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Poetry Please!

People toss pancakes - and do not know the reason why. Russians know: they eat pancakes for a whole week before the Great Fast before Easter, Lent in English, from and old word for spring. In Russia meat, fish, eggs and finally dairy products are taken out of the diet in the lean weeks before Easter. It used to be the same in the west as well. People ate pancakes to use up the eggs and milk. Now we're being told to give up the use of mobile phones and i-pods for the next six weeks.

Snowdrops

February is the month for snowdrops - my favourite flowers. I celebrate them in a poem written as I share my daughter's sorrow that, because her mind and thoughts are troubled, the child she loves has been brought up in another family. This poem can be found in Clarissa (chipmunkapublublishing), as well as in Uninivited Guest (Triangle/SPCK

Snowdrops

She grew slender as a snowdrop,
loved defenceless things:
seals, and that tremulous pearl
the ebb of summer light leaves
where waves have been.

She traced angels’ wings
on stone and cloud

at length blossomed forth

Ukraine, winter in Kiev

Ukraine... I have loved our explorations of West Ukraine but now I am in Kiev. It is winter. The temperature drops to - 18 and the streets are inches deep in ice. I do not venture out alone. I clutch my companion with one hand and pick at the ice with my walking pole - not stick: poles are for active walkers, sticks are for the bent elderly seen as such on road signs in UK.

A few lines of verse for early February

Lent is the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter, but it is also an old world for spring. February is still winter – and yet a hint of spring brings hope to the following poem.

She lost her purse
and missed the bus.

He slipped on ice –
an early brush
with transience.

Sunshine pours
from this lenten sky –

it will be wet in July.

Set stone is graced
by fleeting light.

Branches set scaffolding
around a nest.

From No Elegy

This rear of hills and the encircling sky,
Scotland…

Home of the seagull, home of the oil,
heartland of lost causes, heart’s dream of the exile,
hoast of fawn-faced bronchitics, doomed on the dole,
dun hold of millions in an industrial sprawl,
home of the failed which bred the word ‘leal’.
High priced resort of the tourist, last lap of the Gael…

published in Jenny Robertson, Beyond the Border, Chapman 1989)

Elegy to the shtetlen

In 1947 Antoni Slonimski (1895 – 1976), a Polish poet of Jewish origins wrote a lament for the vanished small towns of Poland that were once predominately Jewish. A phrase from this poem, wrongly translated was chosen as a title for an illustrated guide to Jewish Poland. My husband, Stuart and I have just made a translation of Slonimski’s elegy.

Meditation for Advent

Advent is traditionally a time for meditating on last things. Sounds gloomy, but the point is that the winter solstice, the longest night, points towards lengthening light. The ancient dwellers of these islands knew it: Maes Howe in Orkney is built so that the solstice sun strikes to the heart of the burial mound. The Christian faith declares it. A rose is born in midwinter, the old carols declare. Advent heralds Nativity: new birth, new life, new hope. So although the following nocturne sounds a little bleak – it ends with light.

Peace

On a happier note the following poem celebrates the Nativity. It won first prize in this year’s Blue Butterfly Christian Poetry Competition and I am including it in my Christmas cards.

Clarissa

Clarissa is a new collection of poems, together with a prose account. The publisher, chipmunkapublishing is unique because it aims to give people with mental ill health - and their carers - a voice. Mental illness affects one in four, or even one in three of the population of the UK at some time or other in their lives. Severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, blights the lives of young people and devastates their families. One estimate says it has killed the potential of more young people than the two world wars put together.

It could be you. It could be a son or daughter - please God, no! But suppose it is? Who cares? Who will help?

Poetry Please!

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