Time is a strange thing

When the children were young and I was younger than I am now, I was always busy and yet there was always time to write - late at night or in intense bits of 'time out' of the usual run of things. Now that in theory I have a lot more time and I am a lot less busy, it feels as if there is hardly any time to write. Yet I feel the pressure of time getting shorter, of the probability of there not being a lot of time left.
Maybe it is energy I'm missing - or a sense of purpose? Or perhaps I just spend too much of my time on Facebook.
Whatever - I'm looking forward to taking some unpaid leave over the summer and not having the pressures of work. Having more time . Hopefully doing some serious reading and some writing. Alongside having a few more lie-ins, pottering in the garden, doing a bit of travelling and generally enjoying myself of course. Hope there is time for all of it!

Mother's Day

Mother who has been

my broken bowl           my holy grail

my long silence                        my spoken truth

my tiny bound feet      my seven league boots

my never quite             my every first prize

when you come on the forgotten well among the trees

lower the bucket, hand over hand: the rope will hold

as you draw up the cold clear water. Feel how it cools

your blood’s wild fire, scorched earth greens back, seeds burst,

and you can read again the hieroglyphics of branches

budding across the sky. Birds wake to fly and small animals

uncurl among the nascent ferns. Listen –

a child’s untroubled voice rings on the morning air, singing

as you fetch water for your mother from the wood well

and nothing will be lost.

Here is your father, once the youngest boy

neighbours had ever seen between

the handles of a plough, the hardest worker.

He lies under my heart carved in stone,

grown to the man who never wept.

Soft as a breast, your mother

is my children’s remembered dream of milky mouths.

Each thought undone, each memory unpeeled,

each year of you, I fold, hold to my cheek

like the white linen your grandmother sewed

by candlelight. I breathe you in, the living skin of me

knowing it was always too late for us, for everything

happens as it must, in its own moment.

As I become the past on which the future rests,

forgiveness is a final irrelevance.

Years from now, on some perfect summer evening,

I will look and you’ll be in the garden, gathering fruit.

A small dog will follow at your heels

as you pick gooseberries, bursting juice,

strawberries red ripe under leaves.

When you see me, you will beckon me to come,

and I’ll run down the years into your arms.

From Snakeskin Stilettos 1998

from the window

I'm so lucky to have a view of fields and trees from my kitchen window and I love to sit at the table and just observe. Often what I see seeps into my psyche.

Prey

This summer past, day after day, I watched the buzzard

rise from her stand of trees to hunt; watched her describe

her wide effortless circles, as a wheel set in motion, turns.

This autumn night she has gyred silently above my sleep

so that now at four a.m., I lie awake beneath her dream

and the small, secretive animal of self, trembles.

 

For the day that's in it

There was a taste of Spring in the air today and I was thinking about my mother, Nessa and her sister Muriel, now also gone. The daffodils are starting to bloom and it reminded me of these two poems.

The first I wrote when my mother was going through the hell of late dementia and the second is more recent. They are the same daffodils in both poems.

Daffodils

 

The Vertues: The roots stamped with hony, helpeth them that are burned with fire. They have also such wonderful qualities in drying, that they consound and glew together very great wounds.*

Gerard’s Herbal

 

1

I thought it was a fool’s errand, thought

we’d never find the place,

my mother trying to navigate

with only a vague address to go by –

a farm somewhere outside Millisle.

My children bored, fighting in the back seat,

my nerves on edge, my hands too tight

on the steering wheel, stress levels high.

 

But we got there, loaded sackfuls of bulbs

into the car’s boot, and paid the man.

 

For weeks afterwards, I’d look out the window

and see my mother on her knees, digging,

planting daffodils behind hedges, among trees.

 

2

My mother has descended into hell

(these biblical allusions haunt me),

and daffodils are the only colour in this Easter,

yellow incongruities across the dull fields,

painfully there, like the resurrection of love.

 

I cut them against despair, bring

huge bundles of them into the house,

beacons burning in vases, on windowsills.

 

 

 

 

 

Spring

 

It’s trespass time.

I’ll take my scissors

across the fields

to where my mother

planted her daffodils.

 

It’s not really stealing is it?

Anyway I feel no guilt,

there are so many drifts

a few dozen blossoms

won’t be missed.

 

 

Crazy Knot

I'm hoping to write a series of pieces about my identity as a Northern Irish person and poet - this is the first of them, sparked by a recent visit to Dublin.

I was pleased to be invited to read at this year’s Dublin Book Festival and after a lovely event with a warm and receptive audience, I went for some food with my husband and then back to attend the launch of the Windharp, an anthology charting the history of Ireland through poetry since 1916, edited by poetry commentator Niall MacMonagle. It was a great reading, with poets such as Paula Meehan and Moya Cannon reading both some of their own work and the work of others, from Yeats, Easter 1916 to a poem about a post-crash ‘ghost estate’ and Paula’s wonderful The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks. However as the evening went on, I found myself becoming more and more aware that this did not feel like my history or my life. The cultural references were not mine. I was in a foreign country. The next day, as we walked around Dublin, there was a sense of the whole city’s tourist machine gearing up for the centenary next year of the Easter Rising.

I grew up in a Presbyterian family in Northern Ireland through the worst years of the ‘troubles’. It sometimes feels to me as if my history has been made up of nothing but grim news flashes, bombs, shootings, horror and despair. This is what we have inherited, here in the North, and we are still struggling to find a way through to the future. Even now, sectarian gangs hold huge swathes of people here to ransom, fattening on the communities’ fears. In a recent article by Glenn Patterson, he stated that in the twelve months to February 2015, there were 347 incidents where bomb disposal experts were called out. This is our peace. Fear and pain is in the fabric of our society, politicians rely on it. It is difficult for me to regard Pearse without also seeing the shadows he left behind, that we’ve had to sleep with for forty years. I feel very far away from notions of Romantic Ireland and the Celtic Tiger neither boomed nor busted in my neck of the woods.

I have struggled to find a sense of my own identity in Northern Ireland. In the early 90’s, when I helped to found the Creative Writers’ Network, it was at least in part to explore the idea of an alternative ‘Ulster Voice’. At the time another poet was so vehemently opposed to the very idea of that voice, that she said that the word ‘Ulster’ made her feel physically sick.

I have no time for hatred, guns and flags, for narrow-mindedness, or that mind-set that seems so prevalent here and that will always and forever argue the opposite from the ‘other side’. I have grown into a sense of myself as being Northern Irish, not Orange and not Green; not one thing or the other. It continues to feel as if there isn’t a lot of room for people like me in the North; when the chips are down and the votes counted, our society still falls into its tribal lines.

So who am I? Though I’m not defined by the Battle of the Boyne neither am I by the Easter Rising; neither the burning bush or the sacred heart; not the sash, nor the shamrock – or England’s red rose. To quote a great Ulster poet, John Hewitt, ‘Time and this island tied a crazy knot.’

 

Keeping Busy

It has been a busy year for me with readings and workshops. I love having these opportunities to connect through poetry, so I'm looking forward to facilitating a workshop as part of the Irish Writers Centre Masterclass series on 28th October http://irishwriterscentre.ie/products/the-poetry-masterclass-series

Also really delighted to be appearing at Dublin Book Festival in some great company on November 14 in Smock Alley Theatre, so get booking: http://bit.ly/1kmiFod

And I've been speaking to Headstuff about my latest collection of poetry 'The Goose Tree': http://www.libertiespress.com/shop/the-goose-tree
Thanks to Alvy Carragher for the opportunity and the interesting questions.

Elementary

This is the second Beautiful Dragons project with which I've been involved. The first was 'Heavenly Bodies' where 88 poets wrote a poem each to represent each of the 88 constellations. My constellation was Triangulum and the eventual poem was A Dream of Three.
In this new anthology poets were invited to pick an element from the periodic table and I chose Silica.

Dreamt up, organised, edited and masterminded by the wonderful Rebecca Jane Irvine the projects are not only great fun but also a challenge and I love being involved. The launch of the new book will be in Manchester on the 27th November and the book will be available at the link below, where you can also see a picture of the lovely production.



http://www.beautiful-dragons.com/Beautiful_Dragons/My_Dear_Watson.html

Dis-Ease moves to Bangor

As part of Aspects Literary Festival, the Dis-Ease exhibition opens on Wednesday 2nd September in Sync Space, Dufferin Avenue. Opening at 6.00 pm and a short reading at 7.00pm.

Dis-Ease

Very pleased that the exhibition of Dis-Ease is part of the Belfast Book Festival. The result of my collaboration with photographic artist Victoria J Dean, the exhibition consists of a series of images combined with poems or extracts from poems. It opens on Monday 8th June at 7.45 - everyone welcome.

 

 

http://www.belfastbookfestival.com/#!exhibitions/cahm 

 

Absorbed

 

I’d take you back into myself,

every cell, each chromosome.

 

I’d have you back, before birth,

before conception, all

 

your future still ahead. I’d hold

you as an imagined thing, safe.

Solas Nua

A poem of mine - read in Washington for St Patrick's Day


http://www.wjla.com/blogs/lets-talk-live/2015/03/irish-book-day--24770.html