Poem of the Week, Week 4: I Slip into My Mother's Shoes by Jo Roach

Another poem of Poem Of The Week is I Slip Into My Mother’s Shoes by Jo Roach. With VE day approaching and the language used to describe lockdown in the media, this poem rouses a relatable mood -

I Slip into My Mother’s Shoes

and stand at the bench in the munitions factory

oil pours over my hands

the air thick with the choking smell of sulphur

my skin stained canary yellow

the deafening din of the machines

the clatter of metal trolleys

I run into the Anderson shelter

terrified by twelve seconds silence of doodlebugs

have all my teeth removed at the Angel Dentist’s

ready for an ill-fitting set of false teeth

take dictation in Pitman’s shorthand

type sixty words a minute in an office in Charterhouse Square

catch a Green Line bus for a day out

lift my skirt and go for a paddle by Southend Pier

dance down Oxford Street on VE Day

with men in coarse demob suits

I’m wearing an engagement ring

a ruby with diamond chips

I wait in the church and he doesn’t come

I go back to my baby son and one room.

Jo Roach born and brought up and still lives in the part of London where she can trace her mother’s family roots back to 1650. Jo’s father was from Ireland, a connection to place which exerts a strong influence on her poetry.

Poem Of The Week, Week 4: 'Three Paintings by Giovanni Bellini' by John Mackinnon

For week four of Poems Of The Week we bring you John Mackinnon and his poem, Three Paintings by Giovanni Bellini. Whilst the galleries and museums are closed to the public, perhaps this poem will conjure the imagery of the Italian Masters…

Three Paintings by Giovanni Bellini

Madonna

If we are to be judged

it won’t be the bambino

sucking his finger and staring

vaguely heavenwards,

but the unlettered girl watching us,

not smiling, not unkind,

whose charged stance is the question

we won’t evade.

Circumcision

She urgently holds

her child to the knife.

His body shudders

as he takes on the law.

The old priest,

so careful in the act,

is all beard,

eyelid, eyebrow.

Jerome

He is reading a book

in a rock landscape

a face disfigures.

It frames the lit city

and the hills’ recession.

While the lion waits

he will lift God’s word

on the state’s stretched tongue.

Mackinnon states, …”recently I have been writing a series of short poems on paintings; the poems here relate to the National Gallery’s 2019 exhibition of Bellini and Mantegna and their permanent collection. I see a poem as an exploration of a territory opened up by some kind of form or material.” Mackinnon website is www.johnmackinnon.org.uk.

Poems Of The Week, Week 3: WHAT WE CAME LOOKING FOR by Chris Hardy

As part of week three of Poems Of The Week, we have WHAT WE CAME LOOKING FOR by Chris Hardy, a poem about ‘about memory, love, and loss.’ Hardy explained to Bell House that he, ‘…write[s] as a reaction to moments of sudden awareness, of time, the beauty and fragility of life and the world, a random memory, an overheard phrase. A few words appear and that is the beginning. I read poetry looking for the same experience.’

WHAT WE CAME LOOKING FOR

She might remember to tell you,

though she is busy

running the café.

Also she is young

and might not know

what we meant

when we told her how

we came here

and camped on the beach

before she was born.

We met fishermen,

a woman driving a bull,

the Chief of Police, children, and you

who’d once made pastries for Farouk

in Heliopolis,

and gave us coffee, water,

cakes and wine for breakfast.

We watched above the shore,

swam, picked up mail,

rubbed olive oil and vinegar

into our burnt skin, and waited for something

or nothing.

Something came –

work, daughters,

a slow accumulation of weight

to hold us in one place

and press us into shape.

Many others bought

your powdery confections,

spent enough to turn the track

into a road and line the fields with

shops, apartments and a gleaming,

arched Patisserie.

We didn’t knock to wake you

just now,

when we had to leave again.

But we told the girl our story

and if she tells you I think

you will remember us and know

what we came looking for

this time.

(‘WHAT WE CAME LOOKING FOR’ was published in ‘The Frogmore Papers’ poetry magazine and Chris’ first collection, ‘Swimming In The Deep Diamond Mine’. )

Poems Of The Week, Week 3: Blacksmith, making by Rebecca Goss

In this third set of Poems Of The Week we have a vivid and kinetic poem to transport you to a new setting during lockdown, by Rebecca Goss.

Blacksmith, making

I met a man fluent

in the lexicon of spark

and watched him stand, forge lit,

waiting for the brightest yellow.

I witnessed steel’s blazed

compliance in the vice,

neared an anvil’s kept heat,

saw the dips and rust upon its face. I heard

the hammer’s bounce and strike

and bounce again.

Felt myself to be occupied

by the chime of it.

I held a latch, full of purpose,

and his thinking.

(A poem from Rebecca’s “Suffolk Poems Project”, more of which can be found here )

Poems Of The Week, Week 3: The Zoo Keeper's Song by Maggie Sawkins

For our third set of Poems of the Week we have The Zoo Keeper’s Song by Maggie Sawkins. Sawkins mused, ‘When I was a child, I imagined I would have a job working with animals, but that wasn’t to be. Instead I’ve spent my life working with words, wild and tame, which is the next best thing.’

The Zoo Keeper’s Song

I could watch them for hours

Esmeralda and Zola

strolling up and down

on legs as long as stilted circus clowns.

With my daily offerings

of lettuce, radish grape

I enter the enclosure

run my hand over

the primitive patchwork skin,

watch how they flutter their eyelashes

like two actresses

in an old time move.

When I come back

I want to be the leaves

on the tallest trees

I want to be devoured

by those magnificent tongues.

(From The Zig Zag Woman, Two Ravens Press, 2007)