Advent
Why wait? the supermarket asks
(you know which one) when puddings
ooze expense and calendars for Advent
spill indulgence. Down the street
festive lights jitter and twitch.
Each day is inching shorter.
Wood pigeons strip the hedgerow holly of its red.
A carol service sings in minor keys
of patient yearning; in its shadows
another calendar reflects
the start of its own year
where waiting is a season of beginning.
D.A.Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her second full-length collection (Common Ground, HappenStance, 2014) won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. Her third collection, The Bigger Picture (also from HappenStance) came out in November 2022.
York Advent
A single stab of blackberry, more red than black,
spots a scrap of city hedge.
picked, it is held to the light
then crushed in the mouth like a dare.
between chimneys, a strip of blue
pure as a first violin,
‘Great Peter’s bass slow-starts its ring,
and church after church wraps round a line.
dusk falls. The smoke is too thick for stars.
first here and looking awkward,
Sainsbury’s Christmas lights blink at themselves.
Mint has died back for winter.
on measured, precious allotments,
men and women watch nascent garlands of sprouts
and hope for frost.
Tanya Parker won the 2008 Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition and the 2013 Ryedale Poetry Competition. Her work has appeared in Orbis and London Grip at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome. Her first poetry collection, with Stairwell Books, was published in 2015.
Her Life as a Spurtle
Her father turned her, carved from beech one winter’s night. Whittled her shape. Smoothed into skin. She works well, stirs heat, stirs nourishment. She turns, turns hands. She keepsakes the old days. The minty scent, the oatmeal. Porridge bubbles like a geyser late at night, or on a midwinter morning. She’s the new generation of an ancient practice. Hold her by the thistle end. She’ll not prick you. She’s a wand, bringing glamourie to the food of love.
Maggie Mackay’s debut collection A West Coast Psalter was published by Kelsay Books in early 2021. Impspired published The Babel of Human Travel , from which this poem is taken, this month. She reviews poetry pamphlets at https://sphinxreview.co.uk (Happenstance Press) and collections at The Friday Poem (https://thefridaypoem.com).