by Ana Sampson
Those dark seas and waiting towns you go;
And when you come to me
There are fearful dreams in your eyes,
And remoteness. Oh, God! I see
How far away you are,
Who may so soon meet death beneath an alien star.
Mabel Esther Allan
The Brits
Whatever it was they were looking for, they liked
to arrive in the small hours, take us by surprise,
avoiding our eyes like gormless youngfellas
shuffling at a dance. My mother spoke:
a nod from the leader and the batch of heavy rifles
was stacked, clackety-clack, like a neat camp fire
under the arch of the hall table – her one
condition, with so many children
in their beds – each gun placed by a soldier
whose face, for an instant, hung in the mirror.
This doe, the load of them thundered up the stairs,
filling our rooms like news of a tragedy.
Last night I dreamt of tiny soldiers
like the action figures I played with as a child;
Fay Wray soldiers in the clumsy hands of Kong,
little Hasbro troopers in the massive hands of God.
I’d like to remove their camouflage and radios,
to dress them up in doll-sized clothes; little high street shirts,
jeans, trainers, the strip of ordinary sons and brothers.
I’d like to hand them back to their mothers.
Colette Bryce
There Will Come Soft Rains
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Sara Teasdale
‘Behind Me – dips Eternity’ – Endings
We reach for poetry at funerals, as at weddings, because it can say things we can’t. Death was once a familiar, family business that happened in the home, as here in Joanna Baillie’s domestic drama. It must always have been particularly present to women, most of whom would face the then perilous experience of childbirth. It is no wonder, then, that the Victorians, especially, embraced a cult of sentimental morbidity and wrote so much on the subject. It has even been suggested that Victorian women – many of them idle not by choice but because they were deprived of education and stimulating employment, cloistered at home – naturally fell to brooding and dark thoughts. Whenever they lived, however, poets have always been drawn to this great and final subject. Here are words of deep and beautiful sadness, but also lines to bring comfort and hope.
Remember
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
Christina Rossetti
Not Waving but Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
Stevie Smith
The Child in Me
She follows me about my House of Life
(This happy little ghost of my dead youth!)
She has no part in Time’s relentless strife
She keeps her old simplicity and truth –
And laughs at grim mortality,
This deathless child that stays with me –
This happy little ghost of my dead youth!
My House of Life is weather-stained with years –
(O Child in Me, I wonder why you stay.)
Its windows are bedimmed with rain of tears,
The walls have lost their rose, its thatch is gray.
One after one its guests depart,
So dull a host is my old heart.
O Child in Me, I wonder why You stay!
For jealous Age, whose face I would forget,
Pulls the bright flowers you bring me from my hair
And powders it with snow; and yet – and yet
I love your dancing feet and jocund air.
I have no taste for caps of lace
To tie about my faded face –
I love to wear your flower in my hair.
O Child in Me, leave not my House of Clay
Until we pass together through its door!
When lights are out, and Life has gone away
And we depart to come again no more.
We comrades who have travelled far
Will hail the Twilight and the Star,
And smiling, pass together through the Door!
May Riley Smith
September Rain
Always rain, September rain,
The slipstream of the season,
Night of the equinox, the change.
There are three surfers out back.
Now the rain’s pulse is doubled, the wave
Is not to be caught. Are they lost in the dark
Do they know where the coast is combed with light
Or is there only the swell, lifting
Back to the beginning
When they ran down the hill like children
Through this rain, September rain,
And the sea opened its breast to them?
I lie and listen
And the life in me stirs like a tide
That knows when it must be gone.
I am on the deep deep water
Lightly held by one ankle
Out of my depth, waiting.
Helen Dunmore
Woodland Burial
Don’t lay me in some gloomy churchyard shaded by a wall
Where the dust of ancient bones has spread a dryness over all,
Lay me in some leafy loam where, sheltered from the cold
Little seeds investigate and tender leaves unfold.
There kindly and affectionately, plant a native tree
To grow resplendent before God and hold some part of me.
The roots will not disturb me as they wend their peaceful way
To build the fine and bountiful, from closure and decay.
To seek their small requirements so that when their work is done
I’ll be tall and standing strongly in the beauty of the sun.
Pam Ayres
The Things That Matter
Now that I’ve nearly done my days,
And grown too stiff to sweep or sew,
I sit and think, till I’m amaze,
About what lots of things I know:
Things as I’ve found out one by one –
>
And when I’m fast down in the clay,
My knowing things and how they’re done
Will all be lost and thrown away.
There’s things, I know, as won’t be lost,
Things as folks write and talk about:
The way to keep your roots from frost,
And how to get your ink spots out.
What medicine’s good for sores and sprains,
What way to salt your butter down,
What charms will cure your different pains,
And what will bright your faded gown.
But more important things than these,
They can’t be written in a book:
How fast to boil your greens and peas,
And how good bacon ought to look;
The feel of real good wearing stuff,
The kind of apple as will keep,
The look of bread that’s rose enough,
And how to get a child asleep.
Whether the jam is fit to pot,
Whether the milk is going to turn,
Whether a hen will lay or not,
Is things as some folks never learn.
I know the weather by the sky,
I know what herbs grow in what lane;
And if sick men are going to die,
Or if they’ll get about again.
Young wives come in, a-smiling, grave,
With secrets that they itch to tell:
I know what sort of times they’ll have,
And if they’ll have a boy or gell.
And if a lad is ill to bind,
Or some young maid is hard to lead,
I know when you should speak ’em kind,
And when it’s scolding as they need.
I used to know where birds ud set,
And likely spots for trout or hare,
And God may want me to forget
The way to set a line or snare;
But not the way to truss a chick,
To fry a fish, or baste a roast,
Nor how to tell, when folks are sick,
What kind of herb will ease them most!
Forgetting seems such silly waste!
I know so many little things,
And now the Angels will make haste
To dust it all away with wings!
O God, you made me like to know,
You kept the things straight in my head,
Please God, if you can make it so,
Let me know something when I’m dead.
Edith Nesbit
Behind Me – dips Eternity
Behind Me – dips Eternity –
Before Me – Immortality –
Myself – the Term between –
Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,
Dissolving into Dawn away,
Before the West begin –
’Tis Kingdoms – afterward – they say –
In perfect – pauseless Monarchy –
Whose Prince – is Son of None –
Himself – His Dateless Dynasty –
Himself – Himself diversify –
In Duplicate divine –
’Tis Miracle before Me – then –
’Tis Miracle behind – between –
A Crescent in the Sea –
With Midnight to the North of Her –
And Midnight to the South of Her –
And Maelstrom – in the Sky –
Emily Dickinson
About the Poets
Fleur Adcock (born 1934)
Fleur moved from her native New Zealand to England during the Second World War, returning to settle in London in 1963. She has been writing since she was five, working as a librarian before becoming a full-time writer. Fleur has published ten poetry collections as well as a collected edition, and often gives voice to the powerless in her work. She was awarded an OBE in 1996.
Kissing is here.
Mabel Esther Allan (1915–1998)
Although her terrible eyesight meant she hated school, Mabel decided at the age of eight that she wanted to be a writer, and her supportive father bought her a desk and taught her to type. Her first book was published in 1945 and she went on to write about 170 children’s books, including the ‘Drina’ series of ballet stories. During the Second World War she served in the Women’s Land Army in Cheshire and taught in a school for deprived children in Liverpool. Four of her books were set during war-time. She also published under the names Jean Estoril, Priscilla Hagon and Anne Pilgrim.
Immensity is here.
Deborah Alma (born 1964)
Deborah has worked with people with dementia and with vulnerable women’s groups. She is editor of Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology, The Everyday Poet: Poems to Live By and the award-winning #MeToo: A Women’s Poetry Anthology. Her True Tales of the Countryside is published by the Emma Press and her first full collection Dirty Laundry is from Nine Arches Press.
I Am My Own Parent is here.
Astrid Hjertenæs Andersen (1915–1985)
Astrid was a Norwegian poet and travel writer who worked as a journalist for Norway’s biggest newspaper. She married the painter Snorre Andersen and they often worked together: he would illustrate her poetry and she wrote poems inspired by his nature paintings. She published numerous collections of poetry and won many prizes in Norway, including the prestigious Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature in 1964.
Before the sun goes down is here.
Maya Angelou (1928–2014)
Maya was born in St Louis, Missouri. She was attacked by her mother’s boyfriend as a child, and he was killed by her uncles. Maya refused to speak for five years after that, but did develop a deep passion for reading. After school, she had various jobs including being a streetcar conductor and stripping paint from cars, eventually making a name for herself as a nightclub singer. The first of her several autobiographies, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, told her story up until the age of seventeen, when her son was born, and it was – and remains – hugely popular. From the 1950s she worked in the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. Maya was also an award-winning actress and the first black woman to have a screenplay produced. Her fabulous performances – including reading ‘On The Pulse of Morning’ at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton – are legendary.
Phenomenal Woman / Still I Rise are here and here.
Margaret Atwood (born 1939)
Margaret is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her recent novels are The Heart Goes Last and the MaddAddam Trilogy – the Giller and Booker Prize-shortlisted Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. Other novels include The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize, Alias Grace, The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Penelopiad (a retelling of the Odyssey) and the modern classic The Handmaid’s Tale – now a critically acclaimed television series. Hag-Seed, a novel based on Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, was published in 2016. Her most recent graphic series is Angel Catbird. In 2017, she was awarded the German Peace Prize, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, and the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award.
Siren Song is here.
Ruth Awolola (born 1998)
Ruth is a British born Nigerian Jamaican student, youth worker, sister, daughter, friend and poet. She grew up in South East London but is currently based in York where she studies English in Education. She has been performing poetry since 2015 and has performed up and down the UK, exploring themes of travelling, race, family and space. In 2018, Rising Stars, an anthology of poetry from new poets including Ruth, was Highly Commended at the CLiPPA ceremony.
On Forgetting That I Am A Tree is here.
Pam Ayres (born 1947)
Pam recited one of her poems on local radio in 1974 and her friends badgered her to enter a television talent show in the following year. Both paved the way for her to become a much-loved performer and broadcaster who has sold millions of books, CDs and DVDs, toured internationally and bee
n studied in schools around the world. Her books have often topped lists of the ‘most borrowed’ from libraries and she was awarded an MBE in 2004.
Woodland Burial is here.
Francesca Beard (born 1968)
Francesca was born in Malaysia and lives in London. A leading performance poet, her shows have been called ‘spine-tingling’ (the Independent). She has had dramas performed at the Royal Court Theatre and on BBC Radio 4 and has been Poet in Residence at venues including the Tower of London, the Natural History Museum and the Metropolitan Police. Francesca tours schools, theatres and festivals with shows and workshops and has performed around the world.
Power of the Other is here.
Marion Bernstein (1846–1906)
Marion was a radical feminist poet in Victorian Glasgow. She was ill throughout her life and had to apply for charitable grants when she was too unwell to give piano lessons. She kept in touch with the world through newspapers when she was bedridden, and wrote poems inspired by the subjects they covered, including politics, domestic violence, slavery and working-class poverty. Many were published in periodicals, and one book of poetry was published in 1876. Marion had been largely forgotten until the 1990s but in 2013 her collected poems – including previously unseen work – was finally published as A Song of Glasgow Town.
Wanted: A Husband is here.
Liz Berry (born 1980)
Liz was born and raised in the Black Country and the language and folklore of the region is a huge influence on her poetry – she loves to scour old dictionaries for dialect words to rescue and use. She worked as a primary school teacher and wrote poetry in secret until her twenties, when she studied for a Masters degree and began to publish her work. Her collection Black Country won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, among other awards, in 2014.
5th Dudley Girl Guides is here.
Ursula Bethell (1874–1945)
Ursula was born in Surrey, England, but her family moved to New Zealand while she was a baby. Her father was a prosperous sheep farmer and she was given an expensive international education, studying painting and music in Europe. She eventually settled back in New Zealand and undertook charity and social work. She lived with Effie Pollen. Ursula only started to write poetry aged around fifty, and stopped when Effie died, so all her work is from one decade between 1924 and 1934. She was a talented garden designer and many of her poems were inspired by gardening. She originally published under the pseudonym ‘Evelyn Hayes’ – apparently a great-great-grandfather of Ursula’s who had been deported to Botany Bay for kidnapping an heiress.
