by Helen Ivory | Dec 22, 2025 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
Mother of Pearl It was when your hair fell like snow I found it again. No longer moon blonde, time had coppered the hair auburn. The garage is where your roots grow. I found the plait of hair in a small blue suitcase with silvered clasps, two feet...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 21, 2025 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Ten weeks to Christmas Store leaf fire in your eyes against the dark. Steep the brightness of berries in syrup and wine. Trade green for gold, steadily, like the silver birch. Look across the valley to the other side where March waves to you....
by Helen Ivory | Dec 12, 2025 | Featured, Poetry
Night Out a flower is not a heron does not stand on one leg spear-billed over golden carp does not rise on wide wings neck curving into the blue flight like a slow heartbeat a heartbeat is not a flight does not lift a wary body translate a girl...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 11, 2025 | Featured, Poetry
Chant after Ammar Aziz At dawn and dusk, my father becomes a chant, that flies above the courtyard of the old house by the river, where only the men recite Sanskrit prayers by lamplight, as though in a divine trance, to Gayatri, consort of the...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 10, 2025 | Featured, Poetry
Wake The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen but that I will learn to expect and there’s a fracas-induced full moon, clouds beneath like soot from giant candles. I woke up and the time ahead was missing like Notre Dame’s gothic power and the spots gone...