by Helen Ivory | Sep 13, 2025 | Featured, Poetry
Compline A woodpigeon calls his five-note matins. Petals ratchet wide as the sun rises. A butterfly’s haphazard wing beat. Reverberation of a gong, sandalled feet on tiles. Golden leaves in the gutter, the downpipe’s digestion of rainfall. Petals...
by Helen Ivory | Sep 12, 2025 | Featured, Poetry
Redwood The mineral kin would not know me now, I used to be a cone-coiled code, I mean, I was biding, to flicker into joy. Each day I emerge a little, root deeper, canopy wider, longing burnishing my hardening trunk. Distance from the ground has...
by Helen Ivory | Sep 11, 2025 | Featured, Poetry
An Eight Year Old’s May Altar Inside May’s warm beauty I think of God and of the Virgin Mary. I’ve always loved Mary. The time is now — I’ll make a May altar. And I’ll look for my rosary beads. For my Holy Mary I’ll grab the plastic one from the...
by Helen Ivory | Sep 9, 2025 | Featured, Poetry
St Godfric gets canonised three sheep and a sharp wind, behind which I feel involvement start to tug. Not at all like the song I composed halfway up Wear’s Bank. It’s happening too early, before I’m actually dead. This park bench and the beck’s...
by Helen Ivory | Sep 8, 2025 | Featured, Poetry
The purpose I’m six days late and this is known as a delinquent period. We’re amused by this if nothing else. The first thing you do after I say pregnancy out loud is sit on the loo and search sensory deprivation tank London. I see you typing as I...
by Helen Ivory | Sep 7, 2025 | Featured, Poetry
Ladybird, Ladybird After Paula Rego’s Nursery Rhymes You seem very far from home and who would after all choose a grit pocked pavement to languish on when they could be eating aphids in my overgrown garden? Mother Mary isn’t coming my way it seems...
