A Poem for National Poetry Day 2020

It's National Poetry Day today and the theme this year is Vision. It reminds me of the time I was laid up with a broken leg back in 2015; in addition to the break itself, it also took me a while to get over the shock of such an unlikely accident (falling off the front door step) and the effects of the anaesthetic following the operation to pin my bone back together. I didn't suffer hallucinations but I did spend a lot of time asleep, and also in that strange place between wakefulness and dreaming, where I think this poem comes from. It's a sort of vision come inherited memory, I think.

After the Fall

comes the break 

with all that's normal

the dislocation of lying flat

watching the ceiling's every move

hairline cracks a cryptic

map of its intent

Hour by hour 

I shape my wait with sound

rain and hailstones blinding skylights,

the sullen mutter of the fire,

the twitching dog who dreams of grass 

beneath his paws

the soft-shoe stealth of creeping days

their velvet glances as they leave me

to the wolves

In fractured sleep, half-waking haze

I hear the click of nails

across the kitchen floor

©Deborah Harvey, 2016

from Breadcrumbs, published by Indigo Dreams Publishing

Plus a lympathetic Ted

A Poem for World Poetry Day 2020

Poets are natural hoarders. They understand the importance of memories to the process of writing, and stockpile them for when a future poem might demand, say. the inclusion of a complicit glance, an unexpected gift, or the fall of sunlight through a woodland glade thirty years earlier. 

The restrictions placed upon outdoor activity by COVID-19 means that everyone will now be ransacking their reserves, falling back on memories of loved ones, favourite walks and landscapes, past holidays in distant places, to get through these lean times.

And once we've exhausted the highlights, it will be the mundane that sustains us. The memory of a bottle of glue in a Christmas stocking, the luxury of using it for sticking pictures in your scrapbook. Carefully stabbing open the slit on the red rubber top with the sharp point of a pair of scissors. Turning it upside down and dabbing it hard on a bit of paper to get the glue flowing. And when it was all used up, the disappointment of going back to the gloop of your mother's homemade flour and water paste - its squidginess between the stuck down picture and the page, the inevitable damp wrinkles, the speed with which it congealed in its jam jar. 

Those of us who are able to make are lucky. If we are feeling strong enough, we have the wherewithal to get through this time. It starts between our ears. It turns into words on a page, a drawing filling a blank piece of paper, the rise and fall of notes on suddenly cleaner, quieter air. We at least can make something of this situation. 

A Perfect Circle is from my fourth poetry collection, The Shadow Factory, more of which can be read here on the Indigo Dreams website.