The Poetry Marathon

Darkness slips silent, tight to the ground
On velvet paws
A cat
Is absorbed into the shadows
Of an ebony hedge
Which rustles
And is loosed
Into the dark air
In rough-winged flight
A crow
Rises
Where
Murky clouds cluster
In a brutish sky

Darkness
Flitting before me
Above me
And beyond me

Sometimes the darkness stays

© Anne McMaster 2016

Poem no. 23: Recovery Time

Sometimes the day casually raked its claws down her
And they did not understand
That she would withdraw
To silence and to peace
Waiting for the wounds to heal.

© Anne McMaster 2016

Poem no. 22: January Joy

A tumbling beauty of a day – sun spilling out on scarce-budded hedges, blue sky soft as that of a day in spring.

It should not be, it could not be – and yet it is.

It is a day that calls to the heart to sing – or brings words bubbling up under the skin.

It is a day when the heart lifts in the newly minted light – grown fresh and harvested in the dark days of winter – when we watched the lowering skies and hungered for the now. Hungered for days like this; days when light touches the skin with delicate promise and whispers that more is to come.

Since I saw the light this morning – shivering in the palest silver blue along the water and echoed in the morning sky, I have wanted to be home.

This light is where you go home to: it’s where you return. It is the very origin of things; it is where we begin.

And as the words stir under my skin and ripple through my mind, so the earth begins to murmur and shift as a sleeper does before they wake.

There will be other days of darkness – days when colour and hope are leached from the hours given to us – but today the world is full of light and promise and, in it, I am glad – heart glad – to be alive.

© Anne McMaster 2016

Poem no.21: This Page

No boundaries mark this open page.
Yet on the broad-horizoned land,
Fields, mended hedges, broken walls
Mark exactly where I may not go.

A page – this page – is open to the sky.

Times past, on snowy winter days
Three small girls
Slid, shrieking, down a frosted hill.
Boundaries were a whispered dare.
A looming thrill.
Only a final curve – a tipping point
Moments before disaster–
Drove us deep into the snow
Not pinioned on leafless briars
Behind the cold barbed wire.

We raced through crop-filled summer fields,
Picked raspberries and blackberries,
Sweetening our lips and nights
Tasting summer and autumn on our tongue.

Only in adolescence
Did we then find ourselves
Drawn to the edge of things;
Moving towards the boundaries of the day.

Hold the book. Open the page.
This page – this page – is open to the sky.

© Anne McMaster 2016

If she could have her way, she said,
She would have liked to own a summer clock;
A gleaming, simple timepiece
To gather time – not pass it –
Placed snugly in a corner of the room.

It would take hold of summer time, she said,
Catching the moments of light each day
To keep away the long, dark winter hours.
And there would be a corner of her house
That would remain afire.

She said this in a wistful tone, soft as a dawn,
Then turned her hopeful gaze to me.
But in seeing, she looked far beyond me, now,
To the lowering darkness of the October day.

© Anne McMaster 2016

He does his best to woo her
With generous, glittering squares;
Presents her with the fiesty rectangles,
Sparkling rhomboids, glistening spheres.

While she, listening closely,
Responds as best she knows;
Her soft replies are in colour,
Gentle shades and milder tones.

Each aches passionately for the other
In every conceivable way.
But though each talks, they simply don’t
Understand a word they say.

© Anne McMaster

The spring day was cool and fresh with a luminous light drawn down from a mixture of cloud, sun and light rain.

Many puddles edged the road in glowing arcs, yet one small, silvered pool caught my attention and drew me back.

At the edge of the cloud-streaked water lay a tiny dead mouse. I could not see how it had died – there was no visible wound – but its sleek grey body curled peacefully around the edge of the puddle.

The light was strange that day; it dazzled, it reflected off damp metal, it brought all lying water to life.

The puddle was luminescent. It glowed.

And the tiny mouse – so perfectly placed – looked as if it was staring deeply into a portal to another world where all mice ran untrammelled and free and none died ignominiously at the side of a small damp country road.

© Anne McMaster 2016

Standing in the playground,
Eyes closed to the sun,
Dreaming I’m a superhero;
Believing I’m The One.

Later, in the mirror,
Appalled at what I see;
Clumpy, tousled, earth-bound.
No one there but me.

© Anne McMaster

“On Fridays, we eat fish,”
She told me as we’d walked up, chatting, from the Waterside.
The train track, routed by the river bend,
Arched underneath the city’s second bridge.
A towering form (or so we thought so then);
Two mighty levels for the traffic that roared by.
Mindful of warnings, kept alert by news,
We exited the station: took the lower level of the bridge.

To navigate the upper storey, then,
Was foolhardy and just not worth the risk.
We knew the news reports – civilians shot;
A soldier ambushed on his way back from patrol.
We walked the rattling, fume-soaked lower deck
Then up the hill and down into the Bog*.

Newly friends, we’d learned each other’s rituals;
But lecture halls and theatres were neutral and benign.
Walking on home turf was different when the soil was new;
Signs and signals were foreign – caught us unawares –
But we were young enough to want to learn.

We’d walked the rough-edged pavement to the house
When suddenly she stopped – and all too casually inquired –
‘My mother was worried you might be insulted…I mean…
(She struggled here) She thought you might prefer
If she took down the Sacred Heart while you were here?

I could not answer for the grief that swamped me then;
I had no right to ask it – and made clear to tell her so.
Her friendship and her family were what had drawn me in;
The rules of her house would be mine while I was there.
And so it was I found my second home –
A tiny terrace in a torn city with a generous, beating heart.

I’ve visited often in the years since then,
And on Fridays, we eat fish.

© Anne McMaster 2016

*The Bogside.

October races towards November, still like a child at play.
November reaches slowly down and takes its toy away.

© Anne McMaster 2016