The First Christmas
away from home you invite me as family;
more used to a summer celebration
I brave the weather to join you.
Fingers of cold inch through layers,
pinch ears in unkind clasps,
bring tears to my eyes.
I walk the blanketed roads and pavements;
snow-covered, featureless, silent ground – blue in the dark –
each corner the same and unrecognised until I arrive.
Chilled beyond expectation I knock at your heavy door.
You fling it wide and hug me in,
welcoming me ‘home’ when I am nowhere near.
Madelaine Smith grew up in Australia but hated long hot summers. She has had poems published in South Magazine, Paper Swans anthologies, Perverse Poems, Northampton Poetry Review, and the Winchester Loose Muse Anthology. Madelaine works for Winchester Poetry Festival.
The Strange Folk from Under the Stairs
December, they tumble out,
covered in dust, shy as mice.
I tend their breaks and grazes,
make them comfortable
by the fire where they sit
smiling like little children.
God love them, chubby faces
lit up like full moons, all except
the girl – the light has gone out
of her, still, she makes an effort
in her red dress and silver shoes.
Only I know about the years
she spent alone and broken,
hands clasped in silent prayer.
Everyone said she was beyond
repair. But now look at her!
She’s as good as new.
Soon there’ll be parties,
and everyone will try
to get her to shine,
but she’s happy sitting alone
in her dark corner, lips sealed,
dolled-up to the nines.
Joanne Key’s poems have been published online and in print. She won Second Prize in the National Poetry Competition 2014, and Charles Causley 2016 and was Runner-Up in the Prole Competition 2017. In 2018 she won the Hippocrates Open Prize.
First Winter Estranged
Before she leaves the apartment
the girl hides all her notebooks;
tears a hole in her skirt to stop herself
wondering if she’d remembered.
The bus is so full of snowy people
stuck together like wet hair,
she dives back into the crowd
and runs through the coloured lights
and music to the gallery.
The way that it keeps coming down at her
she stops brushing away the snow,
leaves it to pile on her shoulders
as statues do.
With Dante in her left pocket
and two matchboxes in her right
she looks hard at the painting of winter
pretends that those trees can cry
that it’s true: you can snap a twig
and hear the voices of suicides
lamenting.
Home, she’d say
Is made of paper, spoiled by wet snow
But the question is never asked.
The girl is here at opening time
9am in summer, 10 am in winter
and leaves when they suggest it’s time to close.
London-based Caroline Hammond is part of the LetterPress poetry collective and was published in their Anthology in 2015. She has read at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2016 and the South Downs Poetry Festival in 2017, where her poem, the Firetail, came second in the Festival’s competition