Time of year
Mistletoe hung by the front door
and you had to kiss
whoever was standing under it.
That was one of the Christmas rules
like watching the Queen at 3 o’clock.
It was the uncles with wet mouths
that she didn’t like.
How did they do it?
Turn their lips inside out
so the red squishy bits
pressed against hers?
Uncle George gave dry kisses
but that was because he had a moustache
and tried to make her squeal
with the bristles.
Her cousin said you had to give
as many kisses as there were berries
so she was pleased when they shrivelled
and started dropping off.
It all changed in 1959
after the chimney caught fire.
Dad said it was Mum throwing
dried greenery into the grate.
And now her periods had started
there shouldn’t be any more kissing
Anne Symons lives in London but was born and brought up in Cornwall. After a career teaching deaf children and adults Anne began writing poetry in retirement. Her work has appeared in a range of poetry publications, including Agenda, Dreamcatcher, Ekphrastic Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Orbis, Poetry Salzburg Review, Steel Jackdaw and The Atlanta Review. Anne has completed an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University and the Poetry School in London.
The Winter Outing of the Woolhope Naturalists Field Club, December 1870
with acknowledgement to Richard Mabey’s ‘Flora Britannica’
The ladies of the party are helped over the stile
by whiskered botanists fond of a well-turned ankle.
Miss Taylor draws a notebook from her beaded reticule
and writes “The bunch of mistletoe was so large
that it could be exceedingly well seen from the lane.”
The Reverend Johnson climbs the ladder
“placed with thoughtful consideration” amid banter
from the men about Druids, golden sickles
and garlanded white yearling bulls.
The Reverend drops the felted sticky bundle
and “small sprays of the heaven born plant
unpolluted by any touch of earth” are given out
to “all the ladies present”. Miss Taylor holds
the wishbone sprig with its smeary fruit.
Her whalebone stays are biting, her chilblains
ache, her hem is iced with mud. She smiles
(Mama says she must always smile).
In the dwindling light the botanists are advancing.
Lydia Macpherson’s debut collection Love Me Do (Salt, 2014) won the Crashaw Prize. Widely published in magazines and anthologies, she lives in a remote farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors.
A woman becomes a Goddess
Christmas 2004
She slams out of a hut in the Maldives
cursing the book token which refuses to be hurled,
flutters, limp, silent to the fly-specked sand.
She curses him who never learnt the cool kiss
of perfume in the neck’s hollows,
the slow seduction of champagne in a saucer, the care
with which it must be lifted and held. She wrenches
Ironweed, Devils Backbone from the beach in fistfuls,
strides among the gold blades sunset carves
through the waves, screams damnation, calls down
brimstone. The arc of her rage cracks strata,
strikes to the core, the furnace of the earth.
Far past the horizon, out in the eastern dark,
the ocean swells, rises, begins to roll
Sue Butler took up both walking and Creative Writing in retirement from a career in General Practice; both unpredictable forms of meditation on life, its grace, pain and peculiarity. Her pamphlet Learning from the Body is published by Yaffle Press