by Helen Ivory | Dec 26, 2024 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Eighteen Years of Advents Gone Because My Father is Now a Crow We pick up where you left off, searching still, choosing random cards from a dealer’s deck: twenty-one crows in a night-time tree, deep within the dark, with all that chatter all that...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 25, 2024 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Spreading the word As regular as Santa Claus, she’d call around at Christmas, the next-door neighbour and my Sunday school teacher, Mrs Williams. My mother sent me searching for the matching cup and saucer, television off for the only time that...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 24, 2024 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Christmas Eve ‘I was all hers and we peeled potatoes’ – Clearances III, Seamus Heaney we set about our tasks. I was called to the kitchen where she was ribboning their freckled skin, the fall of my knife steady like hers, they hit the cold...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 23, 2024 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Poplars in the Mist A crow’s eye weighs the view: poplars and their spiky layers, mist – all froth & pomp & wisp. I am more poplar than mist. I am there in each defiant branch: stalky, not willowy, standing my ground. I am always reaching...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 22, 2024 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
The Christmas Market Her mother doesn’t want to linger here – cheap stuff from South America at cruelly inflated prices. Disgrace. But Nuala won’t be dragged away. There are wooden frogs that sing an ugly croaking song. Their coats are...
