by Helen Ivory | Dec 27, 2019 | 12 days 2019
Street dog Soft fur, stroke fur in each and every fine hair your heat and life, best at quiet, knows ragged not. And in this hour, I plunge my hands into your fur and they are there. This. ...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 26, 2019 | 12 days 2019
I’ve Just Invented the Tai Chi Sprout Stalk Form Boxing Day and I’m in the garden practising the Tai Chi Spear Form with the curtain pole that Andy found for me in the tip. The kids are watching through the window over breakfast. I’m just doing...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 25, 2019 | 12 days 2019
Christmas List Is this the dream we have had all year – the whole house smelling of burnt toast, the black and white cat sitting on the bottom stair chewing tinsel while the ginger tom looks on, a floor littered with screwed up paper, tights from...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 24, 2019 | 12 days 2019
Christmas Eve in Dad’s kitchen and now only I know which bits of Delia we follow, which we skip, and what The Dairy Book of Home Cookery (1968) still knows best. I know to find the stump-handled jug for the cranberry jelly, and why eight pints of...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 23, 2019 | 12 days 2019
Christmas Cards I posted them. Piles of envelopes into a letter box alive with curls, mouth wide. I pushed them in, then skipped a beat, startled by the thud, that ricochet of drum and heart, before they settled, each envelope in wait, their flaps...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 22, 2019 | 12 days 2019
Walking to the Solstice I raise you a bunch of haws’ tight fists, darkly reluctant to quit thorns. I compliment you in frosted drips, mash, sticky from orange-bright hips. I give you hard burgundy brambles never destined to grow soft or more...
