowing I’ll take my tea back to our quilt

still warm, to read . I stay pyjamad til quite late

these days. Last week’s storms have stripped the trees.

It’s winter. Easy to find excuses not to swim. 

We don’t need Google to tell us it will freeze

again tonight. Easier to sink another evening in.

So life winds down in loose, uneasy patterns,

we sort of rationalise our letting go of dreams.

Skin’s surface like the stems of green things slacken

but affection does a better job than creams;

while the habit of acceptance makes failing 

memories, eyesight, backs, plainish sailing. 

Cora Greenhill

published in The North, January 2012

www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

Desert trade

Even the sky 

Painting by Pauline Rignall

is dust. Walls and streets 

bleached mud: all shades of beige. 

He seats himself before us, 

a pool of blues, unwinds 

a river of indigo from his face, 

which shines like oil,

purple with dye that’s bled.

Long, tapered fingers flash 

their rings as he unpacks 

treasure from crumpled calico:

amber, hammered silver, 

polished camel teeth.

The bargain made, we pay. 

He stays. Expectant. 

The ceremony of trade

is incomplete. I grope 

around for gifts. Find soap,

in hotel wrappers. 

His sneer 

Tuareg man in Timbuctoo, 2004,
 taken on our journey to The Festival in the Desert

reveals gold teeth. ‘Tuareg women

don’t use soap. Just oil.’

A gleaming finger pokes

my flesh, its shades of beige.

As if its pigment had been lost

by washing.

Cora Greenhill

Published in The New Writer, Summer 2011,

www.thenewwriter.com 

and The Best of Manchester Poets 2, (Puppywolf) 2011

www.puppywolf.co.uk 

Nil by Mouth, week 3

Still no swallow, so we’d brought things to smell:

lavender was in bloom and I’d plucked rosemary

trudging the dual carriageway from Silver Street. 

Tessa brought various kinds of mint 

from her Berkshire garden. You grunted

what we took to be approval. Encouraged, 

I’d brought essential oils today. You had me repeat 

their names: chamomile, geranium, frankincense,

rose. You nostrils quivered at each sniff. 

Then from the twilit depths of your confusion, 

as if the oils had cleared some mental passageways

like menthol for the mind, with just a whiff 

of a smile, you announced your plan. 

 ‘You can leave the bottles in the drawer, 

and we can have some more tomorrow, 

instead of listening to music. One is familiar

with the music, you know. But one isn’t

familiar with this. It’s very … interesting.’ 

Along the dual carriageway I walk on air, 

become familiar with this ballooning

happiness, held on a rope of grief.

Cora Greenhill

Published in Antiphon, 2011

Antiphon.org.uk

Released

Night scent of late jasmine: 

the flower Greeks gave

to departing guests,

like blown kisses 

reaching only air.

And I see you still

in that seagreen quilt, 

shrunken like these almonds, 

blackened on the tree in winter. 

A white silence 

of owlglide

full 

of its own perfection      

drops

all of it   

flight-feathers flared,

talons down-stretched 

onto the top branch

of the pomegranate tree.

Closing its cape around its shoulders,

it settles to watch me, a stranger

cloaked in her losses.

A spindle of silence whorls me.

As if this weren’t enough, 

its lift-off swoops so near me

I am caught in the updraft

vacuumed, undressed,

sucked clean enough to see

you, my mother, who hunted

like an owl 

pouncing on revelation

fly off

• your freedom in your claws.

Cora Greenhill

Published in ARTEMISpoetry, 2011

www.secondlightlive.co.uk

Myrtle accepts containers

I bought the little shrub for its coconut

scented leaves and tiny vanilla flowers

for the pot by the back door.

And then I remembered the tree

at Moni Paliani: higher than the church,

and the convent grown around it.

The cobwebs in the canopy are thick

as hide with dust. There is no space

in matted branches where birds,

snakes, hedgehogs, lizards, bats and rats

have built and left their nests.

It is suffocating in there, dry

as birdbones, snail shells, beetle 

carapaces, vacated snake skins.

Burdens of prayers, both appeals 

and gratitude, clutter its lower storeys: 

crutches, corsets, frames. 

And human hands and feet,

eyes and hearts, on cheap tin plaques.

And the icon, just wedged in there 

among the debris, had been stolen

but always returned. 

A lamp burned 

perpetually beside Her. 

Agia Myrtia. Holy Myrtle. 

Container not contained.

Cora Greenhill

Published in ARTEMISpoetry, 2011

www.secondlightlive.co.uk

Today

The boot’s full of bulging sacks, heavy as corpses.

Free firewood. After lugging them in, trundle off

down Malaxa mountain. A scatter of goat turds 

on the road glow like dark chocolates: free compost.

Better than horse manure for potassium,

Giorgos told me, after I’d spread

Leo’s stable muck around the orange trees

banking on getting a better crop next winter.

I flick turds into a sack with a piece of the wood, 

loose patience, lift them by hand. Forgot the trowel

I used yesterday to edge out crowded century plants.

Century plants flower in ten years, not a hundred,

Giorgos said. But either way I’ll quite likely be dead.

Someone will see them, I say to the road ahead.

2

Hungry, I hit the coast at Kalives. Smell out 

souvlaki joint, still open in winter. Carry 

pita gyros to the beach, a nice weight 

in the hand, reminiscent of something. 

Watch a tumescent rainbow prod donkey dark

cloud from a steel horizon on slate-black sea.

I want my hair to be these glorious, grisly greys, 

to shine darkly, as my feet sink in clay,

like today. I want my food to be this good

when I’m this hungry. I grow more beastly

as I get older. Hands, clumsy on keyboards now, 

reach for real tools: machete, pick axe, trowel.

I loose my watch, forget my phone. Alone,

warming my bum at the stove, I’m home.

Cora Greenhill
Published Tears in the Fence, 2011

Wild relatives

Ganesh stands on our windowsill, 

silver-etched with signs, sparkling

with elephant aura. 

It was he who carried me, 

when I journeyed shamanically,

ears tyrannosaurus butterflies.

One rush hour on The Underground 

last year, foetal elephants swam 

all filmy pink on everyone’s front page. 

Our communal unconscious

held its breath. Trains floated

in unspoken tenderness.

I felt that sway again, under straddled 

thighs, the shudder and steady

as the path tipped slippery to the river.

Alarm at a trunk raised trumpeting

wild relatives, gathered like shadows

among the baobabs, watching

the tame orphans we were riding. 

Remembered, too, old eyes, dwarfed

by the crackled expanse of cranium,

hold mine, as the baby’s trunk,

thicker than an arm, wetlipped

peanuts from my tingling palm.

Another day, a herd straddled

nonchalant around our open jeep,

not caring to change their route

at our incursion. A nudge would topple 

us, but they flowed gravely by: 

a river of elephantkind.

Fourth Floor, Harvey Nichols:

a waste of silks and sushi. Handbags

of snakeskin, crocodile. Afternoon teas.

Mesmerised, we drift the aisles.

Discreet designer label on a grey hide 

jacket reads – I put my glasses on – elefant. 

Cora Greenhill

Published Lumen Camden Anthology, 2011

Unconditional Life

We can see them all

over Blacka Moor, near Sheffield:

stonechat, linnet, sparrowhawk,

wheatear and woodcock.

though we may not know them

In marshes near Redcar

wade gadwall and pochard. 

nor who on earth named them

On Redesdale

marlin and peregrine fly

and dippers dive.

though no one’s  watching

They’re still on the wing

near Kirkby Stephen:

the Northern Brown Argos

(whose egg is laid on the upper side

of the young leaf of the Rock Rose )

and the Green Fritillary

(whose caterpillar feeds on Dog Violet).

will their names outlive them?

Somewhere near Weston, the orchids

- Green Winged, or Early Purple, 

followed by Autumn Lady’s Tresses -

are visited by the Grizzled Skipper 

and Grayling.

  or will they fly on, 

nameless, when we’ve gone?

Cora Greenhill 

Published in ARTEMISpoetry, 2011

www.secondlightlive.co.uk