by Helen Ivory | Dec 28, 2024 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Weird Thank you for the knickers but I think I prefer the ones that cover my tummy and how the elastic feels round my waist. I started last summer. I was wearing my white indoor jeans and feeling kind of both tired and sparky so I lay on my bed...
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...
