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 year. Hello
Mrs Williams, how nice of you to call.
Mince pie. Three or four sugars in her tea.

She was a bit of a bragger, Mrs
Williams, and seemed quite la dee da, though
she lived in a council house like everybody
else. She’d tell us how her daughter’s kids, Camella
and Estella, were flying high at school,
swimming for the county, writing, in French,
and in verse, to pen pals in Paris.

She was big on religion, Mrs Williams,
I’d heard her say that people die and somehow
rise again but, at least on her visits,
she would not mention God. Instead, after
one last cup of tea, a disappointing
present in the form of a book where every
year the storyline was more or less the same –
inner city boys and girls in trouble
with the law and a man in plastic collar
who’d come to the rescue. I’d read them once
and throw them all away.

What if
it wasn’t just me? What if all the other kids
were given books to read where Christians
always win? As a Sunday school teacher,
she must have had a large supply to hoik
from door-to-door and around the estate,
bent by the weight of a satchel on her back,
supermarket carry bags dragging through
the snow. Wrapping paper, greeting cards,
Sellotape and books. So many children
to see, she might have had to knock on doors
as early as November. Bore da,
Mrs Williams, sut ydych chi? Gallons of tea.
Bladder the size of a Christmas stocking.

As a result of winning the Geoff Stevens Memorial Award, Paul McGrane’s first collection Elastic Man was published with Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2018. A second collection British People in Hot Weather came out with Indigo in 2021. Paul is the co-founder of the Forest Poets poetry collective in Walthamstow and runs Poems Not Bombs poetry open mics in Walthamstow and Soho.

Note: Bore da… sut ydych chi? Good morning… how are you?

Eavesdropping On A Group Discussion About What The Three Wise Men Could Have Brought The Child In A Manger

Doctor Frankenstein.

Probably scare the little mite.

The creator not the monster.

Bringing the future messiah the gift of Victor Frankenstein would have been an excellent choice. Given how things turned out for Jesus, having someone who knew how to bring the dead back to life would have been the gift that kept on giving.

A nice carpenter’s tool set might have been better.

Carpenters sets are no longer allowed for children,  Health and Safety has seen to that.

I don’t think The Carpenters ever played Bethlehem.

Maybe they brought along one of their singles.

I disagree ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’
fully explains the star the three so called wise men were following.

Kevin Reid lives in Scotland.  His most recent pamphlet, Suitcase was published by 4word in September 2020. Held is his first full collection of poetry published by Yaffle.  www.yafflepress.co.uk

Misper

The police helicopter is circling
above our Christmas Day

searching for a vulnerable woman
missing from the next village –
from home, husband, toddlers.

That engine-and-searchlight
hovered on Christmas Eve,
noisy through the dark hours.

This morning it’s here again,
so loud it’s almost unbearable.

We’re asked to check sheds,
garages, outbuildings –

Where’s God in all this?
I think. Something whispers:
alongside us, vulnerable.

Later today she’ll be found
in a corrugated-iron field shelter –
listening to the sheep calling

and watching brushstrokes of cirrus
turn darker as the sun sets.

Helen Evans runs two poetry projects: Inner Room, and Poems for the Path Ahead. Her debut pamphlet was Only by Flying (HappenStance Press 2015); her work has featured most recently in Mariscat Sampler One (Mariscat Press 2024). www.helenevans.co.uk