• Archive of all Poetry Space showcases
Guest Editor – Thelma Laycock
Thelma Laycock/Courtesy of Indigo Dreams Publishing
Poems by Claire Coleman, Joe Jordan, Lizzie Ballagher, Ann Wuehler, Michael Docker, Jo Waterworth, Ndaba Sibanda, Roger Elkin, Gerda Mayer and Carolyn O’Connell
Photographs by Chris Sims, Steve Aukett and Roger Elkin
It was a great delight to sift through so many varied poems. The chosen poems are those with clear imagery, making the poem visual as in ‘On Leaving Maryland’ by Ann Wuehler. Her accumulation of images passes on her emotions and dislike. Other poems have the same clarity but also comment on social injustice as in Michael Docker’s ‘Shirtless in Prague 1995’ and ‘A Soul in Solitude’ by Ndaba Sibanda. In ‘Turbulence’ by Carolyn O’Connell, ‘Leaving’ by Jo Waterworth and ‘October’ by Claire Coleman, the poets contemplate the unsolved problems of sleep and death. Coleman’s poem makes the month of October into a metaphor for an ageing person, ending in a memorable Larkinesque last line. Gerda Meyer presents the reader with three snapshots of Regents Park in Autumn as does Joe Jordan with the filmic ‘Passing Deer’. ‘White Phlox’ by Roger Elkin gives beautiful images so that the reader can see their pastel-lavender and sense their ‘cool distancing’. ‘Woods in Tapestry’ by Lizzie Ballagher is an outstanding poem, celebrating Autumn with both imagery and rhapsodic language. Most appropriate for an Autumn showcase.
Copyright of all poems and photographs remains with the poets and photographers. Please do not reproduce without permission.
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Chris Sims
October
You are still full of beauty. Though not so full of yourself
you are not half empty, so you can suddenly turn to me
and say “what a lovely invention of God’s; flowers”
looking at those I’ve brought from my garden
and you’ve asked me, and asked me and asked me
again to name them for you. This is our point in time.
The stones on the beach age infinitesimally.
The clouds melt and meld moment by moment.
Everything changes, leaving only love.
Claire Coleman
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A Soul In Solitude
That old ragged man lives alone in a homestead devoid of human voices
Only his occasional coughing and sneezing give the passers –by
An inkling of the presence of a soul in that secluded home
They wonder what he eats in that state of seclusion or isolation
They also fail to attribute his lack of contact with people to something
For it may stem from bad relationships or loss of loved ones or deliberate choice
Does he enjoy his loneliness? Why does he live away from everyone else? From
Human interaction? They ask themselves many questions as they throw cursory glances at him
He looks at them as if reminding them that solitude is a state of being alone without being lonely.
Ndaba Sibanda
Chris Sims
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Chris Sims
Turbulence
Windows open heat seeps in
stretchy trying to sleep
deep within darkness
far off guns boom
who are they when will
they come? The chill
of battle fills my soul
shall I stay, can I go
but this is not war
but the peace of night
what I hear is an aircraft’s flight?
Far away the last plane’s gone
to land in China but noise goes on
as the city sleeps repairs repeat
cleaners sweep, stranded carp,
twenty miles away I weep
waiting sleep.
Carolyn O’Connell
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Roger Elkin
White Phlox
Not Persil-white, but
the kind of white that at petal edge
slides to violet or pastel-lavender
as though holding its own shadow
in their five-petalled fulness of face.
Like bridesmaids gathering in huddles
under full sunlight
it’s their quietness that hurts:
that, and the stately catch-glance of their gaze
or when they bow – oh so slightly –
as if admitting an only moment of inclusion
and giving you permission to look.
Otherwise, it’s that cold-shouldering
of specialness gone to their heads,
that cool distancing
borrowed from whiteness
and that sticky sweet-sickness smell
that cannot stop them from
giving their presence away.
Roger Elkin
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Three Autumns in Regents Park
The footballers
dance in the mist
it muffles their shouts;
in muted colours
they rise
through the mist
through the trees.
And once again
the high stem of my heel
roots in the damp
leaf-mould for conkers –
too late.
Can’t you remember –
your father threw sticks for them
and you carried them all off –
years ago…
Under a tree
St Francis
in an old mac
preaches sermons Gerda Mayer
to the birds
from a crumpled brown
paper bag
Steve Aukett
Leaving
You could try the stealth method –
guilty first-time mother at the nursery doors.
Hope no-one notices until it’s too late.
Leave others to deal with the distress –
hope it won’t take long, or ruin lives.
You can delay it. Talk about it.
Try to prepare each other for the known unknown.
You can not mention it, this tacit elephant
swept under the rug where forbidden things lie.
It’s the scariest monster.
You can look forward to it,
the next big adventure – release
from drudgery and pain.
Wait, longingly, for that moment
when it doesn’t matter anymore – you’re gone.
You can dread departure, cling on
by fingernails, anything, anything.
You can dance with it, sing to it,
make a joke of it,
become obsessed, imagine it daily.
You can make it a drama in five acts
or leave with no fuss at all.
Whatever you do, the odds are
you will have little choice in the matter,
and you can only do it once.
Jo Waterworth
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Chris Sims
Shirtlesss in Prague 1995
An old man takes off his shirt in a street in Prague,
Tourists in a chic café watch and smile;
It is always like this with the poor and rich:
Nothing much passes between them but smiles.
What else to expect this velvet summer when
An old man takes off his shirt in a street in Prague.
But the streets know better, they have a music
Their own. The old man plays it, though he knows
It is always like this with the poor and rich
He has violin dreams, communist memories –
A Prague Spring day in Wenceslas Square.
An old man takes off his shirt in a street in Prague
Who was young when the tourists were Nazis, who aged
While the world recited from East to West
‘It is always like this with the poor and rich’.
He plays for the tourists. At their thin coin he smiles.
An old man takes off his shirt in a street in Prague.
It is always like this with the poor and rich.
Michael Docker
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Chris Sims
On leaving Maryland
Oct 24, 01
This landscape of density–
bays, capes, chunky rivers with salt currents,
Chesapeake, St. Mary’s, Magothy, Elk, Patapsco.
Those highways, byways, freeways, cloverleafs, turnpikes;
no road going where it should, no direction sane or logical;
towns designed by blind, malicious children
with better things to do that day.
Summer in Annapolis– a creamily green jungle of humidity,
oppressive like a moist fevered hand against the face.
Not like the sagebrush-smeared lands at all.
Where everything is seen,
where everything is measured in miles,
not the time to get there.
Too many trees in Anne Arundel County, boles
dark and fulsome with mold and mildew;
the iron of my wind chimes turns red overnight.
I can’t remember how to think here…
The fan’s little motor hissing beside my bed
and my skin riddled with sweat and pores and odd hairs.
And the winter before, the heat did not come on.
They have gas here, pilot lights and little blue flames.
Always out, unlit, hidden beneath, out of reach of my short arms.
The drawbridge going up and down for sailboats,
the neighbor man offering to show me and my friend
his one testicle, the other he’d lost in Vietnam.
Someone placed the ocean here.
But even that blue beast has to endure weekend sailors.
Ann Wuehler
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Chris Sims
Passing Deer
Driving through Richmond Park today,
We stopped to watch the deer pass.
They took their time,
Pausing to sniff the wind,
Making as if to cross, then stopping to crop the grass.
A stag sauntered on to the road,
Then stood to look our way,
Not at us, for in our little shells
We were as rocks, or mounds, mere shapes,
Insignificant bumps in the landscape.
No, in all his antlered pomp,
He looked above us, over us,
Into the grassy, tree-thronged distance,
And, having surveyed his demesne,
He walked slowly to the other side
To crop fresh grass,
And the beautiful, submissive does
Followed where he led.
Meanwhile, we sat meekly, humbly, the common herd,
Waiting for this royal progress to pass.
Joe Jordan
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Woods in Tapestry
You taste the burning of sienna oaks,
The searing smoke of red-hot sumac leaves,
The sweet-and-sour, sharp-tongued chestnuts;
Saffron sycamores,
Turmeric trees
All spiced and smudging into autumn.
Today you taste the full earth dwindling down.
You hear the ringing of a million coins,
Shaking and spendthrift on a silver tree,
And the low weep of yellow-livered willows;
The march of mosses,
The slow seep of water through the stones
All soft and sifting into autumn.
Today you hear the rich earth dropping down.
You see the mass of layering cloud wads,
The turreting flock and fleece of them,
And the banked up brass of fearsome marigolds;
At the back-hand slap,
The black-edged snap of frost
All cruel and cutting into autumn,
Today you see the bright earth darkening down.
Lizzie Ballagher
Chris Sims
Thelma Laycock lives in Leeds. She published her own poetry magazine, ‘Gabriel’, for eight years. She has had three pamphlets and one full collection published and a second collection will be published by Indigo Dreams Publishing later this year. Her work appears in various magazines and anthologies. Some poems have been translated into Hebrew, Italian and Romanian.
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