whiteweave poetry
The preserve of any who will
whiteweave poetry is a creative project aiming to collect moments and memories – to hold onto them and to shape them into something new.
I put things here as and when I’d like to (including the occasional piece of prose), and they are for me more than anyone else, but I hope they connect with you, and I hope they draw out feelings and memories, and make you pause a while.
I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.
Learnings
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We’re sat in a field and taught about time.
About Chronos and Kairos,
About capturing the moment.I cut out the thoughts and keep them in a jar.
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A tiny insect has landed on my finger
Clinging to a hair in the wind
GoneWalking through the gate it is pulled slightly
after my breeze
It creaks softly in the windFinding time – stumbling upon it
“Time passes oh boy. Time got the
jump on me yes it did”I can see Venus (or Mars?)
Full dark
There’s one otherRound a fire poems in hand and
Lucifer has entered our evening
He stares at lily eyesBed now? No. Write.
Good discipline.“Time taking Night by the hand and trotting
off down the road”Morning. Sitting eating.
Branwell Brontë is reincarnated
as a frog?
I have misheard… This happens often…The others sit and wait outside my window
I like his trousers
All our noticings on coloured cards spinning overhead- June 2023
-
I.
Take my hand and I’ll go with you
through trees and reeds and violet skies.Hold it tight. Let it
sink into your skin,
touch your shape,
your softness and sharpness,
your shadow.Let it embrace you
and we can hide. Together.In the tall grass.
II.
Our fingers fold out,
tracing a length from nail to
knuckle before circling down,every touch pulling a thousand echoes in its wake.
III.
We clutch the memory in a delicate grasp
as a butterfly on the palm,wings flicking softly,
pulse matched.We have to be sure that we are more than a dream –
that if our glass breaks, we sit beyond.Our touch untouchable.
- July 2022
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I – Blue
He understood colour and form like no-one else,
that visionary in Vence: how well he understood
their separation and their collapse; how they collide and merge
in space or circle one another without ever forgetting their shape;How, in Samuel, Bethsabea finds herself folding from her lover’s cheek
as they court, their lives playing out about them in
figures and towns spun from embered hair,
or in a great hand offering itself from nothing.Here we can stand in a garden, surrounded by flowers,
each well-dusted with blues and blood-reds, yellows and greens,
their nature marked out in purest primes,
while fruits bleed from vines
with crystal sharpness.II – Yellow
As some hidden sun shines past whirlwind trees
to light a town in golden haze,
two angels fall from the sky:
frayed lines woven in a three-armed pattern of descent.To one side, a lonely woman gives her flowers to unbalanced men,
and stands betwixt two worlds upturned.A universe toppled.
III – Red
They hand out perfume sticks to inhale,
breathe in each image with a rosy tint
from a plastic chair:
blood-reds turned to blush.IV – Green
Hold me with doves’ eyes and hear them sing,
watch the flowers appear about them.
Press against me breasts like fawns,
like young roes twinned in wooded glade.
Feed me clusters from your vines:
Rose of Sharon, Lily of the Valley,
tender-faced, milk-washed.
Speak from threaded scarlet lips.Breathe out scents of calamus and cinnamon,
Apple orchards, pomegranate,
Richest saffron.
Wrap your arms around me as a garden enclosed,
as springs and fountains sealed away,
for our bed is Green.- August 2023
Illustration at the bottom of the page.
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I miss it at first
(mind wrapped up in first-date kisses and candles)
until the news fragments in in shrapnel-shots.In a still morning the radio thunders guns and speeches,
and papers fill corner shops with smoke clouds and soldiers,
with pixel-pocked jeeps on dust roads.In some other dark a non-existent peace ended tonight –
desperate men killing desperate men.
A century of faults was passed down
to mothers and sons making dinner as missiles fell.And miles away more men sit at desks –
make speeches, pen condemnations.
Men who made it happen.
Men who are so much better than the chaos they left behind.We stand apart in unaltered streets
and the blood is on our hands.- October 2023
-
I
Remember me when I am gone –
remember me my little one.
remember how we used to play
and build our castles by the bay,
soft palaces of wet and sand,
parapets that once we manned
together. You and me
against the sea.We’d climb out with day’s first glow,
plastic buckets in tow
and find the tide marks, clear or not,
the odds and ends that night forgot;
we’d clean the stones, collect the
glass,
and turn each stick into a mast
to set us free
against the sea.The castles now are washed away,
stick and stone reclaimed by water
and I have aged and faded grey
and you have grown, my daughter.II
I went down to the stream again –
mother do you hear me?
I saw the water flowing there,
bathed and drank it freely.
I sat by the bank and piled up my clothes,
and wetted my ankles and skimmed some stones.III
Speak to me, mother, as the child I am.
Keep me here where no harm can
come near me.
Hold me – your hands are warm –
and hide me from this storm
that rages dark outside.I look out to the night and see
a colder world surrounding me,
its shadows pulling tighter in,
shadows that creep across my skin.Please mother, take me, hold me close.
Love me here.
I beg you.- November 2023
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While I was writing Miss Rossetti’s Childhood back in November, I was approached last minute to write a Christmas carol for a composer friend (with the instruction: “Gentle, and not too on-the-nose religious…”).
I filed it away and forgot about it, but a few months later I had a message asking (with a couple of word changes) to revive it for Mother’s Day. It found its way back onto my radar.
***
In the still the streets sit quiet,
and hold me soft in hand;
and streetlamps light the white-set cold
and shine on silent Christmas dark.Somewhere far away a babe is born,
and somewhere far away a mother lies with child;
nests with them deep, in cold and quiet -
nesting hope.Hold me, mother, hold me close.
Hold me in the still.
Warm me with your touch
and breathe me life.- December 2023/March 2024
-
We sat and watched spring edge
through summer to fall –
The sun low,
Oranges and golds catching in the trees.They waited so long –
To turn,
To loose,To drift away.
To press themselves beneath a passing boot.
- May 2024
-
Its one-sidedness stares back at me,
waiting.You are everything
and you stand here with me,
holding out kindness in a little clay pot
for me to take.
If I choose.Sometime before now I’ve been tricked,
somewhere along this road I’ve learned not to trust,
learnt to stick fingers in ears, grit teeth,
force eyes shut.Non!
Je refuse!
Je n’écouterai pas!
Je ne vais pas!Lalalalalalala!
One eye opens,
peaking out between lashes.Trace the clay. How does it feel?
A fingerprint is pressed into the side with a blush,
just where it has passed from her hand to yours,
and now it rests,
perched soft in your palm.I love you too.
- October 2023
Listenings
-
It pulses – catching first on the wind,
then on rooves, trees,
the cheek of a toddler,
the noses of two lovers as they stand on the bridge
kissing warmth through the cold.It circles their glowing in murmuration,
and spirals softly to its spot on the tracks beneath –
settling for a moment on the steel.The toddler waves at the train as it passes through.
- January 2024
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She walks in a soft double-tap through the trees.
My pen scratches.
She steps up onto a log and shakes off the leaves.
The traffic hums in circles.Slowly, in a trail of tiny tilts and turns,
she takes in her world,
and so do I.We sit together a while.
***
We sit and listen.
To bird song
and pen scratch.To the voices of dog walkers
and passers by.We tune into the silence –
the nothing between moments,
the pauses in the trees.She flies away.
***
I want to hear the birds fly,
the swallows sing their height.
I want to hear the wind whisper
stillness to the grass.- September 2023
-
Speaker
I am time
and newness
and hope.Let me watch you while you turn
Let me welcome you here.Here where you sit and I stand
Here where the city spreads its branches about you.
Breathe with me.
And listen.
Listener
I hear you, my friend
and I listen. To time. To you.
To your past. To the future we share.
To our hopes and our memories.
To the city and the earth.Let me feel you,
breath you as I lie across your roots.Twine them about me.
Close.And hear my voice.
- May 2023
-
A wash of sound.
The tree stretches out, its age split through branch and leaf,
Brushing up against the wind,
the sky,
the falling calls of birds and buildings,
the roll of traffic – circling.Beyond the grass people talk and pace,
Drills crack the silence.The noise flickers past her,
Growing and tiring.How fleeting it must seem.
Breath in. Out.
Grow.
- May 2023
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She asks a question and invites an answer and a low cello fills the silence between us.
Pohjola’s Daughter. Väinämöinen is coming out of the snows of the North, the world building in substance and pace around him, coming out of his own land and racing to enlightenment.
My outward silence isn’t the answer she was looking for – but it is true.
- June 2023
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The light is close now.
Mid-point.
Wholly open.It sinks into branches,
catches on leaves,
flickers gold on a bird’s wing,
and falls in a soft mosaic on the floor.A patchwork of silhouettes cut out with perfect clarity.
These shapes are an epitaph – a testimony.
Of life given.
Of breath and warmth received.
Of winds washing gently through summer days
and petals cautiously unfurled.Of fingers stretching tentatively out
– combing the grass.In their print they map out something new.
Another cycle.Another story to be spun from the light.
- June 2023
Fragments
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My wall is painted with water-based paint – gently washing over childhood yellows and more, all the way back to small scraps of oddly-patterned Victorian wallpaper.
In places the layers poke out, almost imperceptibly – a cut into a past life – and on the surface are little patches that shine out from the matt. A handprint, a palm, a sweaty back – each with a story.
You can see them sometimes.
(In the right light.)
- February 2024
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Blush. A ripening. A turning out
to face the world,
a pushing from within.A surfacing. When you break out
of the water and breathe in
salt air.A release. A confession.
A flowering.The open world is looking in, curtains held back.
Pink walls and red furniture.- February 2024
-
The world is soft and I feel it in shades –
cushion soft and duvet soft,
wooden soft and lamplight soft.The softness of feet on a carpet.
Of fingers on the spine of a book.Of blanket-watched movies or warm gloves in winter.
Of yellow-lit screens in the dark.Of stirring a late night dinner –
smell soft
steam soft
heat soft.It leaves a trace, a need,
nerve-ends tingling,
waiting.Waiting-softness.
- November 2023
-
Beneath the trees and autumn skies
we sit, my love and me.
Apples and pomegranates scattered round
for only us to see.We sit beneath boughs and dappled lights
and lie on cloths of gold,
and open our hands and fill our hearts
with fruits, and love, and songs of old.- September 2023
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With one button click they make their way
from a warehouse in Ipswich or Kent perhaps
to a well-made box and to your door.Autumn is more about leaves than flowers,
more about death and “fall” than life.
It’s nice to remember that things still bloom,
even in October.- October 2023
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My hope is that
we find the colour in the world.
That we see it, capture it,
and keep it safe.My hope is that we pass it on
and leave it brighter than ever.I will notice
love
write
hold- December 2023
-
I write by beeswax when I can,
My candle shaped into a hive,
Where bees might slowly disappear,
And thoughts slowly arrive.- July 2024
Circles
-
You lay a finger on my leg – back seat (smash heat)
radio chatter –
pull me with you, my breath wrapped round your every touch like
you’re curling a blade of grass round your finger.I can still trace it. Mark out its shadow.
Stretching out, easing the boundary,
toes dipped in the water,
testing.All of me is held in one thread of movement, circling.
Round
and round
and round.The circles follow me to sleep.
You lay a finger on my leg – reach round (heart-pound)
grass coil turning –
edge higher, closer, and you are on me,
body and sweat,
pulsing silence in the dark.Round
and round
and round
in circles.I know you then, the feel of you.
The way you breathe, sleep, touch,
leave shadows on my skin like ripple-marks on sand.
I lie awake and listen as you build and wash away in tides,until he’s there –
Sat.
Quiet.
Watching.
Filling the space between our hands, our lips.And your hands are not your own.
His body and mine. Here.
Alone.He lays a finger on my lap – drawing out (clawing out)
sharp, beating –
circles, echoes, waves, screaming.
Where have you gone?You brought me here,
where have you gone?His age is soft in my palm, on my lips,
warmth running in rivers, taste filling my head,
seeping, burning, shouting now,and I am still.
I lie naked in the cold,
whiteness cut from the hardlight of the bathroom,
skin marked out with our secrets which I hide
under t-shirts and towels,under the lies I tell.
I clutch my legs to my chest, lonely here,
rock circles on the tiles,
round and round.I scrape at my mouth till it bleeds.
***
They think they’re alone but they’re not
they’ve forgot
every car has a driver
every film a viewer
we are never alone but watched
never alone as we touch
he’s seeing our seeing
catching our being
each glance in his palm
be calm
for he’s waiting
his hand is there guiding
he’s biding
his time
till all his fruits are ripeI see your strings, O lover mine,
Whose hands are these that stroke my spine?
Whose heart with my poor heart entwines
To carry me away- 2019/2023
The date given here is 2019, but this version is from 2023 and there are lines that go back half a decade earlier. Originally called The Anatomy of a Circle, it was the central piece from Spinning, a series of vignettes about abuse each written from a different generational perspective.
The version here was reshaped after reading Anne Carson’s Red Doc>, absorbing something of her fractured rhyming patterns and adding a poetic response inspired by Carson’s Greek choruses.
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So that it formats the way I'd like, I have put LLJ on a separate page. You can click through to it here.
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From Spinning, a collection of poems and monologues discussing abuse.
***
The children say they’re alright because of me, but I don’t know that I did anything. It’s natural, isn’t it? If he’s going to hit someone, it’d better be me. My eldest did it too – winding him up so he’d take it out on him, leave the others alone. I wonder how much they really saw in the end?
You’ll say I should have left and of course I should, perhaps now, but then? The children definitely couldn’t, I couldn’t take them with me, and then what? Anyway, I didn’t have any money – anything at all.
We had some family friends and when they died they left me this big house, but of course he comes in and says, well we only have a joint account, and so then it’s his. Everything, his!
It’s funny looking back and maybe it’s a different world now, but I don’t know. The details might be different, the words updated for new times but the men stay the same, the meanings stay the same – restriction, reduction, a boxing in. The memorial service was a revelation!
Did you know, he was part of the team who realised Polio was in the water? A load of students came over and stayed with us while he gave some talks, but I never knew what he was doing. People were expecting me to be sad and I definitely wasn’t that, but really it took everything I had not to look surprised!
It’s so long ago now though. And all the children have all their children, and he will never be in their lives. And I sit here and I’m content.
A lot of people my age are sad, deep down, I’m not. I potter, and I read, but I’m really very happy – here, on my own.
- 2019/2023
26
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Much of my unpaid time is spent working with writers group 26 - if you don't know them, take a look. When I took over as editor of their newsletter, I introduced a series of "Mini-Projects." These are just little creative tasters, offering a new invitation to members each month.
This project in particular, run over two months, was a delight - both in the writing it allowed to see the light, and in people's responses to it.
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The 2023 Bloomsbury Festival was centred around the theme of “Grow,” and 26 put together a project with the Wildlife Trusts, assigning 26 writers an endangered plant to explore and write about. We were asked to put together a centena. 100 words, with the first and last 3 being the same.
The poem was published in 2024 as part of a collection from Paekakariki Press, And So We Grow.
***
I stand tall.
By the mud and water,
in the still damp of the wetlands,
in ditch and fen.I hold.
I cradle.Life breeds on my back –
Dragonflies and damselflies,
wading curlew,
snipe,
kingfisher and sand martin.They huddle in azure and emerald gems,
hide beneath umbels that hold up the sky,
nest at my feet.And I am theirs.
Their goldilocks mother.
Grown over in fence-kept quiet,
trampled down under busy foot –
A haven of life with a paraffin scent.In ditch and fen,
by the mud and water,
in the still damp of home.I stand tall.
- July 2023
When waiting to hear which plant I had been assigned I was hoping for one of two things. Either something instinctively emotional, evocative of fragrance and beauty – honeysuckle, alpine lady, or lily of the valley – or a more exotic offering – the green winged orchid or devil’s-bit scabious (does anything roll of your tongue with more glee than the “devil’s-bit scabious”?). Both routes were sending my mind leaping down ten alleyways at once, finding the loves, the whims, the tragic misunderstandings and sorrows – even the maidenhair spleenwort seemed to have just enough “maiden” to make it a character in Hardy.
I open the digital raffle ticket.
Greater water parsnip.
It’s Valentine’s Day, you light the candles, you have roses lining the table and petals trailing to the door. You carefully select a bottle of wine… and a parsnip. The image doesn’t work. This plant may only be a vague relation to its edible cousin, but there’s still something deeply unromantic in the name (perhaps second only to turnip or kidney vetch) and it isn’t helped by the first word of its description, marked out in cold capitals: TOXIC.
That said, the more I read, the more I found…
On a purely factual level, the greater water parsnip is an umbellifer – a member of the parsley family with umbels (flower clusters that splay out on small stalks much like the seeds from the head of a dandelion). It has a tall, hollow stem (sometimes reaching up to 2 metres tall) and gives off a slight smell of paraffin (a subtle hint at its toxicity). But what struck me most was a sense of balance or even contradiction – not simply between its grand stature and particularly delicate flowers, but in its very nature.
The plant is a mother – to the darters, dragonflies, and damselflies mating in tight emerald and azure balls on her stem; to the curlews and snipe that shelter beneath her umbrella umbels; to the kingfishers and sand martins that burrow into her roots to make their nests. And yet she is toxic – loving and deadly; maternally welcoming and best handled through plastic gloves.
These contradictions are carried through into the plant’s preservation. The greater water parsnip is endangered due to the draining of its wetlands and has been protected since the 1980s, but environmental groups still struggle to support it. If you fence it off, it is overrun by nettles and brambles, and if it is left entirely in the open, it is either eaten (by those animals to whom it is not toxic) or trampled to nothing. Projects to look after the plant have been forced to search for a “Goldilocks” point – a perfect middle way between isolation and full exposure.
The greater water parsnip is no lady or lily, nor even devil, but she does somehow remind me of one of Dickens’ quirkier characters: the goldilocks mother making the best of a difficult circumstance – loving and violently protective, resilient and delicate, and living on a knife-edge.
Other Writings
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On occasion I work with a group called Scribeasy. They run workshops with children, often with special educational needs, and help them to love reading and writing. Their software has bright colours and images and suggests words or phrases. It is meant to break down the fear of the blank page, to lead you on.
I tested it out before my first workshop and I found a gentle picture of the sea with a rainbow and a bird, was assigned a string of five words (“sea,” “gold,” “Janey,” “dove-grey,” and “rainbow”) to include, and sat for 10 or 15 minutes just writing whatever came into my head. It’s childish and simple, but I found it quite charming.
***
I always loved the sea – the waves throwing out fragments of white and gold from their blue. My mum would take me to watch them and we’d sit for hours on the stoney shore, just watching.
A little girl ran up to us once, this radiant face, cradling a stone in her palm as though it were an injured bird or some thin crystal sheet that could shatter at the slightest touch.
“Will you help me?” She said. “I want to help it to fly.”
She passed it to mum who looked at it carefully, its surface softened by tide after tide.
“What’s your name?”
“Janey.”
“Well Janey, I know exactly what we can do with that.”
She lifted a gentle finger and stroked it down the side of the rock, as though soothing a dove-grey wing, and then moved closer to the sea.
“We need to let her back out there!”
As we watched she sat calmly, just by the edge of the water’s foam, and pushed the sand into a pile, placing our dove on top as though perched in a nest, and then coming away.
Janey tugged at her sleeve. “You’re sure?”
She looked down. “I know it.”
“Now we wait.”
Little by little, the waves crept further in, lapping at the bird in its nest, until a quiet foam surrounded her. A wave came in. The sand thinned and was washed away. Another. Again – until she was held in only the finest ring of gold. And then, with one final stroke, she was swept out into the blue.
Janey leapt up but mum caught her.
“Just watch.”
And then we saw it. A dove, soaring across the surface, glinting in the sun. With a shard of light, almost like a spark catching on its feathers, it split into a rainbow, cutting into the sky, its reflection spinning out across the ripples.
And dying away.
All of life is in those waves – their deep blues, their white tips, their cresting and falling.
She is there too.
I know it.
- March 2023
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