Fractured as the rainbow of meadow flowers
You veer and turn, soar and drop
Between worry, ideas, hopes
Hedges, grasses, paths
Seeking that
Warm spot:
Pause:
Then off
Dizzying me
As I try to keep track
of your sky-blown career still
scented with clover against the fen sky.
Chettisham Meadow, beautiful orchids in the spring, traditional English meadow in the summer.
From the amoeba warp of pools
where under chalk-ghostly leaves 
the springs no longer pump but only seep
out of the thirsty hill,
past the foursquare monument
to the city’s long-gone great and good,
under rusty metal where a wavering needle
charts half, a quarter of its former flow,
trickling over pondweed and drowned water flowers,
the brook negotiates the graffiti roar
of the thunderbridge, nods to the rivulets
of DNA on the cycle path, skirts
the flood-plain housing and the ponds
new made with warnings to the age-old birds,
before imprisoning herself between
the gault clay banks made and unmade
over the centuries by the city’s scrabblers:
the bricklayers, the launderers, the farmers,
the allotment waterers, the yellow machines
felling pines for a glimpse of railway sidings,
where once the cattle trucks brought flocks of geese
prize bulls, pigs, and newly scrubbed fen farmers
strolling in bowler hats past new-fangled
machines, ignoring the rustle and splash of the dogged
water rat that ploughs upstream under the pock-marked
bank, the flash of the kingfisher looping
down the water’s silver ribbon to his perch
by the crowded empty common, where Hobson’s
channel leaves the vicar’s stream, to lend her water
to the ingenious pipes and plastic bottles
of the communal gardeners and to sidle past
the nuclear bunkers, commuter apartments,
threadbare mansions, the city’s feathered nests, before
letting go, among the reeds and willowherb,
the weight of chalk and history, coal dust and memories
into the settling bed, three foot of silt, until
quietly and soberly dressed for city streets, she walks
the hidden ways under the city,
Trumpington Street,
Market Square,
St. Tibbs Row,
Corn Exchange street,
Emmanuel College and Christ’s,
Sussex and Hobson Street
Jesus Lane
Park Street
and down to the river at
Jesus Green.
Spent an hour at the Empty Common communal garden in Cambridge, telling stories for the Hobson’s Conduit Trust: here’s the poem I wrote for them
You hold my finger in one small hand
and walk me slowly around the garden to sit
in one place after another,
the sun golden on our shoulders,
talking about nothing in particular
in words that have no meaning:
ten minutes that stay warm in memory.
Round Castle Mound, the branches toss and moan
Blown by the arguments of politics
Below them, college roofs, solid as stone:
‘We’ve weathered much and we can weather this.’
The trees reply: ‘It’s very well for you,
Down there in sheltered comfort: but for us:
our jobs, health, food, the place we shelter too,
are all at stake: we risk our lives or worse.’
May you, newly elected, at the heart
Of our wide city, listen to them both,
The fragile ones whose lives are torn apart,
Asking your help, and hear those old ones too:
In life and politics nothing will last:
Both good and evil done will one day pass.
Commissioned for Cambridge 105 radio, 8th June 2017
I’m shaving white flakes from a piece of wood,
sitting on the pine you lugged here
in your chip-oil van, and slotted in – no nails-
into our wind-broken tree, carved in swirls
and infinite curves, returning on themselves
like the whirls of your mind respooling your wild
rants and eccentricities. And I wonder
whether these first stumbling marks
I’ve left on the raw slice of ash will last
after I am gone, as your work
outlasts you.
Those sky magicians, wind and rain
are arguing once again.
One brings up the credit card bill
the other, washing up and the failure to listen.
One turns into a flashing swallow
the other a yellow-eyed goshawk.
One falls into puddles, a silver-finned minnow
the other swoops in, a skewer-beaked heron.
Branches tremble, long grasses cower,
hearing the same old arguments come around.
Hiding their heads, they wait
for the rainbow sign that calm may last
for a day or two.
This month’s poetry challenge is my annual challenge for June from the Wildlife Trust: to commit 30 random acts of wildness over the month of June. And write about them.
The first week has been high on wildness but low on writing: here’s what I’ve been up to so far.
Day 1
A city is growing
in chalk on the porch floor.
A dog bowl lake and a lavender pot forest,
while we sit down
for tea in the garden
Day 2 Rain Music
Dip
Tap-tap
Ti-boom-tap
Ka-chucka-chucka
tin pans
under the dripping gutter.
Day 3 First punting trip
Watching, dumbstruck
the eye-level ducks,
your stick’s drift down the stream,
ripples of light on the tunnel’s low roof,
you cried when our two boats
drifted apart.
Day 4 hands…
Sand trails
from your fingers
as you run, from sandpit
to mud kitchen: then show me
gritty hands.
Day 5 … and feet
Yukky!
You brush grass blades
From feet too soft for dirt
Then run across plantain, daisies:
Catch me!
