Francis and the Crib at Greccio One witness, among the crowd …. reported that Francis included a carved doll which …. seemed to be awake...
Tofts Lane
‘Living down there was like living in a bean pod; one could see nothing but the bed one lay in’ Cider with Rosie – Laurie Lee
The row of cottages nestles
into the crag in the same way
as the child above me shapes
her frame to her mother’s hip.
The buildings look down on me
as mother and daughter
greet me and my neck cricks up
to take in kind faces and sashed windows.
The drystone wall, like a breakwater
keeps the cottages from spilling into the
road my dog and I trudge daily.
Grace’s young voice,
lisped by chewing an apple,
is crammed with her new term.
Mrs Green is young,
there is also old Mrs Jameson
and on Wednesday, after lunch,
Miss Bankstone for story time.
The daughter’s garrulousness
emerges from maternal skirts,
cultivating the affinity
of our gate-side chats,
like tea in cups.
To Grace’s chagrin
grown-up talk begins,
her father from a top window,
his big plans that will
eat their weekends,
as the dog’s lead strains
against the current of our walk.
Both this woman’s grans
lived in the valley
leaving a long drift
of ancestral memory.
From the planting
of a line lime trees,
to the paddling of pools,
from old Matty’s well
to the quarry in Rivelin Glen.
I tell her of a photo
I found of our house
from early last century,
walls daubed with whitewash,
advertising teas and sweets
for the whit-walkers,
a boy and a girl at the door,
in their Sunday best.
The dog and Grace are restless,
pulling us away from the richness
of stretching our roots into
this mill-streamed, valley.
This green backwater
where we ply our subsistence,
as it always has been,
back into the horse drawn past.
In the last pass that
a good chat entails
we share that the virus
made us walk the valley more,
traverse more of its paths and tracks,
fall more for its green and shabby charms.
We have both seen the Barn Owl
as it swoops down Coppice Lane,
outspread over us,
cream and brown,
at once lonely and at home.
And the bat’s erratic
scattering progress
as the dusk catches
us unlatched and opened.
And we find we are breathing
in time with the valley,
finding green hope
in its sheltering edges,
nestling in like a
child to its mother’s hip.
'Have you ever been plunged under the surface of your conscious life and found yourself all at sea, not knowing what course to steer?'
- All At Sea, In A Night Sea Journey
'When will you be ready to hear the voice that has been speaking to you with a patient kindness for some time now, like birdsong as you wake?'
- When Will You Be Ready, Arriving in Magic
'I came back from High Easdale Tarn, and my teacup was white like a new page'
- Easdale Tarn , A Night Sea Journey
'I often wonder what my face says as it stares out at the world. Is it begging a question of the returning gazes, asking who am I and where does my face fit?'
- My Face, Arriving in Magic
'And so, the ordinary continues to be the thing that is most dangerous, and the hundred-year-old memory that we banished'
- Sheffield In Lockdown, Soon to be published collection about Sheffield
'A space presents itself as the wind and the needled edge of the saguaro cactus, speak of the solitude that you bargain away for acquaintance'
- Aravaipa Canyon, Unpublished Poem
'What is acidic in you, that might turn sweet, yearning for delivery, to take first breath. Go into hard labour to birth it, It is there, in the womb of you, aching to emerge'
- Last Testament, A Night Sea Journey
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