Poetry & Prose by Carol J Forrester
He wants to know why
I’m so bothered by such a small
incidental thing.
Doesn’t understand
the ratcheting wind in my nerves
has been so slow,
so steady,
so long in the build up
that any reason is good enough
to make me snap.
The shock of it.
A feather brush among brittle spines,
and it’s body,
whole,
a weight unexpected from the straw
I am scattering from these hands.
Fallen,
twice over now,
from rafters, eaves,
hollows above these stables,
the last place this swift would know.
When I was younger and stayed with my grandparents on a regular basis, I used to help with mucking out the stables. I have such vivid memories of picking up a bale of straw, shaking it loose, and a dead bird tumbling out. My grandmother’s explanation was that the bird had died in the rafters and fallen into the bale. I’m not sure if that was actually how it ended up there, but it happened enough times that straw and hay bales have freaked me out slightly ever since. Not a great phobia for someone whose whole family has been involved in agriculture at some point or another. Today’s Quadrille prompt brought this memory bursting to the forefront, so despite my inability to so much as look at dead birds these days, I managed to work it into my response.
In less morbid news, happy International Women’s Day, and Women’s History Month! Over the weekend I posted a piece on Britain’s First Female Historian Catherine Macaulay. For those of you who know of Mary Wollstonecraft, Macaulay was a contemporary, and her ‘Letters On Education’ which call for equal education for girls and boys, predates Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’. While it’s not poetry, I would love to hear any thoughts anyone may have on the article as I’m now working on my third ‘Women In History’ piece which looks at the women of the Peasants Revolt in 1381.
On the very edge,
where you go to curl your toes
into prayers.
Ten tiny bodies bent shoulder and hip
heads tucked in tight
as if curved spines can protect them
from the weight pressing forward,
you, so wind washed of expression,
clinging on.
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.
It takes three minutes to brew black tea.
English breakfast, china mug,
steam lifting lazy from the spout
in a long, spiral stretch,
my own arms raised from the blanket
for the glass bottles stowed up top
just waiting for autumn and wind falls.
