after TS Eliot<\/em><\/p>\nSo whose idea was this?
\nTo come all this way
\nthrough endless fields from the manor house
\nto this colossal thing?<\/p>\n
We trod past mounds of dung,
\nforbidden pastures,
\ntracks that led in circles,
\nbridges and barbed wire,
\nrows of trees like pews before the hill<\/p>\n
and the honeysuckle path
\nand the blue-smeared animals, oblivious,
\nand the ditches that we crossed,
\nso full of mud that it seeped through our shoes
\nand the people, just as lost,
\nasking us how to reach this folly.<\/p>\n
We stepped up here together,
\nhot and haggard,
\nto this crumbling castle \u2013 picture perfect
\nfrom the manor dining hall.
\nBut here we see the wooden struts,
\nthe boarded windows and the painted-on cracks,
\nthe weeds seeping up stone,
\npaper-thin and damp.<\/p>\n
Whose idea was this?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
David Van-Cauter<\/strong> is a personal tutor and editor from Hitchin, Herts.In 2017 he was runner-up in the Bradford on Avon festival competition and highly commended in the Bare Fiction competition. He was shortlisted for a previous IS&T Cafe Writers Commission.\u00a0 A pamphlet is forthcoming in early 2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ho Ho Ho<\/strong><\/p>\nI remember being seventeen,
\nsafely in college, away from home,
\nin a place with guaranteed meals, where I
\ncould spend large chunks of the last years of my
\nminority reading books and showering
\nas infrequently as I liked, without
\nthe threat of a return to the place
\nwhose name I still (all these years later)
\ncannot pronounce without nausea.
\nI remember waking up in the night,
\nstill wearing the jeans I had on the day
\nI moved in, watching the moon shine in,
\nmagnified by atmospheric ice-crystals,
\nsweating and nauseous from one of those dreams.
\nI remember sliding into my favorite
\ngray hoodie (I never did buy a jacket)
\nand toeing past the warm lump of my roommate
\nwho seemed to exhale vanilla, effortlessly,
\nfrom all her small pores. I remember
\nthe always-on lights of the hallway.
\nI remember the shock of air, harsh,
\nas though the world were freezer-burned, as I
\nslipped out of the door. Out the door. Up the hill.
\nPast dining hall and mail room, thinking, ‘Ten
\nmore days till Christmas Break. Then five weeks.
\nBut two of those weeks are in Florida.
\nIt won’t get too bad, in Florida.
\nNot with everyone around.\u2019 I remember
\nthe track, outside the gym. It was lit all night,
\ntoo, and the white frost lent the tarmac
\nsilver. My hands hurt, until they went numb.
\nMy feet hurt, in their Birkenstock sandals,
\nuntil they suddenly didn’t. Sometimes
\nmy toenails would peel off when I changed
\nmy socks. And I would walk, at a fast clip,
\naround and around, until my blood beat
\nthe thought of Christmas from my skull and I
\ncould go someplace a little better, where
\nI could dream for a while. I’d fight crime,
\nsave the world, dress all in black leather
\nand generally charm the hell out of everyone,
\nuntil the dawn seeped in, weak and gray,
\nfrom the edges of things and the same three
\ncrows (who always seemed to be watching me)
\nshook themselves from the branches of their pine
\nand started grazing in the centre
\nof my orbit. The bell would ring, somewhere,
\non the hill, and I’d slog back to the place
\nwhere scrambled eggs (made from powder) steamed
\ngreasily in their trays and I would read
\na free copy of the newspaper
\nbefore trying to write a couple of lines
\nabout the way the needles of the pines
\nlooked, in the night, sheathed in their casings
\nof jewel-like ice. It’s amazing, to me,
\nexactly how much of my life’s been spent
\nescaping from any kind of thinking.
\nIt’s amazing how far I’ll go to try
\nto earn the better kind of dream.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bethany W Pope<\/strong> has won many literary awards and published several\u00a0novels and\u00a0collections of poetry.\u00a0Nicholas Lezard, writing for The Guardian<\/em>, described\u00a0Bethany\u2019s\u00a0latest collection as ‘poetry as salvation’…..’This harrowing collection drawn from a youth spent in an orphanage delights in language as a place of private escape.’\u00a0She currently lives and works in China.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Midwinter Wishes I wish you midwinter darkness the better to see the stars. I wish you midwinter silence the better to hear yourself think. I wish you a midwinter forest to lose your way in. I wish you a midwinter fog to attend to what\u2019s closest. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-twelve-days-of-christmas-2018"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18070"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18154,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18070\/revisions\/18154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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