Day Seventy-eight

A walk in the country

I am a fantasist - no doubt. Aren't all writers? And I love to pretend to be other people when I'm walking, or driving, or well, anything really. Today I pretended I was a Jane Austen heroine - nothing unusual in that is there? ;-)


Three miles to Netherfield

I was Elizabeth Bennet today except
I crouched to pee in a bush - and
I'm pretty sure she
never did that. And I
had a short skirt on and
my new pair of jeans and my hair hadn't
been coiffured by a maid.

Or maybe Lizzy did and dear Jane
omitted to say how she
unbuttoned her
bloomers and squatted in an
unladylike sprawl. It was after all
three miles at least to
Netherfield Hall.

But I was still her as I traipsed
ancient paths and
jumped age-old streams.
Sun flickering
across fields half smothered by
cloud. And the pheasants
were making a hell of a row.

Day Seventy-five

I'm back!

It's been an amazingly busy couple of weeks and poetry has had to take a back seat. I've not enjoyed not writing. It's been awful having lines and fragments of phrases launch themselves into my mind and not be able to do anything about it. I suppose I should have been taking notes; or freewriting; or at least writing something down, but my head space being in moving house mode has been in another world. So there you go - my excuse!

On the night we actually moved in to our new house. I won't say home because at that point it didn't feel like one. Both Matt and I had a similar feeling and this poem is an attempt to catch it.


Moving on

Arriving alive in that space
between worlds. Primordial,
primitive cave.

Such was that place - that gap
between lines
laid bare
on a big empty page.

It was cold - crammed
into that airless hole. So we lit
a fear-melting fire.

And the blackness outside
felt further away.

And the warmth in our bones held it at bay.