Salt stiffened, her wings don’t lift
except pinwheeling feathers
caught helter-skelter by sea breeze,
sun bleached and lichen lined.
Watches for the hands rising,
faces breaking among shallows,
hope and desperation.
She sings for them.
Caged in her cove, she sings.
I should have taken that course,
the one with the guy
who builds drystone walls up north
for the farmers who have to maintain
things the way they’ve always been.
A bit like how I’m still trying
to keep this how it was
when you laid each slab in place
one, against the other,
so clever with your fingers,
finding the flattest stones,
the edges most like jigsaw pieces,
and stacking the pile
till it looked like a skyscraper
even if it always was only a folly.
I’ve just taken part in Caroline Bird’s Brave Writing poetry workshop, so I was a little worried I’d be all poet’d out by the time I got round to the DVerse prompt for this evening. It was an amazing workshop and I feel like a got so much out of it, much as I did with the workshop I did last year run by Mark Pajak. Workshops are a great way to improve your poems and your craft.
Also, my poem When Medusa Goes Shopping went live on The Daily Drunk today! I think this is the first poem I’ve had published in 2020. After writing my collection I felt a bit like I’d run out of poems, and it’s only been in the last couple of months that I really started got the fire back in my belly when it comes to writing.
Since tonight’s prompt is Follies, I’d like to mention Hawkstone Park Follies. It’s a lovely site in Shropshire, built originally by the Hill family, and a local tourist attraction. The family built it as a pleasure garden (eighteenth century gardens designed for noble families to go walking in) and as a result the Follies boast fantastic sandstone caves, a hermitage, and the obelisk which is not actually an obelisk but a monument to the supposed first protestant mayor of London. (Supposed, the claim is a little contested). For those who enjoy walking it’s a fantastic place to visit (though only open between 1st July and 1st November). I’d highly recommend not doing it dressed as the Easter Bunny however. There are some steep bits.
Fireworks popping off underneath skin,
an explosions against the brickwork.
Blood so bright it burns my retinas
and when I dreamed I can see it,
the splash,
the sizzle of colour.
My own fists tight as un-popped corks
deep in my dressing gown pockets,
buried under lint and hidden things,
like the sound of bone
crack
on plasterboard,
always plasterboard,
this fuse pulled taught between my shoulders
unlit
and your face so dark with thunder
the crash of it in a plate on the kitchen floor,
slowly starts to clear.
I feel like I need to preface this poem with the fact that it is not a description of a real event, or specifically based on one real individual. We’ve had sporadic fireworks for the last couple of weeks, so if anything, those are the main source of inspiration. Right with that out of the way, here’s an audio recording of the poem, and a note to say go and check out the rest of the poems written for tonight’s DVersePoets sound prompt.
You and your dim accuracy,
head lolled loose
eyes whitened and widened
till the pupils blink out.
Words come clipped,
ransomed love letters
read like shopping lists,
or obituaries.
Call this a grey life,
the air sucked clear
your mouth a pursed funnel,
but I
am the culprit.
Found the bruises of your hands,
like marble sponge,
cold as stone
the heat slipping over you
without warming.
In the well shade you sit
while I sink deeper, darker
for the waterline.
Come up spitting dust
and excuses.
Shoulder a shallow cloak
of indifference,
already the hem unpicked
by those grasping hands
always tapping
rapping
at the weakest point.
Feel them at my temples
tonight, tomorrow, today,
at the weakest point
always tapping away.
Ah, I’m really hoping I got this right. The five Samuel Greenberg charms that I used for my response are as follows: dim accuracy / grey life / marble sponge / the well shade / shallow cloak. I tried to emulate Greenberg’s abstract style (though not quite as drastically as he employs the abstract).
Their heads bob like drinking birds,
of course, of course, of course.
Necks pulled up from their collar bones.
I have never seen throats so open
as when your snout is at their jugular
the gleam on bright white teeth
masked by sheer magnetism.
Tonight’s quadrille prompt had me a little stumped to begin with. Then I started writing about iron filings, got stuck fifteen words in, and wrote this quadrille instead. I even got to bring out one of my own sketches to use for the feature image.
Carol J Forrester 
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