You are currently browsing all posts tagged with 'poetry'.

Autumn clothes

  • Posted on February 24, 2019 at 9:23 pm

worn sparingly
a low sun and still too much

twelve years
ago I was 50, a tipping point
in understanding mortality

twelve years ago
you were in school, gatherings
in our world of your friends

twelve years ago you were
calling me a hippie – we both were green
by degrees in my garden

twelve years, two degrees,
two is the difference between a frost
and a frosty day

two is a third of
the difference between Brighton and
Yorkshire in summer

two degrees
are the difference between a heatwave
and a heatwave

one is nothing
the other is forever, neither small,
yet far too big

it is everything
everywhere and all of us, nothing else,
now numbered

today
today is our tipping point unseen
a day of silence

Autumn leaves
unsparing in a low sun, still
too much

The day after publication, October 2018, of the IPCC Special Report that gave a 12 year window to avoid 2 degrees global warming.

2019 © Andie Davidson

Going Out: Eastern Germany 2017

  • Posted on January 1, 2018 at 1:22 pm

She doesn’t quite catch my hand
it falls—shatters on the ground.

You never quite know.

Windows down the empty way,
nostalgia with suspicion —
a Trabi sits on the lot, a tiny
sufficient reminder
that trust is fragile, still.

I look down at my hand
the pieces silently explain
why I had danced apart last night
to rock, metal and stones, a
wrong fear of anyone too right.

They pointed at us.
They looked disgusted.
You just didn’t see.
At the fruit blossom fest last year,
—and I recall.

The pieces of my hand reluctantly
rearrange themselves, reoccupy
my glove, find my pocket;
join every love darkened by fear
es tut mir leid.

Yes, and knowing
that this is not how change happens.

 

2017 © Andie Davidson

Basket of Memories

  • Posted on August 10, 2017 at 11:30 pm

There is a series of drawings I should have bookmarked, illustrating grief. One shows two people walking side by side, each holding a handle of a basket marked ‘memories’. The grief version of this image is one person, holding just one handle. Memories are something else when shared, repainted, renewed. Something is forever lost in memories unshared.

And then there is the business of separations, and memories that are denied, memories longed for, memories stirred, and not the same from both sides. This poem began in light of my lost family: chosen and deliberate breaking of memories. And I have seen shared belongings in an unshared space, and wondered about the ways in which I am forgotten.

This poem is a poignant and very real portrayal of losing my family to my personal changes with which they could not cope or embrace. But then I thought about it after writing, and realise that it also applies to my mother’s slow loss of memory (even that I am her daughter), whilst well-remembered things could be found in her house. Things shared, that no longer are; things that could be shared memories, but are not.

The basket of my memories

has a broken handle, many spilled—

I found them arranged on your shelves
hanging in order on your walls

where my eyes are pools
not wells, and dry in the sun
between showers.

There is a mother and there is a daughter
who don’t remember, deliberately—
one doesn’t deliberately remember
the other deliberately doesn’t.

I am a memory in a basket
with no handles
a pool without reflection.

There is a photo of a cat who died—
on your shelf, on your wall.

The recycling basket lies by the door.

 

2017 © Andie Davidson

Kiss my breath

  • Posted on June 29, 2017 at 10:08 pm

it has entered
left and some is still of me

a little can be you
or may dispelstay free

some is morning
is cloudsat night

stirring of wings
of leavesand flight

open as windows
like my heartand mouth

stirring in curtains
from eastthen south

some is yawning
or laughterand delight

a little lies in stillness
or a skylarkat its height

it has flown
touchedan ancient sea

kiss beginnings
kiss my breathkiss me

 

2017 © Andie Davidson

Stars

  • Posted on February 24, 2017 at 7:02 pm

Some go to the harbour
for the buoys
or gaze out to sea;
others fly to crested castles
for knights hoping
for a favour, to be won;
we go down to the undercliff
where the spray
catches us, reeling.

Landed, quiet and still
wrapped in you, I feel
your breath on my shoulder;
each exhalation full of
fragments of dreaming;
every inhalation drawing
inspiration for more.

Our limbs become branches
of a single tree,
acquiring leaves;
and stars.

 

2016 © Andie Davidson