A Poem for World Poetry Day 2019

Every day is World Poetry Day in our house. I love the fact that poetry is such a big, comforting, startling thing in our lives. But today is the official World Poetry Day that only comes once a year ...

... and to mark it, I'm posting my poem 'Oystercatchers', which recently won the 2018 Plough Prize Short Poem Competition. (Still haven't quite integrated that information into my life.)

And also some photos of Uphill Slipway in Somerset, which is the landscape I had in my head when I wrote it. 

Uphill is where, according to local folklore, the boy Jesus landed with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, en route for Glastonbury. For me it has a deeply creative, rather more pagan resonance that feels just as divine.  

Oystercatchers

‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte’

                           ‘L’étranger’, Albert Camus                                                                

One day

the day she’s been waiting for will come

and she’ll take these words with her to the sea

unzip her coat, pull open her ribcage

let them fly as purposely

as oystercatchers

pulling the strings of the sky

and tide

lifting the weight from each blood cell

giving her permission      

©Deborah Harvey 2019 

'Oystercatchers' is from my forthcoming collection, The Shadow Factory, which will be published by Indigo Dreams Publishing later this summer.  

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 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. 

A Poem for World Poetry Day 2016

It's no longer good enough just to be a day, one of the 365, getting out of bed, shining yourself up a bit to meet the masses - no, you have to be World Something-or-other Day too.  It's this celebrity culture, innit.

March 21st is the Kim Kardashian of days - first day of spring, Equinox, World Downs Syndrome Awareness Day, World Poetry Day. Here's a poem in honour of attribute 4 that has attributes 1 and 2 covered.  

Tipping the Balance

Let winter steal this March on spring

falling backwards into snowlight, 

its blinding victory. 

It’s not about green and yellow,

the glow of celandines or whether

miserly beeches are still pocketing their coppers

We’ll measure the turning year in light,

throw the wolf and lion into the balance,

let afternoons trickle into evening,

evening out the hours of dark

and as night comes

hurtling into morning,

wake to the beating of wings

warm as migratory kisses

©Deborah Harvey 2014

'Tipping the Balance' is from my 2014 collection, Map Reading for Beginners, which is available from Indigo Dreams Publishing, good bookshops everywhere, and Amazon if you must. 

My new poetry collection, Breadcrumbs, will be published in the next few weeks.

A Crown of Sonnets for World Poetry Day 2014

I've been so busy distributing brochures for the Bristol Spring Poetry Festival next month - have I mentioned that before, the Spring Festival? - that I missed until now the fact that it's World Poetry Day.  Never mind, here is a Feather Crown.

Seven Feathers

Lucifer

Scattering sparks, glints of glass,

it scalpels down through solid light,

freeing lethal, sharp-edged feathers

of every colour that is black –

crackle of witchery, guilt-edged

misery, thunder, mussel shells, the cavern

that is absence

Watcher, jagged scavenger, dark harbinger,

the idea of raven

arranging pieces into claw, beak, sinew, eye

fused to horizon,

melting from the blazing sun,

emerging glossed, wing feathers

fingering bright air

Magger

Wing feathers fingering air, a quick

flickering in woods

Black or white, day or night,

it’s not that simple

Somewhere a river’s running backwards,

pebbles, stones are treading water,

flowers open on the coldest day of winter

 

so don’t spit rituals, mutter rhymes 

to make me safe, unwind bad luck 

Don’t read meaning into chance configuration

I don’t take jewels, the fairsies’ gold

I whet the silver’s sickle edge,

the half light of the half dark moon,

a stealing shadow

Chaw

Steely shadows, colour of doubt,

pinned to the ridge tiles of the house

by silver eyes that do not blink

What makes you think, this time,

things will be any different?

Your feathers rags, your ageing bones

too thin, too frail to hold you high,

lift you clear

yet still they launch themselves on air,

urgent pairs of clattering jackdaws,

skilled practitioners of chance

and how to take it

their chackles words of love

hurled against the dusk

Rooky Wood

Hurled against dusk,

    the big bang. Oh, it starts quietly enough –

            handfuls of rooks, cartwheeling stars,

                        shining a path, beating the drum

              of coming night

     

              this strident tide of dark matter,

     haphazard galaxies

caught in its rip,

                  conjured from nothing

                       a black-tailed comet of raucous calling

                           a falling

                  down through failing light

          pulled by the wood, its need

                           to leaf the bare-boned trees

Scritch

Leave these trees, night-watch rooks,

pack your black suitcases and go

sling your hook!  Bare branches need us.

We jays are ornament enough,

dressed in daybreak’s

rosy cloud, cerulean blue,

more celestial than the leaves

that startle grass

Treetop Puccinis,

we copy winter’s frosty opera –  

banshee gales, sexed-up foxes,

wind on stone

If you rooks will not be told,

we’ll sing you gone

Murder

Everyone wants them gone

WE TAKE AN ANNUAL, SUSTAINABLE CROP

somebody said they wire them up

let’s face it, they’re nasty

FROM THE CARRION CROW POPULATION

and it’s their screaming

they’ll eat anything, even road kill

TO ENHANCE THE CROP OF GAME

that keeps the other crows away and

they’ll peck anything, attack anything

WE CAN SHOOT DURING WINTER

they’re left to hang till they’re

dead black wings

sails spread against mourning

Palores

Sails spread against morning,

chancing the breaking spray of light,

a couple of choughs, pioneer lovers

seeking haven, their new court,

dreams of a dormant people

feathering their shoulders

The old ones knew the truth

A man with no tongue

will lose his land

so map our granite, tells its edges,

jig these clifftops

in your scarlet dancing boots,

lit firesticks blazing in your beaks,

scattering sparks

'Seven Feathers' will be published in the poetry magazine Sarasvati anon.