Poems and Stories
Cold Salt Water
'Cold Salt Water' won first prize in the Save As Writers' Prose Competition 2009. Jeremy Page, editor of the Frogmore Papers, has kindly agreed to the story being published on this website in advance of its publication in Frogmore Papers 75, March 2010. So here it is, 'Cold Salt Water'.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Best Words, Best Order: poems by members of the poetry class held in Teynham, Autumn 2009
The Bargeman
Bronze statue on Sittingbourne High StreetThey gave me a wheel but no barge to steer.
These days I watch the shoppers –
mothers like mallards with ducklings in tow,
that woman a heron flying from the bank
in her soft grey suit.
I miss the waddlers and waders,
a full tide, the wind in our sails
whipping us along the Swale
when I was in charge of men,
our craft, its cargo.
I miss those mornings of stillness
at low water, the sounds of trickling,
the sucking and bubbling of mudflats
pulsing with worms.
These days I wait for rain,
the spray in my face as I stand here,
my sails furled.
Gillian Moyes
posted 5 January 2010
Beware the word thief in the dead of night
Beware the word thief in the dead of night,
she steals from the sleeping tongues of poets.
She’ll snatch words of yours that are too precise,
and build a bonfire for her own delight,
from the verbs you were saving for sonnets.
Beware the word thief in the dead of night.
She’ll leave behind adverbs that are just not right:
slope off with your powerful nuggets.
She’ll snatch words of yours that are too precise.
She’ll stamp on your nouns in the moonlight,
hide your rhymes up under her bonnet.
Beware the word thief in the dead of night.
You can fight poetic inversion all night,
she’ll laugh at your vigorous efforts
and snatch your words that are too precise.
So sleep tight-lipped beneath your skylight.
Check under your pillow and blankets.
Beware the word thief in the dead of night.
She’ll snatch words of yours that are too precise.
Alison McNaught
Dusk
The autumn sky is cobalt blue,shrouded with the black lace
of tree and branch silhouettes,
peppered with remaining leaves.
I’m in one window, flooded with light,
staring out into the darkening garden.
Opposite, mum’s in her studio retreat at the top.
Her silver hair lit up like an arctic fox.
She dabs and stipples a purple painting then
stands back and seeks clarity with a squint,
her tongue tip out in concentration.
Pen to paper, unconsciously I mirror her movements.
Kate Fox
Strange Fruits
Blackberries shrivel on Cellar Hillthough a few late blooms defy the new order:
bletted plums usurped by ripening pears.
A kestrel hovers over the orchard,
the gate staked by an estate agent’s board.
Cobnuts lie scattered like popcorn on the turning
to Lynsted Lane, by the houses that first broke
through the earth in the spring, now de-scaffolded,
exhaling steam through plastic heating vents.
And strange fruits hang in the hedgerow,
Stella cans, a Co-operative bakery wrapper
with orange sticker, reduced to 40p.
Maria McCarthy
posted 14 December 2009
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Noreen
Connolly cut me some roses on Tuesday. I know it was Tuesday as Come Dancing was on the telly. Some lose track, but it’s mince and potatoes on Monday, Come Dancing on Tuesday, sheets changed Wednesday and so on. She brought red and white, but a nurse will always arrange them separately, or there will be blood and bandages before the day’s out, so the white went to Rosina and I have the red. They were in bud, so they’d last longer. I’ve been watching them unfurl. They smell like summer, like the outdoors as I remember it. When the petals drop onto the bedside table, I want them left there to darken then brown. I want the leaves left to wither on the stem, to watch them shrivel; but the cleaner comes in every day, gloved, overalled, and changes the water, and wipes the fallen from the bedside table with a cloth dipped in disinfectant. I close my eyes, and I see the roses in the garden blossom, fade and drop. I walk on a carpet of withered petals, and pinch them between my toes. They swirl round my feet in a soft breeze that sweeps my cheeks, pulls my hair here and there. Then I’m in the field back home with Jack and Molly, and we’re running fast towards the sun.
I was used to the smell of disinfectant when I was nursing, and the way it clouds in the bucket when you added the water. A man offered me Pernod once, said you added a dash of water. It clouded in the glass like disinfectant; smelled of the aniseed balls that Aunt Alice tipped into paper bags from the teardrop-shaped bowl of the scales in her shop back home in Mitchelstown.
There’s no wildness in these gardens, just straight lines and fresh mown and leaves piled up in the autumn. Nothing like the fields back home with the brambles and crab apples. Off we’d go: Jack, Molly and me, with bowls to fill, and our arms and our clothes would be torn and purple-bruised with juice. The sweetest would always be the furthest in, and didn’t we always want the sweetest, the juiciest, to reach for the best, not to settle?
The first time I offered a brimming bowl to Daddy, I was so small I had to raise it to reach his hands, hanging like shovel-ends from his arms. He said No; he wouldn’t touch those things, full of spiders and flies. I never offered them again. I gave them up to Mammy for the crumble. His was made separate with crab apples and lots of sugar. He didn’t like the black stain on the apples’ flesh.
Daddy thought it was the boys I was after when I went to England. Jesus, with what I’ve seen of men’s parts, what’s there to get excited about? Like snails tucked in a hood, and sometimes, sick as they were, it would rear up at the feel of the sponge. God, the first time I saw one at full length I called for Sister. I thought something awful had happened. Shrub came running at my shrieks, and when she saw what had alarmed me, she pursed her lips to stop the giggles. Sister said, ‘I think Mr Ericson is well enough to wash himself.’ At the end of the shift, Shrub collapsed, tears rolling down her cheeks. Oh, she took me off something rotten: Sister, come quick it’s Mr Ericson’s… I couldn’t even find a word to describe it at the time. And we were both in stitches, with her attempt at my accent. And wouldn’t she have laughed even more if she knew it was the first I’d seen standing to attention?
It was last names, even off duty. It was Shrub, Gates, McCallion, O’Doherty and so on. You’d say, ‘Is Shrub on tonight?’ or, ‘I’ve the same shifts as O’Doherty.’ Then the crowd I went round with called me Josie, as there was another Noreen. I forgot I was Noreen at all until I came here; it was in my notes, and that’s what they go by.
You didn’t have to choose what to wear, to be as good as, to have a style. You just wore the uniform, maybe dressed with a frilled cuff if Sister would allow. Connolly wears a cuff and a fob watch like I had, pinned to the chest. I can see it through the plastic apron. She’s my favourite, Connolly; she listens, really listens. Some of them just talk to each other. I suppose we did, too, me and Shrub: tipped the patients forward like they were one of the pillows we were tidying, eased them back, talking over them the whole time. As long as the ward was spick and span, that’s what Sister was after.
The fool I was, falling for a woman. I’d study her lips, the soft hairs on the nape of her neck below her pinned up hair when she was on the ward, the curl of her hair when it was down, when we went dancing or to the pictures. She hadn’t a notion that I dreamed of her, dreams from which I woke with the sheets twisted, hot and sighing, dreams of parting her lips with mine, her face cupped in my hands, of slipping a satin nightdress from her shoulders, watching it fall to the floor. Sometimes, on the ward, she’d brush against my bosom in passing, and the heat of those dreams would flush my face and neck.
It was a shock when I saw the faces of the people when I first arrived at Euston station from the boat train. No one smiled or said hello to strangers on the street, as they did at home. It was just after the war – we weren’t involved, in Ireland, so I’d no experience of what they’d been through. Nice enough people, but there was this reserve, and not just because I was Irish. It was as if they’d had their joy removed. But the nurses, there was a spark in them; they knew how to dance, to drink, to let go. You never knew what you’d encounter on the next shift, so it was living for the moment.
There weren’t always men to dance with, so the women danced together, and if there were any men, the women would flutter round them like moths to an old suit. A man could have a different woman for each dance. I wasn’t bothered; if a man asked, I’d dance with him, but I was happiest with Shrub, with my Annette.
So when I went home to Mitchelstown I was full of stories, of the hospital and the friends and the dancing. Mammy clapped her hands and wrung them in turn. Part of her was in envy of me, for getting away and making something of myself; the other part of her was sure I’d go to the bad in such company. She was in her thousand-times-washed dress with the faded paisley swirls of pink and mauve, the lace of her slip peeking out from the hem, and there I was talking of taffeta and satin and the new coat I’d bought for the winter. As for Daddy, I shall always think of him as square, hard edges and as broad as he was tall, and no softening at my touch or my words.
I tapped a cigarette from the packet, and tried to light it with the matches from my coat pocket. It had rained on the walk from the bus stop in town, and they were damp, so I put a spill into the embers of the fire. It was if I’d stripped naked and danced on the table, the blustering and the language from Daddy, how I’d been ruined by England and nursing. How I was setting a bad example to my sister Molly.
There were rows the whole week I was there – when I was back late from a dance at the hotel, when I laid in late the next morning, and how I wasn’t to smoke either in or out of the house. ‘There’s no holiday here, my girl,’ he said, expecting me to go back to my old chores as I used to. He called me the worst of names, the worst of names. And Mammy chopped the vegetables and cut the meat for the stockpot and swept the floor and took out the ashes and sat on the doorstep waiting for a passing neighbour to bring her a bit of gossip, and fading into an old woman before she was forty.
posted 29 October 2009
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Night Watch
We thought it dead, no sign of a leaf
until after the tulips had wizened beneath.
We are watching for a season,
matching with pictures – new gardeners,
used to twelve paving slabs and pots,
hoping to do justice to a country plot.
And this tree appeared entombed in lichen.
Now, as the peonies shout as loud
as Ascot hats, a sudden budding.
Woken by wailing, alien to a town-dweller,
I look below, and the tree glimmers amber,
a portal through which princesses may dissolve,
falling back at dawn with tattered slippers.
Now, to the daily watch
of the vegetable patch –
strawberries, courgettes, onion sets –
is added a night vigil,
waiting for the amber glow,
watching for a signal.
posted 5 Aug 2009
Two poems that I have written since moving to my new home in Teynham, near Sittingbourne in Kent. The second is about the traces left by the woman who used to live in my house
Car on a country footpath
Twig fingers probe where windows
no longer wind down. Russet windfalls
tumble in the foot well, rot on skeletons of
once-upholstered seats. Long-since scavenged
of mirrors, tyres, headlights, a bramble-clamped car
on a country footpath, though human-placed, is not out of place,
as much a part of the landscape now as the lines of planted poplars.
Mrs J
Who is there to ask, but the whispers
of a chiffon scarf in the dust of a drawer,
the handbag, lying flaccid on the wardrobe floor,
the cut-out Christmas shapes in the attic,
or the catalogues that drop through the letterbox
to tempt you from your sprinkled place
with offers of slippers and bra-strap extenders,
or to add to your collection of ceramic country cottages.
Who is there to ask, but the neighbours
who say that you were ‘lovely’, except
the man whose wife was promised
the job you landed at the library.
I cannot fix an image of you,
the woman that lingers in my house,
just know that you were Mrs J, that you
were lovely, that you worked in the library.
A new poem: this took months to ferment from an exercise done on a writers' holiday in France back in May. It is written in response to the last of my children leaving home. Now they have their own coats.
Coats
There are seashells in this pocket,
trickling down collected silver
from thirds of pints of morning milk;
and in the other, a lone pineapple
chunk, stuck to the bottom, and sugar
to chase with a licked finger.
Now the gabardine becomes a duffle
stuffed with bus tickets, where the numbers
add to twenty-one, folded into stars;
now a denim bomber with numbers scrawled
on torn-off paper, and balled-up tissues;
now an over-sized overcoat wrapped
around mother and unborn child,
now around mother and baby.
Now she has her own coat.
I'm posting this poem in tribute to the Matalan store, the phoenix from the ashes, that is about to open in Strood. I read this at an open mic in Chatham; when I read the title, a cheer went up from the crowd.
After the Fire at Matalan
Men in uniform lift and lower the tape
for other men in uniform
as the crane rises and circles.
Neighbouring stores close, choked by the acrid plumes,
bank holiday shoppers deprived of DIY and carpets.
And those of us housebound by the flames
walk by late afternoon to view the carcass
of this giant industrial bird, its curved bones
bared like a half-carved turkey,
and inhale charred remains that float,
then settle on the concrete of the retail park,
ochre insulation like discarded nesting.
Close to Christmas,
graffiti-ed hoardings disguise the deconstruction,
apologise for the inconvenience, while skip lorries
rattle the ashes of the pyre through the town.
Viewed through the square link fence,
an open space, a pile of rubble.
And still stray slices of the old bird’s nest
skim the car park, perch on the branches of the winter trees.
July 1969
One small school is gathered for assembly
in the sun-freckled shade of the chestnut tree.
Sister Bernadette, haloed by the sun
like a statue of the Virgin, says Class One,
just like the men who have walked on the moon,
will take their own small steps soon.
They will not return to skewer conkers
from St Joseph’s tree, but, come September,
step up to St Andrew’s or the grammar.
Except Michael Sullivan who will never
grow into his too-big blazer, unworn
in an unopened wardrobe. Picture his step
from behind the ice-cream van, like the boy
in the road safety poster: frozen, poised.
'July 1969' is from Learning to be English, available through this website
John Whitworth, judge of Split the Lark Poetry competition 2007, said:
‘July 1969 is a beautiful and touching little word machine.’
The poem was highly commended in this competition and shortlisted for the Frogmore Poetry Prize 2005. It has also been published in ‘Fourteen’, the magazine of the sonnet.
Raising poems
There is a quickening early in the day.
This is a delicate time with singing
and dancing, or an inability to rise,
and what has arrived can as soon be lost.
It’s ages before you can leave them alone.
You must feed them, even when exhausted.
Partners grow to know that distracted moan,
the paraphernalia beside the bed,
the way you slip from their arms at dawn.
They learn to be second best.
Some of them you cannot live with.
You hide them in drawers
to be discovered, perhaps,
after your death.
Imagine the gasps,
‘How could she?’
Those that survive you must let go.
You regard them from a distance: notice,
too late, that they’re not dressed right.
They are no longer yours.
There is nothing you can do.
Raising poems is from Nothing But, available through this website. It has also been published in 'Equinox' magazine
Missed you on the day it rained
On the first day,
you lashed poles to poles,
vertical and horizontal,
created your own first floor with wooden planks,
filled in the cracks
in the brickwork.
You picked out the flowers and tendrils
on the lintels,
gold on brown,
and now you are painting the pillars
between the windows,
the rounded plinth
a rich chocolate, the column cream,
topped with the curves
of the fleur de lis.
I am learning the exact length and breadth
of the naked patch at the back of your head,
how it shines in the afternoon sun,
the way stray strands arch over
in the breeze
like a field of ripening corn.
If you would only turn round
you could see into my house.
Missed you on the day it rained.
‘Missed you on the day it rained’ is from Nothing But, available through this website
Love
When I came home that evening there was a man sitting on my garden wall, drinking tea from a mug and eating a thick-cut sandwich. His hair was long and matted, and those parts of his flesh that I could see were muddy brown, either through exposure to the elements or a lack of soap and water. He rose a few inches as I walked up the steps to the door, each of us glancing sideways, neither of us looking at each other, then he sat back down to finish his meal. Later, there was the drained mug, the tooth-marked remains of a ham sandwich and a brown stain on the path, which I had no interest in identifying.
The post that morning had brought cards from foreign places. I should have felt pleased for them, those friends who could afford holidays, and glad that they’d remembered me. Instead I buried the cards beneath leftover Weetabix and coffee dregs in the kitchen bin. Postcards to an alien, viewing a life where I no longer belonged – no money and no one to go on holiday with.
There was a folk festival in town, and I decided to go along. The town was full of aliens, so I felt right at home. The day was billed as Ruby Tuesday, and everyone was supposed to wear something red. I found an old red T-shirt and blended in with the other aliens with red streaks in their beards and painted eyebrows. After I’d had my fill of folk music and morris dancing, I came home to this tramp – if we’re allowed to call them that these days. Gentleman of the road, homeless person, whatever he was, I hadn’t seen him around before. You notice them, people from other alien races, when you’re an alien yourself, but they’re invisible to most people –until they sit on your garden wall.
It’s a balancing act between safety and charity. Who knows, Mr Tramp might be a violent sort. But the words of that bible passage filtered through, the one about faith, hope, and the greatest of these is love: not charity, love. Someone had shown this man love and directed him to my garden wall café for his snack. I suspected my neighbour Teresa, a practising Catholic. For me, being a Catholic was like my efforts to learn the violin. I gave up both in my teens. It wasn’t as though you worked hard and arrived at perfection. You had to keep practising – not worth the sacrifice for the returns.
When I went through my charitable phase, my love phase, I volunteered at the Simon Community, a home for the homeless. Some of the men travelled around the country, signing on at different towns, and came to Kent for the summer. It was like a holiday for them. There isn’t much begging now, what with the Big Issue, but in those days they’d stretch out their hands for the price of a cup of a tea. Never went on tea, of course, straight to the off-licence for a can of Special Brew.
I wondered where Mr Tramp thought of as home. I couldn’t ask him; my days of ‘love’ were over. I didn’t know where I belonged anymore than he did. Not in the house where I was raised: I’d said goodbye to that many years ago. Mum was still there, of course, but it had been months since we’d spoken, not since Dad’s funeral when I said I wouldn’t go. There were tears from her, and just three words, ‘How could you?’ That’s what I thought too, how could you put up with that for all those years? Self-love, or a lack of it, that’s what it came down to.
I remembered the parties, when he brought people back from the pub. He would turn up the Dansette, and get Mum to make sandwiches for his cronies. I lay in bed praying for the house to stop whooping and the floorboards to stop shaking. There was always the Dubliners, ‘Seven Drunken Nights’ and ‘the Black Velvet Band’, then the songs about leaving Ireland or going back to that ‘Old Irish home, far across the foam’. If Ireland was that great, why didn’t they go back and live there?
When you’re English, but your family’s Irish, you never know where you belong, where home is. England was where we lived, but Ireland was home, even though us kids had only ever been there on holiday. Maybe that’s why I’ve always felt like an alien.
***
You know how once you’ve noticed someone you see them all the time? Well, Mr Tramp turned up again, sunbathing on the grass verge near Matalan, his carrier bag beneath his head, a can of White Lightning clutched in his fist. I wonder if my dad would have ended up like that if it weren’t for Mum. The word ‘alcoholic’ was never used: not for Dad, not for Kieran my brother. They were just men who liked a drink, good company down the pub, same as the uncles who came over from Ireland to live with us for a while until they got settled. They’d come over happy and full of life, greeting people they met on the street like they would at home. No one replied. Mum told them don’t go round saying hello to everyone; they don’t do it over here. After a while they didn’t smile so much, and the drinking started.
Only once did Mum come close to using the word ‘alcoholic’. ‘It’s like a disease, you know’, she said. She’d got friendly with one of the nuns at the Sacred Heart Convent, where my sister was at school. This nun, Sister Anne, told Mum about Al Anon, a support group for the families of alcoholics. The group met every Friday night in the school hall. Mum wouldn’t go in case the neighbours found out.
***
I never had the urge to travel the way that teenagers do, the way that homeless people do. The summer after A-Levels, I got as far as Cornwall working in a shop that sold seashells and tacky gifts. Thought I’d visit the English holiday world. I’d only ever been ‘home’ for the holidays, to Ireland, plus day trips to the coast, crammed in the back of Uncle Bill’s van with my cousins.
Maybe I’d become a traveller now. I’d heard about the adult gappers, people who sell everything and go round the world. Nothing to keep me here with the kids gone, and me single again. I did some research on the Internet, bought some guidebooks. I fancied New Zealand. It looked good in the Lord of the Rings films. I even had the house valued.
Mr Tramp was gone by the end of the summer, holiday over, back to the grindstone of doing whatever tramps do. My brief flirtation with wanderlust was over, too. I took a bus into town to pick up the Adult Education brochure. It’s what I call my seasonal adjustment, looking for something to do as the nights draw in. There was a Big Issue seller by the bus station. He was wearing a thin jacket, holes in his shoes. It was drizzling and cold. He had his dog with him, tied to the railings, a blanket thrown over it, a plastic tub of water by its head. A woman in an expensive-looking coat was shouting at him, ‘Are you going to keep that dog out all day? And does it have somewhere to sleep at night? I hope you’re feeding it properly.’ It was the week that a whale had got stranded on the banks of the Thames and pages of newsprint were devoted to the tragedy. Meanwhile a new drug for Alzheimer’s had been declared too costly to be dispensed to those that needed it. It struck me that that there wasn’t much love in the world.
I barged in front of the screeching woman. ‘How much for all your copies?’ He quoted a sum. I searched my pockets, gathered up all my notes and change and stuffed them into the young man’s hand. ‘Get yourself home,’ I said.
'Love' is from As long as it takes: a short story collection and work in progress. It was part of a dissertation submitted for an MA in Creative Writing. The examiner, Stewart Brown, said:
‘The stories are sophisticated, the characters well drawn and the world they occupy made vivid for the reader…I can well imagine that these stories might form the basis of a published collection.’
Read another story from As long as it takes on the Tales of the Decongested website
Hear Maria as a columnist on Radio 4's Home Truths
Read more poems and prose by Maria on the Medway Libraries website