Useful String

I received a leaflet this morning about a poetry prize. After a few minutes of imagining entering and casually turning my fiver into two and half grand, I pulled myself together and decided to just put a poem on here instead.

Very rarely I have an idea that wants to be poetry but, even after writing it, this one still wants to be a poem. Its about two memorable days from my childhood, about string and also about time …

Useful String

We walk the dazzling fields.

A searing white sphere, squinting eyes.

Shorts and halter-neck

expose legs and back.

Wheat stubble scratches ankles.

Dad and brother march,

macho pride in first and fast.

Grandma regales Mum with village tales.

You and I lag behind

and we discover the trees,

the bees, the beetles,

flowers and crickets.

The spared ears of wheat,

at the field’s edges.

A loveliness of ladybirds.

You slowly bend with rickety legs,

pulling and gathering your useful string

from crust-dry furrows, releasing

fine powder into the air.

You wind it around your hand.

Pocket neat bundles, to store

in the drawer in the shed.

Your collections turned to rust,

dust and yellow-age. After -

we cleared out, threw away,

before the last day,

when we sat by the pond and

drank lemon squash from jam jars.

If Someone Had Told Me

It's now nearly a year since I moved from the Uni to my lovely little flat in Morecambe, hoping I would keep up the writing & make some sort of progress.

If someone had told me then I would, less than a year later, have been placed second and third in two comps, done a reading, had a little something published by Mslexia, be talking to people I know, people I hardly know and people I don't know on twitter, have my own blog, have six stories online, have made £75 from writing AND have written over 73,000 words of a NOVEL ... (deep breath - sentence far too long) I'd have said ... HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW THAT?

But it is more than I could have hoped for ...

The sixth online story is Kirsty and Shane and is on 330words This started off as a poem when I was doing my MA but I think it always wanted to be a flash. Mainly due to my poetry being a bit dodgy but it's good to try these things. Though possibly not when you have a well published poet as your tutor.

I didn't take the photo myself but I have this single (Fairytale of New York) and could have if I'd gone back to my parents in Coventry and hunted it out from the boxes and cupboardful of vinyl I don't know what to do with.