TED Walks in the time of Coronavirus Pt 6 ... or I get locked down (but I get up again)

Actually, we haven't taken full advantage of the relaxation in the rules and gone to Berrow Beach, or my much-missed Dartmoor, or on an all-day road trip to the south coast. It just doesn't feel safe yet to me, and anyway, my car is overdue its MOT and service (though booked in). But Son the Younger, Ted the Dog, and I have been on a couple of walks along the Severn, and enjoyed the huge skies and the slightly misplaced sense of being (nearly) by the sea. 

The first walk was one Ted and I had done before, only this time we were starting our walk from Whale Wharf and heading for Oldbury Pill and the nuclear power station half a mile or so beyond it, rather than the other way around. 

It was so good to feel the breeze, and see and smell the river. And the cows! Lovely lovely cows. 

Some of the local sailors had taken advantage of the relaxation of the lockdown and taken their boats out. 

Spring came early this year, but conditions are harsher on the river and it was nice to see some whitethorn still in bloom on Oldbury Pill. 

And by the sailing club swathes of umbellifers. Instead of continuing to call everything cow parsley, I've embarked on a scratch course -  Know Your Umbellifers 101 - since our lockdown walks began,and can confidently identify this as hemlock ... 

... and this is hemlock water dropwort, from our second walk, starting at Shepperdine and walking down to the power station.

Forget, for a moment, Covid-19. What with deadly plants and nuclear power stations, quicksand and this, everything was always out to get us anyway. 

It was very very windy for our second walk so we cut it a lot shorter than planned. 

But it was good to take a deep breath before diving back into lockdown.

We also made a trip to Badock's Wood, which is local but not within comfortable walking distance from our home. And ooh it was lovely down in the little gorge, among the dark summer trees ...

... and the still just blossoming ramsons ... 

... though Ted was a bit put out at the River Trym's lack of water.

There was a sad thing, though, namely the deliberate damage done to the carvings, both in the wood and in the fields above it. 

Especially this carving which I liked so much, I had it in my author's photo on the back of my poetry collection, Breadcrumbs, to mark how important the wood was to me at the time I lived the poems.

Otherwise, we've been mostly going up over the golf course, sticking to the public footpaths to access Charlton Common and the meadow. 

Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to block every single desire path on the edge of the course with brushwood, and sometimes barbed wire.

There's also a few new instructions to follow. Presumably this is so that walkers exercising their right to walk on ancient public rights of way can see golf balls heading towards them and catch them before they get hit. 

We've also been walking up the Public Right of Way that hasn't been painted white. There's an arrow pointing to it in the little wood on the edge of the course, but no further indication of where it runs, unless you have a map. I have a map ... 

... and I'm not afraid to use it. It's a useful thing to have in your pocket to wave around in case of challenges. (A friend was told she had no right to walk across the course while she was actually standing on a painted line.) 

Though for now the most concerning thing has been the possibility of transfiguration and ascension to a higher astral plane.

With the whitethorn all but gone, we have instead elderflowers, cornflowers, hogweed and cow parsley, pot marigolds and viper's blugloss, vetch ... 

... plus a field full of pignut. 

The small dark wood of the mind is darker and more impenetrable than ever ... 

... but there are sunsets too ... 

... and plenty of ticks to pick up. Verily, some kind of heaven. 

A Poem for World Mental Health Day 2019

This poem is from my 2016 collection, Breadcrumbs, published by Indigo Dreams. I'm posting it for World Mental Health Day, with the reminder that when you've lived in a familiar situation for a long time, it can be very hard to see just how damaging it is. Also, that writing - or otherwise exploring your creativity - helps (if you're able to do that).

Headland

  

This was no rupture. No sudden loss

that left you stranded from yourself

All the same, the land is gone

He must have filched it with a spoon

so surreptitiously sometimes even now

you don’t perceive its absence as anything

more than a tendency to dream

don’t hear the breach filled with echoing dark,

don’t notice you’ve stopped building boats and bridges

out of stories

©Deborah Harvey 2016

A Poem for National Poetry Day 2019

It's National Poetry Day today and the theme is truth, which seems a timely choice to me, given that the sort of lying and gaslighting that often characterises abusive domestic relationships is now being demonstrated by heads of state on both sides of the Atlantic.  

Here's a poem about the sometimes elusive nature of truth from my 2016 collection, Breadcrumbs. 

Variations on the Theme of Truth

I am fluent

in thirteen languages

each one a lie

You force me to lie

by not making it easy

to tell the truth

My lies

are the questions

you don’t ask

I tell you

what you want to hear

I kill you with kindness

Nobody lies

more than you do

to yourself 

My lies are truth, my truth

the only thing that matters

is that you believe me

Truth is, I never lie

I’d say I’m sorry

but I’m not

A Poem for World Poetry Day 2018

Spring is a time of renewal, so here's a poem on that subject from my collection, Breadcrumbs. It has an epigraph from a letter written by John Keats to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats, in which he says 'We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same: for the careful Monks patch it and patch it: till there's not a thread of the original garment left, and still they show it for St Anthony's shirt'. 

Relict

‘We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same’

                                                                                              John Keats

Her mouth forgets him first, her tongue

sloughing his aftertaste hours after their parting

Next, her skin divests itself. Within a month

there isn’t an inch that remembers his touch

Her quickening blood scours love’s taint,

the shadows darkening her heart retreat, grow faint

Three years and the hair he preferred cropped

falls past her shoulders in torrents, never the same river twice

and although she still feels him in her bones

it won’t be much longer before he’s gone

and she’ll be herself, the same yet different,

the relict garment of a saint,

a patchwork sail on the leafing mast

of Theseus’s ship

©Deborah Harvey 2016

Breadcrumbs is available to buy from Indigo Dreams Publishing and the usual outlets.

A Poem for National Poetry Day 2017

It's National Poetry Day today and the theme is Freedom. So here's a poem on that subject from my collection Breadcrumbs, which is published by Indigo Dreams. 















Longships

for CB


We arrive 
hunched under history

dragging our pasts 
like phantom limbs,

stop 
when the land stops

Beyond sorrel, wild madder, gorse
cloud and sea touch,

a blind dissolving 
into nothing,

this last slab of granite 
becoming the first 

Put down your things, 
you say. Catch hold my hand 

Dance 

Dance 

©Deborah Harvey 2016

 

 

Artwork by Dru Marland

A Poem for World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day 2017 #ifmywoundswerevisible

Today is World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day. For more information, read here and, most importantly, here.

A Misattribution

  

The honeymoon ended

but the moon kept pouring, no one said when

and within a couple of months

his blood was heavy, sluggish with honey

their new life together

built of sugar

the doors peanut brittle, the windows

glazed with melted sweets

and he

losing his temper, raging

hair stuck to the ceiling, his fingers

and palm prints marking the walls

while she who’d promised

in sickness, in health

baked puddings and cakes

sweetened with apple

learnt to spot symptoms the instant

he stormed in through the door,

not knowing that fury isn’t a given

not seeing how everything had turned golden,

he an idol in his palace

she walled up in a honeycomb cell

©Deborah Harvey 2016

'A Misattribution' is from my poetry collection, 'Breadcrumbs', which is available from Indigo Dreams Publishing, Amazon, and your local bookshop, if it still exists.

A Poem for World Poetry Day 2017

Strange, I thought, and rather unnecessary of the man working in my locallest Oxfam bookshop to pick the very moment I began to browse the one poetry shelf to start lifting books off to make a World Poetry Day 2017 display in an already crowded shop window. The day was half over anyway, and I probably would have bought more than just one slim volume, had most of the books not been whisked away from under my nose. I might have doubled or even tripled their total number of books sold on World Poetry Day 2017.

This was a pleasing find, though. 

Anyway, in a bid to up my poetry quota for the day, I'm going to post one I prepared earlier. It's the title poem of my third collection, Breadcrumbs, and it's about resisting those who would wield complete control over us, whether on a domestic or international scale. It feels particularly apt for these troubling times. 

Breadcrumbs

She’s finished her chores for the week

five spare hours cupped in her hand

takes her hoard to the bedroom

In the kitchen

he’s checking the state of the floor

runs his finger down the counters

slams each gleaming cupboard door

stamps upstairs to glare at her

from the landing

turns as she puts her pen aside

crumples poems into balls

fills her pockets

©Deborah Harvey 2016

'Breadcrumbs' is available from Indigo Dreams Publishing, good bookshops everywhere, and Amazon. 

Satellite of Love

Satellite of Love is a relatively new gig in Bristol for page and performance poets alike, but over the last year it's become very popular, and not just because it takes place upstairs at the Greenbank in Easton, one of the best pubs around. The hosts - Helen, Pauline and Stella - are welcoming, the audience attentive and appreciative, and it just feels good to be there.  

I was so pleased they asked me to be one of the two monthly guest readers (along with Tom Sastry) on International Women's Day.  My Breadcrumbs poems have acquired a new resonance with the election of Trump, and even though we've long known that the personal is political, I feel a lot more like a political poet these days. It turns out the overweening desire for control is pretty much the same whether it's exercised in the home or the White House. Apart from the nuclear bombs.

Also, the event, which is free to attend, has raised over £500 in donations in the last fourteen months or so for various charities supporting refugees. 

It runs every second Wednesday in the month. Get in touch with the organisers via Facebook for an open mic slot.  

Clearing: A Poem for International Women's Day 2017

Clearing

'Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all' 

                     Hermann Hesse

Know your empty place, make it home

Scar tissue’s intractable, dead

It’s your wound that will remind you

who you are. Walk its edges,

test its depth, map its contours

your geography of loss

The trees might seem distant

They’re eating sunlight, snagging cloud

When night comes they’ll slip a spoke

in the turning wheel of stars

They won’t mind if you touch them

print their bark on the skin of your face

listen for the fizzing sap

rising in your veins

©Deborah Harvey 2016 

Art by Dru Marland 

A Poem for #WomensMarch

Somewhat belatedly, a poem from my collection, Breadcrumbs, for all the women who marched on Sunday in protest against a powerful man whose behaviour, attitude and language mirror the tactics of abusers.

Wildwood

It’s time to leave this house

Glancing up as I cut the grass

I see three apples, green in leaves,

the first-ever crop on the tree I grew

from the seed of the final fruit

picked in my grandmother’s garden

I’ll watch them swell and ripen

take the pips with me when I go,

plant a tree that might not blossom

in the years that are left

There are millions of seeds in pots and jam jars,

spilling from mouths of paper bags

one for each minute of each day lost, 

copses, forests, wildwood

falling through my fingers

I reach for the hands of my children, my sisters,

our dormant stories stir in earth

make for the light

©Deborah Harvey 2016  

'These are important poems. They carry us through despair and hope, through myths and imaginings, through violence and insight to deliver us to a place where we are not only enriched but wiser. Harvey's poems are astute, well-crafted and delivered with a calm certainty that is hard-won by any poet. Witty, surreal and above all redemptive, this book uncovers truth after truth and, like stars, sets them shining.'                ALYSON HALLETT                                                                                


'I think very highly of Deborah Harvey's work. Her honesty draws you in because Harvey knows that honesty is itself an art form. It needs to be strongly crafted; it is a crafted matter; and she makes a persuasive poetry from the matter of experience.'               DAVID MORLEY

An Eight Red Kite Day

Dawn turned up at 8am this morning. I couldn't stay around to make her breakfast, however. I was off up the M4.

I would have loved to have had a fossick around this 13th century church in Swallowfield - so inviting with its flint walls and half-timbered porch. 

But the door of All Saints was locked and there was no note to indicate where a key might be found.  

Never mind. I saw six red kites on the way home, to add to the pair I'd spotted on the way up. At home I discovered that Breadcrumbs is featured in Writing magazine, in an article about my wonderful publishers, Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams, along with Mab Jones's new collection.

And Ted was chuffed with his doggy bag of garlic bread. An Eight Red Kite Day.