London’s Eye can see into your soul,
the metal mammoth a fixture
of your lifetime. Gathering at fountains
on Saturday nights, clutching at camaraderie
with forced fervour, weekend drunk and lonely.
The brown envelopes leftovers hinge on a Soho visit,
strip club or a jostle in your local, as Cockneys harp
about market stall trends, or Arsenal, or Everton,
whatever.
Misplacing accents as you swallow your own,
toning it down for others, when all you crave
is a sense of belonging.

You miss the incessant screech
of herring gulls, squabbling at the dock,
the chug of trawlers, loaded to the scuppers.
Netted bowels heaving with their silvery catch.
Scales like glints off a blade,
shimmering in rays.
Betty from two doors down,
proffers the only net you’ll see now,

cushioning the sparse wisps of her blue rinse.
Smells smash into you, street scents raid your senses
Your memory bank at…

Windswept, Mam walked the shore

with her offerings: a chest full of gulls,

a numbness deeper than all sleep.

Wading into the roar

until she was up to her neck in it,

she’d slip off her feet,

shed her heavy sense of emptiness.

She’d wait forever for a glimpse of seal

despite the north wind slapping her backwards

and the fella who stole her skin

waiting up on the dunes.

Even moonlight died on him.

A man full to the brim with drink.

Most nights he’d beat the tides out of us

and threaten to carve his name on her,

button my lip with a fishhook.

After the storms,

we’d wander the beach or she’d reel me up

from sleep in the small hours to float me

in the gentle rise and fall of her grief.

Many a night I found her calling out

to the water in the same…

CHRISTMAS, AND THE RUSH HOUR

The bus I am sitting in has a full belly.

Bursting thoughts float like ghosts.

The man next to me nods in his book

a bottle peeps from his jacket.

Ruffled mother, pram-deep in plastic bags

and rolls of Christmas paper

gives her baby some sticky drink.

Hush now.

While tinselled teenagers like mosquitoes

giggle in the rear.

We pass the cemetery, slowly;

eighteenth century I have read on the stones;

for their day, clip-clop, clip-clop.

Hollied logs. Braziers popping chestnuts.

Mulled-wine. And the goose is getting fat

Clipity-clop, clipity-clop.

Horse-dung, carriages, carts.

Now rain drips through trees

I rub the misty window

see between the lip of a cloud

a sickle moon.

Nothing much changes… except

the traffic lights are on green.

Maureen Weldon

First Published, Poetry Scotland

Susan Jordan is the new Featured Writer with her first collection, A House of Empty Rooms, published by Indigo Dreams. It was delightful to hear Susan read some of her poems in Exeter at Uncut Poets last month, I think it was.  I was particularly impressed with ‘Gertrude by Alice’ with its witty refrain She was a genius, you know. I think we all gasped!   The poems about family members misusing words are humorous as well as being poignant.  Susan has this gift for probing insights delivered with irony and tenderness at the same time.  She creates atmosphere with a few words, focuses on detail on something someone says to reveal hidden truths.

….the front door loomed incomprehensibly blue

Its smell of polish lingering like stale cake

These poems always know when to finish and you hear their quiet notes falling away so you need to read…

Edward Thomas joined up to fight of his own free will. He was just starting to come into his own as a poet when he was killed. This poem of mine refers to two of his poems, ‘Rain’ and ‘Words’, two poems I have loved for years.

In this poem, from The Five Petals of Elderflower, I have wishes for him but for every other person killed in war. World War One, like all wars, was indiscriminate in its killing: ‘poets and painters and musicians,
labourers and farm hands, thinkers and doers’ all perished, along with those killed by their own side who had become too traumatised to fight, conscientious objectors, who deserve to be admired for taking a stand, but who also suffered from poor treatment and even imprisonment in many cases.

The great war deprived me of three great uncles. Two were killed in France: Nicholas Lawler…

I am grateful to David Cooke (of The High Window) for this review of my latest book on Amazon:

Beautifully crafted and accessible, The Five Petals of Elderflower, is convincing testimony to Angela Topping’s unwavering pursuit of poetry as a vocation. Undistracted by fashion, she writes with authority about the things that are important to her: family, childhood, the natural world, in poems that are beautifully cadenced, honest, and rooted in real experience. Throughout this collection, there is an admirable clarity and musicality. Nothing is overstated and time and again the poet delivers in images that are freshly minted. This is a poetry where ‘each house has its own story to tell, / each door keeps its own secrets.’ It deserves to be widely read.

Amazon is saying the book is not available, but they are wrong. It is available from me. £10 including postage, which gives a small discount.

My anxiety is rising… my stress is off the scale

I glimpsed a bloody headline in the Daily Mail

They fill you up with crazy and make your mind obsess

We should waterboard our MPs and make them all confess

Leaning left, leaning right, then they’re on the fence

Scrap the trident, ban the bomb, spend more on defence

The security forces watch you with your own webcam

Phishing, skimming, hacking the latest techno scam

Why did they put those masts in the centre of our towns?

Wireless from our smart phones is used to dumb us down!

The rich are getting richer they are standing on our backs

The poor are sponging off the state according to the hacks

The foreigners are coming they’re going to take your job

The criminals are outsourcing… to the Russian mob

The food we’re eating will kill us it’s gone beyond a joke