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Woven with words: Jenny's Writing Week

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.

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)

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?

Simply write

I wonder if you know about Robert Louis Stevenson. He lived in Edinburgh in the nineteenth century. His grandfather and his father designed and built lighthouses around the coast of Scotland. Young Robert wanted to build books, not lighthouses. But, if you think about it, a good book is a kind of lighthouse.

Robert’s family didn’t understand him. They thought he was lazy. They said he was wasting his time. Robert Louis Stevenson knew better.

Jenny's writing week

A poem written in June about a feast in February!

I chose Candlemas,
that forgotten feast
songless, last moment for the crib

Candlemas. Our Lady’s Feast.

The old man Simeon sang peace
as he held the young girl’s child.

Candlemas – a taking down:
no fuss or flowers.

I wrote this poem during a workshop when we were asked to think about seasons and what they mean to us. We all chose winter seasons, although it was high summer with soaring temperatures.

Woven with words: Jenny's Writing Week

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