Lynne Rees's Blog, page 11

Deerfield Mile

There are the walkers with coffee. There are the plodding joggers and the sitting sunrise watchers. There are the hand-in-hand walkers and the couples who walk an arm’s length apart. There are walkers muffled up in hoodies and runners pumping their bare arms. And old ladies, in ones and twos, weaving and winding from kerb to kerb as if they might still be dancing in a 1950s ballroom with the one they loved.

And, of course, there are always the ‘let’s-all-spread-across-the-sidewalk-and-take-up-as-much-room-as-we-can’ walkers. And dog walkers. And a woman who must have splashed through the ocean’s shallows, standing one-legged at her open trunk wiping sand from her feet. And a man wandering the boardwalk with a phone in his hand, who could be waiting for someone. Or even for himself.

And here’s me, trying to remember to keep right not left but forgetting when I run back to the beach, and spit some water onto the rocks, which way the wind is blowing.


sunrise
all of us
in this
together

Poem: January

New Year 2020

Poem: When We Make Things

When the pig arrives I cannot stoplooking at her. It's more than just the wayshe both delights and unnerves me -
her snout so realistic it could be breathingthe air alongside me, the glint in her eyes,her little scalded trotters. And she is

more than the sum of her parts: cashmere,mohair, cotton, her pinned joints, the petalsof her ears, a necklace of lace, a bell.
Of course, holding court in a vintage tea-cuptends to lift you from the mundane tothe exceptional, but what moves me most
is the delicacy of care, the dexterity,the kindess even, her maker has instilledin each stitch, dimple and bristle.
When we make things, we send ourselvesout into the world, with love, with hope.
With thanks to the wonderful Brenda Turner, pig-maker (and maker of so much more) extraordinaire.

Poem

Night journey
It must have been a relief to reach the smooth skin of Velux glass after a long ascent up the rough terrain of brick wall, over the peaks of ridged tiles, a kind of ‘putting your feet up’ slug-style but disappointing, nevertheless, to find it bare of anything to eat but here’s the map you made, to be sure of that, before returning to better pickings on the roof, the gutter’s moist wells where you fed, for once, under a sky empty of fear. And we sleptour own fears and relief chasing through our dreams.

Rewards

Two days couldn't be further apart: from coldmizzling rain that seeped into my bones to thisgift of blue sky and the heat on my face as I runthe field’s edge that almost persuades me so muchmore has been gained overnight than a single hour.
Autumn plays us like this: discontent, joy,resignation, rekindling. While darkness movescloser each day we find comfort in the season’s shift:a palette of bronze leaves, wood-smoke, a coinfound in the pocket of a heavy coat.
Rewards enough to keep moving forward.

National Poetry Day

Someone stole my National Poetry Day (yesterday!)... so I'm having my own today.

And this is for my grand-daughter, Summer, who, 15 years after this poem was written for her, is adventuring her way through Asia's 'frights' and 'wonders', and those legs are definitely longer! Be safe, my lovely girl. Be magnificent.









Riding the Fright Box
This time she wants me to be a man
on a fairground ride – scaring her

with darkness, cockroaches, a skeleton
shuddering through invisible doors

in the corner of the yard. .You sure
you’re old enough?. I growl as I slip her

into the garden chair, the hula-hoop
a safety bar across her chest, push a lever –

and she’s off across the cobbles’
rickety track, jeans tucked in her socks,

ready to brush away roaches, sway
from flesh-eating zombies, calm snakes

with her own special hisses before bursting
back into the light, nothing nibbled or missing,

saying it’s my turn. 'Keep your ‘ands on the bar
and level with your breasts Miss,' she warns,

and I laugh, but she’s suddenly taller,
her neck and legs longer than they were

two minutes ago. She presses the button.
I judder forward, turn and watch her wave.

The things we cannot see

Not all of us are destined to mark the horizon,
some of us are still scrabbling in the foothills,
some of us reached the peak and continued on.
But no matter how high or how low we are,
how far we travel, in company or alone, there is
always light, even under a sky bruised with rain.
Sometimes the things we cannot see will save us.

after three years so much

after three years so much 

branch and leaf, the earthat our feet busy with chivesparsley, beets
we have weatheredthe sun and rainof a dozen more seasons
life’s hoops of love and loss: each yearour scores increase

What's written on the other side of the sign

I imagine the man crunching gears into reverse, side-swiping the bramble hedge then raising a wave of gravel as he hurtles back into someone’s drive to let another car pass, had a bad start to his morning.
A row with his wife, the kids playing up, the shock of an unpaid bill, perhaps his mother is ill, or just a string of small exasperations over days or weeks that unravel now on this narrow lane.
I understand how our lives can sometimes buckle with the unexpected, the road we thought we knew suddenly fraught with obstacles we are not equipped for.
‘Take a moment’ I wrote on the cover of a journal at the beginning of the year. Some days it’s as if I have never even heard those words. Others, I remember to breathe.
As I hope this man may be doing now, slowly, before slipping quietly into first gear, the woman in the passenger seat glancing sideways at him with a glimmer of light in her eyes.  
salad fields what's written on the other side of the sign