Sister:
A passing through,
a revisiting,
a pack carrier,
a ship’s hold that exactly fits your past,
a hide,
a shelter,
the mouth empty of cadence,
how vowels fall soft like meadow grass
and speech smells of green, green, green.
Julia Webb has an MA in poetry from the University of East Anglia. She lives in Norwich where she works as a creative writing tutor and freelance writer. She is on the editorial team for the Gatehouse Press journal Lighthouse.
Outgrown
It is both sad and a relief to fold so carefully
her outgrown clothes and line up the little worn shoes
of childhood, so prudent, scuffed and particular.
It is both happy and horrible to send them galloping
back tappity-tap along the misty chill path into the past.
It is both a freedom and a prison, to be outgrown
by her as she towers over me as thin as a sequin
in her doc martens and her pretty skirt,
because just as I work out how to be a mother
she stops being a child.
Penelope Shuttle : from Unsent: New and Selected Poems 1980 – 2012, Bloodaxe Books, October 2012
And
Sex is like Criccieth. You thought it would be
a tumble of houses into a pure sea
and so it must have been, in eighteen-ten.
The ranks of boarding houses marched up then.
They linger, plastic curtains at their doors,
or, still more oddly, blonde ungainly statues.
The traffic swills along the single street
and floods the ears, until our feet
turn down towards the only shop for chips,
to shuffling queues, until sun slips
behind the Castle, which must be, by luck,
one of the few a Welsh prince ever took.
Or in the café, smoked with fat, you wait.
Will dolphins strike the sea’s skin? They do not.
And yet, a giant sun nobody has told
of long decline, beats the rough sea to gold.
The Castle rears up with its tattered flag,
hand laces hand, away from valleys’ slag.
And through the night, the long sea’s dolphined breath
whispers into your warm ear, ‘Criccieth’.
Alison Brackenbury’s eighth collection Then, Carcanet 2013, can be ordered here. Sample poems, and blogs about them (with intriguing photos), can be seen at www.alisonbrackenbury.co.uk
(And was first published in The London Magazine)