Easter weekend and we got 5 days off school for it. I love the luxury of waking up and thinking, 'not tomorrow' especially when the rain is plashing down like this morning. The return to work will come but it's still not tomorrow, so I'm enjoying the lushness of no plans.
I went to the allotment yesterday and began work, but the rain has cancelled my plans to return. I always thank the rain however it comes. Everything has suddenly greened as a result; the lawn, the tiny buds on the trees. Last weekend the Easter witches came, so my daughter was making wands and wreaths out of pussy willow catkins which I used to decorate the door after the kids had gone. Safe to say spring is properly here.
GloPoWriMo three weeks in and I'm still going strong here. I'm not able to write a whole poem every day, but every day I'm turning up at the page and trying to write something.
Some of the poems I've written I really like, but I often feel that about poems early on. They feel so fresh and right, but then I put them aside for a bit and when I go back to them, they feel forced or they're trying too hard to be clever. So I work on them a bit and put them aside for longer, then work on them a bit more until I feel they're done. Then I put them aside for even longer and come back to them with a totally different eye.
It feels strange to go back and read poems I fell in love with years ago. They aren't the same beasts or maybe I'm not. Sometimes I still love them and they still have a rightness about them. Other times they clash and just don't work or strut too much with their own poetic-ness. My writing style has changed in many ways over time, but it's more that I have changed.
Poetry for me is very much what I want to say right now: my emotions, my obsessions, what I'm looking at and thinking about now. Years down the line I may not see things that way anymore, but the poem is a snapshot of that moment, now gone. And like my teenage journals and blurry pre-digital photos I won't get rid of them just because they're cringe-worthy or not who I am now. I love how they show my growth and development. But, as Billy Connelly said, pay attention because it's all going to change tomorrow.
This was me in the early 1990s.
And this is where I'm at April 2025:
Day 13
I’ve waited for the other shoe
for the truth to be spit out
knowing it would break open
the foundations where I stood
but I wanted to hear it
dug for it in the muck
that was shoveled high
just to be free of its stench
Day 14
I build a cage of discipline
woven with shoulds and musts
to I trap myself
inside I whittle away at time
Day 15
slow motion summers where we were never pent up
running to the gold overtones of eight tracks and polaroids
we brought goldenrod, milkweed and violets
to the table of gray alleyways and riversilt
sneaker toes kicking the dirt
Day 16 – inspired by a Finnish female rapper who came to our school.
When?
Speculate to where I could be if I only spoke up.
I am just holding on.
Still holding back
hesitate hes i tate.
Never too late.
Feel myself close off. Intimidate.
Bite back.
Permission granted.
Day 17
there’s no happiness in this
no peace either
yet I keep plunging myself deeper
I confess I felt dead
spiraling into silence into dust
Day 18
rugby in black and white
bodies rumble into motion
pitch churned to mud
limb wrapping limb
grip bind
Day 19
unstrung
I string myself along
vibrating synched to the wind
high-strung gutted and burned dry
and fall like a broken kite
the sea pulling me away
I’m given to distractions
to remember to forget
when did I stop talking
when he stopped listening
I’ve chosen to ignore
the opinions of the wind
Day 20
myself in the abstract
the rain pelting down this is content
I am torn from the page of the unmade bed this is arrival
a husk of the moon longing
morning a word sanctuary
crumpled at the bottom of the laundry pile expectations
It's taken me so long to write this post that tomorrow is the day I have to go back to work. But it's been a lovely long weekend. Enjoy what's left of your Easter holidays.
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