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.