by Helen Ivory | Dec 27, 2024 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Once there was nothing sweeter than snow Do you remember Penguin biscuits? Their bright wrappers enveloping our first knowledge of flightlessness. What are snow angels called when there is no snow? Mud demons, grass ghosts, sand sprites. Once...
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...
