[Just to bring you up to date:

Today’s post will be the 271st since the cobweb was started in April 2014. I realised a short time ago, on the the basis that each post averages out at about 2000 words, sometime recently we passed the half million word mark. I reckon that’s worth celebrating, so I asked three poets to be guests again. I could have asked lots of people and namechecked many more…Hilary Elfick, Andy Blackford, and The Poetry Business in particular.

However, I wanted to say thank you for three landmark moments…first solo guest poetry reading, first invitation to be a guest blogger, and first time as guest poet on a poetry blog. So. Here we go.]

In the five or six years since I started to take this poetry business seriously, and started to read poetry blogs, and to go to poetry readings on a regular basis, and, indeed, to to read at poetry readings, I’ve started to be aware of poets who regularly travel considerable distances to read and listen. There are a lot of them around, but I’m thinking of some in particular (pleased don’t be miffed if I’ve missed you out). For instance, there’s Michael Brown who I first saw at an event in the West Riding. He’d come all the way from Teesside to read…and , as it happened, got a shorter amount of time than expected (as was one who’d travelled from Barrow. I’ve written about this before. Nuff said.) Since then I’ve seen him in Leeds, in Halifax, at the Square Chapel…where he’d simply turned up to support the guest poets. He rocked up to a mini-launch in Staithes. Last Tuesday he was in Liverpool for the launch of Coast to coast to coast which he co-edited with Maria Isakova Bennett. And She’s another I’ve seen in Sowerby Bridge, in Leeds and elsewhere. A poetry traveller. She lives in Liverpool.

And then there’s today’s guest, Roy Marshall…Halifax, Hebden Bridge, Sheffield, Leeds; recently he was up in the north-east…….and then all sorts of venues in London, and around the Midlands.

An indefatigable traveller, he lives in Leicester. The point is, none of them do poetry for a living. It costs them in time and cash. God bless them, every one. And Roy also writes poetry reviews, and a regular and well-followed poetry blog. Which is why he’s our guest today, because he offered me a milestone moment. My first guest blog post…which was about landscapes and a sense of place. You can find it in the archive..October 2015. Time to meet him again.

Roy Marshall was born in 1966. His mother was born in Italy, his father in London. Roy wanted to be a writer as a child and young man but became distracted for about twenty years during which time he found himself variously employed as a delivery driver, gardener and coronary care nurse, amongst other occupations.
His pamphlet ‘Gopagilla‘ was published by Crystal Clear in March 2012 and was very favourably reviewed by Andrew McCulloch in the TLS.
‘Gopagilla’ has sold out and is no longer available. A full collection ‘The Sun Bathers’ was published by Shoestring Press in November 2013 and has been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy award. The book has also been received very positively in ‘The Warwick Review, ‘Under The Radar’, ‘The North’ and elsewhere. You can buy a copy by clicking on the ‘Sun Bathers’ page of his poetry blog. at http://roymarshall.wordpress.com/.

He’ll be giving us an update very shortly. But first, here’s the poem I specifically asked for on the last post about him, because I heard him read it in Halifax and new it was the real deal….it did what Clive James asks of a poem. It’s a moment that draws you in; it seems to memorise itself as you hear in.

Zoetrope
Being no twitcher
I can’t tell if it’s a black swan or cormorant

speeding beside the train, the near-naked trees
interloping

to turn a glimpse of what must be
the most elegant of trajectories

into a zoetrope that strokes
the rooted eye,

wings fully open and now
closed, neck stretched to spear the sky,

and me in the carriage, alone
and transfixed, as far from that bird

as a child, his eye to the slot of a spinning drum
in an empty Victorian nursery.
First Published in New Walk Magazine

First I liked, a lot, the elision of the zoetrope’s imperfectly synchronised moving image with the flick/flick of something seen from the windows of a fast train. It seems to me exactly right. I like the exactness of verbs: interloping, strokes, transfixed. I like the simple honesty of it all.  I can’t tell. It comes without the knowing self-deprecation of that line of Larkin’s that I’ve never liked, in a poem that I love: someone should know. And finally, that image of the poet, alone, transfixed, not knowing, being involved and ‘outside’, simultaneously. It’s a beautifully crafted poem, I think. So, let’s find out what he’s up to now.

 Thank you for having me back. What’s happened since October 2015?

I started and finished an MA in creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University. I applied for and won an award to do it, so it didn’t cost me anything except time and travel costs. My expectations were high. I believed I might learn a lot.  Maybe I did. I’m still figuring out what I learnt. I guess it was partly what I already knew- that is, to trust yourself and don’t acquiesce or automatically give undue authority to those who hold positions of authority.  I’m glad now I went back to university. I could leave the chip on my shoulder behind on the way out.  One tutor was very dedicated. Others, far less so. I know all courses and tutors are different so perhaps my experience was atypical. The best part of the course was making new friends and hanging about in Sheffield. I eventually received a distinction. However, I thought feedback from one or two tutors was poorly delivered, discouraging and very confusing in some instances. As a bi-product of this experience I became interested in what makes good, useful, constructive feedback and put down a few thoughts about this subject on my blog.  (you can link this if you like John –  https://roymarshall.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/the-art-of-constructive-criticism/

I’ve also used my blog to share poems by new poets. I like to keep an eye out for work that excites me and then I ask the poet if I can feature some of their work. Several of these poets have since gone on to have collections published, including James Giddings, Emily Blewit, John Challis and Keith Hutson.

Personal highlights over the last two years have included reading at Manchester John Rylands Library with Liz Berry, a beautiful place, and at the wonderful Swindon poetry festival which has a lovely vibe. I also enjoyed a reading with Kim Moore and Alison Brackenbury in Halifax, not least because I love visiting my friends in the North. I’ve received a few prizes, one being awarded by Don Patterson at Wenlock poetry festival. He told me my poem,’ The Pack,’ was ‘f- ing brilliant.’

My second book, The Great Animator, was published by Shoestring Press in spring 2017 and has had some lovely reviews. Also, some cardiac nurses wrote to say my poem ‘Carrying the Arrest Bleep’ is up on the staffroom wall, which I was very pleased about.

After the book came out I wrote almost nothing for a while. The political situation, both domestic and abroad, obsessed and depressed me. I found my energy drained by reading reams of updates on political developments here and elsewhere. I felt that if I wrote anything at all it needed to reflect societal changes, but I didn’t want to write ‘political’ poems that were simplistic and crass. Now I accept that it is all right (and maybe a political act in-itself) to create and keep on creating whatever you feel you must.  There is no obligation to make every poem political with a big ‘P’ and it is not an abdication of responsibility if you don’t. I do want to write work that is reflective of my concerns, but I am happy to be patient while my conscious or unconscious mind figures out how to do it. In fact, as I write this I am realize that some of my recent work already does reflect my social concerns, one way or another.

I’ve also been through a period when my writing seemed to fall short of my own standards.
It took me a while to remember that it is normal for confidence to fluctuate. After a productive five years (one pamphlet, two full collections) I now understand that it is all right to take time away from writing and reading poems. Most important to me are the few good relationships I have developed via writing, and it is a great bonus to have the knowledge that poets that I like and respect also like my work. Poems will come if, and when, they are ready. Nothing is quite like the feeling when a piece of writing feels as if it might be going somewhere.  I first experienced this ‘caught up’ or lifted feeling as a child, and I feel blessed every time I rediscover it.

What he doesn’t say is that he regularly posts his beautifully observed and composed photographs on Facebook**….’beautifully observed’. That’s the keynote. Like me, he doesn’t ‘know’ a lot about birds in the way an ornithologist knows birds. But he sees and ‘knows’ individual birds at precise moments and records them in ways that go a long way beyond lyricism. He’s in the tradition of Heaney and Hughes in this. And, like Hughes, he can’t resist a crow.
 

From the Book of Crow Etiquette

To avoid association with a crow’s death
feign a limp or otherwise disguise your gait
when passing a crow funeral. In order to escape
a scolding, don’t contest a crow’s right
to your roof or disrupt its visceral business
among fledglings and eggs. Crows have memories
like wet tar, can recognize the white-stitched ribbon
of a fruitful carrion road, the location of a yard
from which a stone was thrown. Tame crows
give pet names to their keepers; make of this
what you will. Crows that are damaged or ill
are often assisted by others, or else
done in. Decades may pass before a widowed crow
casts the cross of her shadow
on a long abandoned farmyard. A murder might mob
the one-time owner of a slingshot, now
a grandfather in the park. Crows bring gifts
to those who feed them, to children with no prejudice
or fear of crows. You might not need
a stash of broken necklaces, Airfix kit
of sparrow bones, lens cap rinsed in a birdbath,
nor a half heart locket inscribed with ‘Best’.
You may not wish for ‘friends’ to priest a garden fence
or wall, who call before your alarm sounds
and pick at your open dream.

From ‘The Great Animator’ (Shoestring Press, 2017)

There you are: The Poet’s Book of Crows. I like the even tone of this, it’s absolute assurance, and the way I never feel disposed to argue with it as I read. I like the assurance of the line breaks, and, above all, the ‘moment that draws you in’, which, for me is this:

Crows have memories
like wet tar, can recognize the white-stitched ribbon
of a fruitful carrion road.

Just listen to the way everything is pinned and stitched by all those precise consonants, all those ‘t’ sounds. I love its texture. Finally, though, just in case you think his poetry is all about birds and photographs (when it’s not about the life of a cardiac nurse), lets finish with one I specifically asked for. It doesn’t get a commentary, because it speaks for itself.

 Waterloo Teeth

Wigmakers, jewellers and blacksmiths
all dabbled as dentists, wrenching surrogates
from the jaws of the sugarless poor, fixing rotten grins
with ivory, tacks, and piano wire.

Grave robbers bolstered the enamel supply
until a windfall arrived; Tobacco stained, cracked
or drummer-boy smooth, a harvest from Belgian fields
where soldiers flapped like rooks,

knelt or crouched with string and pliers, moved
from head to head, filling pockets and purses, noses pegged.
Handfuls of nuggets, sorted and sized, tipped
into boiling vats, the ends chopped, each set matched

for colour and shape as if sprung from the gums of a child;
enough, if a cart overturned and spilt its load, to make
a sewer-cleaved street into an ivory road, or turn
parliament’s blackened smiles off-white.

From ‘The Great Animator’ (Shoestring Press, 2017)

So there we are. Thanks for being my milestone guest poet today, Roy Marshall. One more to come before the year’s ending. And thank you to all of you for listening. Have a great Christmas.

** all photos, apart from the those of the book covers , are Roy’s  intellectual property  should be treated as copyright

[At The British Library after the Michael Marks Awards. Charlotte Wetton, winner of the pamphlet prize for ‘I Refuse to Turn into a Hatstand’ (published by Calder Valley Poetry), her mum, Jenni, to her right, Chief Judge Ruth Padel to her left.]

What a month it’s been for poetry in general, for the poets and poetry of the north, and for good friends in particular. A couple of weeks ago it was Kim Moore with the Geoffrey Faber Award. Last night it was the prestigious Michael Marks Pamphlet awards in London.

I’m doubly happy about Charlotte’s success. I heard the title poem in November last year at a Sheffield book launch for The Poetry Business. Billy Collins had picked it as one of the winners of the Yorkshire Prize for a single poem….part of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition.  And now it’s won a prize that carries many good things with it…including, I think, a residency in Greece. What’s also nice is to open the pamphlet and recognise poems that I’ve seen in Albert Poets Monday night workshops in Huddersfield. Because Charlotte is one of the many poets who’s been part of the mutual support service that is the Albert Poets.If you follow the cobweb, then you’ll know all about how much I and so many others owe them.

And here’s the thing. It was because of the Albert workshops that I met up again with Bob Horne, who I worked with in the the 80’s and early 90’s, and then didn’t see again for over 20 years. And guess who published Charlotte’s pamphlet…Calder Valley Poetry. What an achievement! Two years ago, Calder Valley Poetry didn’t exist. Since Bob started it he’s published 15 titles. There are many more in the pipeline. The story of the C V P has been told on the cobweb before. You can read it by following this link.

https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2016/12/28/first-pressings-2-bob-horne-and-calder-valley-poetry/

Or you can get the picture from this extract

There seem to be hundreds of small poetry presses about, and I imagine they struggle to make a living, competing as they do for what is essentially a niche market;something led you think: there’s room for another. What was the trigger that persuaded you to set up your own publishing venture?

“Publishing had been on my mind for 12 months, since a conversation at The Albert Poets with Stephanie Bowgett and John Duffy.  I asked why they hadn’t published anything since the 90s. They’re both such good poets that it seemed odd to me. They both replied, immediately, that they couldn’t be bothered with all the hassle. I thought then, well,  I can be bothered on your behalf. I then helped Simon Zonenblick  with Nuala Fagan’s chapbook Not All Birdsong, and thoroughly enjoyed the design and editing parts of the process, which is when I decided I’d set up my own small press. Actually, I think I was intending to continue assisting Simon, and he suggested I set up my own. I came up with the name Calder Valley Poetry, wondered how and when I’d get going.”

Hang on to that simple thought.  I can be bothered on your behalf.  Calder Valley Poetry was created out of an impulse of generosity, and continues to publish poets who you may not have heard of (unless you happen to go to readings and workshops around West Yorkshire, and the Calder and Ryburn Valleys in particular)and some, like Steve Ely* and Peter Riley, who you’ll certainly know. Alison Lock, Gaia Holmes* & Winston Plowes, John Duffy*, Mark Hinchcliffe*, Michael Haslam, Mike Di Placido*, Neil Clarkson, Nigel King, Peter Riley, Stephanie Bowgett* (and me). All the starred *poets have featured as guests on the cobweb; check them out  And then head over to the Calder Valley Bookshop by using this link

Bookshop

And, finally. There’s hardly a post goes by when I fail to sing the praises of The Poetry Business. So many of us owe so much to Ann and Peter Sansom, who for over 30 years, have been discovering, nurturing, championing and publishing new poets. And you know what? I love the fact that their house journal is called The North. So well done and tickertape parades to them for winning the publisher’s award this year.

Right, break out the bubbly, raise your glasses and raise the roof for Charlotte Wetton, for Bob Horne and CVP, and for the utterly wonderful and awesome Poetry Business.

Sunday Dec 1oth : 12.30

This time last week I  was heading out of Pickering, not on my usual route to Whitby, past the Hole of Horcum and over Fylingdales Moor (which is as close to flying as you get in a car) but by Rosedale, through villages in the tight little valleys that were still full of snow and snowmen. Proper snowmen, with twig arms and carrot noses and scarves and c aps…they do things right in the Dales. Then up over the Castleton Road, with its endless horizons, and glimpses of distant grey sea, to stop and visit The Seated Man. I’ve wanted to see him ever since pictures of him started to turn up on social media. Over 3 metres high, cast in bronze and painted in what seems to be enamel…..sitting on his campstool with his satchel on his knees, looking out over Westerdale.

It’s hard to tell what he’s thinking. For me he was thinking that he’s got miles to go before he sleeps. Perhaps it was because I was trying to shake off a cold, and I was heading off to a writing week, and thinking that maybe I had nothing that I especially wanted to say;  there was a cold wind, and though it’s an easy half mile walk over the moor, it was wet and mucky, and I felt as though the batteries had all run down. Whatever. The seated man has the air of one who does what he sets his mind to. It might be hard, and he might not feel like it, but it needs to be done and it will be. I think he will be my role model.

So off I went to Whitby, worrying about whether I’d write anything worth a tinker’s toss, and equally, about Christmas, about things done and not done in preparation, and the annual resentment of supermarkets all tinselled up in November…all that. And then you walk into a church full of christmas trees and lights, and you watch a sunset through the dark ruins of the abbey, and stare at the grey sea running and breaking white, and everything’s fine. You might write. You might not. It doesn’t matter, because the world is complicatedly wonderful, and doesn’t care whether you write anything or not. It’s just that if you worry about the writing, you’ll miss what’s going on. Eliot had it nailed down. You have the experience but miss the meaning. Let it be.

I had a nice week with people I like a lot, came home, and yesterday  bought a Christmas tree, trimmed it to fit in its base, and we got all the Christmas trimmings down from the Christmas cupboard. The house is full of coloured light, and I cannot understand how grumpy I felt a week ago. The Seated Man understands….just do it. It’ll be right.

So, enough with the ‘what I did on my holidays’, and on with what you come here for, which is poems and poets. I met today’s guest, Sue Vickerman, when we were guest poets at the Beehive Poets in Bradford in early November. I didn’t know her, or about her, or her work. How that could be, I have no idea…..I don’t get out out and about enough, I suppose. What I do know is that I liked her voice and her poems; I liked the moments that draw you in. The moments that make you want to buy the book and hear it all again. As it happens, Sue’s newest pamphlet Adventus could not be better timed….because it’s an Advent collection, and a lot more sustaining than an advent calendar with cheap chocolate behind the doors. As we shall see. But let me introduce her.

She was born in Bradford and has lived on four continents. She spent five years in a remote Scottish lighthouse where two of her poetry collections Shag and The social decline of the oystercatcher came into being. She has supervised the publication of Kunst, a poetry collection by her invented protegee, the erratic poet and life-model Suki;  Sue has co-written a third poetry collection with Suki, Thin bones like wishbones (Indigo Dreams 2013). An international readership follows the ‘Suki’ character’s online serialised life-story – a tale both funny and desolate.

Sue‘s paid employment has been incoherent, ranging through teaching for a decade with long stints abroad, picking apples, writing academic and current affairs articles, working for the Methodist Church, support work with the homeless, cathedral tour-guiding in Berlin, mindless grafting for local authorities, German-English translation, and delivering poetry workshops in Scottish schools. Returning latterly to Yorkshire, Sue co-founded The word birds Poetry Showcase with whom she has performed UK-wide.

She has received three Arts Council (UK) awards for her poetry, novels and short stories, and garnered some glowing reviews and endorsements:  ‘Passionate, laconic poetry’ (UA Fanthorpe), ‘salt-drenched – I loved it’ (Sandi Toksvig), ‘Excellent’ (Bloodaxe’s Neil Astley), ‘piercingly topical – a glorious achievement’ (Magnus Magnusson).

Her poems have appeared in Orbis, The Rialto, Acumen, Stand, The North, Smiths Knoll, Other Poetry, Mslexia and Envoi, and have been included in anthologies by Diamond Twig, Polygon, the 2001 Lancaster LitFest, and others. One of her poems was shortlisted for the 2010 Bridport Prize.. Sue’s work was also highly commended in the Arvon Postcard Competition and commended in the Ver Poetry Competition.
(at which point I chip in with a mea culpa…she’s been around for ages.Why didn’t I know? It seems that everyone else did.)

Sue’s latest poetry collection Adventus is 24 poems which, though perennials, may be read as daily pre-Christmas reflections from 1st December. Or, this year, from the 11^th. Sue sent me three poems for the cobweb, and before we get to Adventus, I want to start with one that gives you some idea of the range you can expect.

Swapped

A translation of Verspielt by Kathrin Schmidt

so the buzzard let go of the berries

he was carrying under his wings and soared

over the village church, casting his shadow

into the yard onto the child, a girl

skipping on the forecourt, her little legs

dictated his imminent

split-second timing, plaits

bouncing on quick breaths, ratatat

of wingbeats, his attack so fast our eyes

barely took in the impact, and us so slow

to react, realize

it might be our daughter.

Sue’s provided the background to the translation:

“I went to meet and interview the writer GDR-born writer Kathrin Schmidt for the first time this summer at her Berlin home. She is now supporting me to try for an Arts Council grant to translate her poems, only seven of which currently exist in English – and I think I can do a better job than her first translator.

Kathrin is a renowned novelist. She won the German Book Prize in 2011 with Du Stirbst Nicht which was translated into 20 languages but never yet into English. I could start a rant about what this says about the English-language publishing world and how ‘worth’ is evaluated, but you’re probably in the picture. Anyway as a poet I am focused on her four poetry collections dating back to the early 80s.

My motivations are various and personal. I want to have a foot in mainland Europe to help me bear the grimness of Brexit. I don’t need to extoll the virtues of Berlin; I did live there for a couple of years, have always revisited regularly, and have just counted up that I now have more friends there than in London, where I also lived once and which now gets a sour look from me, up here as I am in the disadvantaged, disdained and ignored north.

Which brings me to my intentional selection of an East German poet of roughly my own age. The reason is, I would always, when living in East Berlin shortly after reunification, identify more closely with East German peers than West Germans.  As a little child in grey industrial working-class Labour-voting Bradford in the sixties, my circumstances and experiences more closely parallel those of the just-get-on-with-it Osies than the affluent Wesies who had cars, fridges, central heating, cameras, house telephones…

So I sought out East German women poets in their fifties and chose Kathrin for her biography as well as her poems. She is a left-wing feminist and was politically active at the time of reunification. Her poems are not the easiest. I’ll need to go on speaking to her and reading everything I can about her and also discuss with native Germans to be sure of getting all the cultural references. Furthermore she uses a lot of wordplay – sometimes as playful as the supreme word-play poet Ernst Jandl, whose poems are often transmuted rather than translated, which would be impossible; his poems’ messages or points of fun have to be conveyed by poems of parallel ideas.  Kathrin’s poems are a massive challenge to me: I studied Theology, not German. But I’m really excited by the whole new world of poetry translation unfolding before me. And another motive for this endeavour is to use Kathrin’s poems as triggers for poems of my own.

So Brexit is at least proving good for my brain’s health, making me stuff German  into it daily with the ambition of becoming bilingual so I can give this my best shot. ”

I thought this well worth posting…and not just for its sense of mission, and its fellow-feeling. I just wanted to say that though I know no German, and next to nothing about the principles and challenges of translation, here’s a poem that makes me want to know more of and about Kathrin Schmidt. This poem drew me in from the first line, the way its alliteration sets up a kinetic dance that energises the whole poem, which is full of staccato movement. I love the precision of all those consonants, the way the narrative is packed into one short sequence; I love the filmic editing, the perspective shifts, and finally, the dark turn of the last line which switches the world into that of the folk tales of careless parents, lost children and shapeshifters. As I say, I don’t know the original and I know no German, but I’m prepared to bet that if this was my poem I’d feel well-served by its translator and her ear and her craft.

*Adventus is a slim pamphlet, but jammed with riches. It starts with The coming, the Brexiteers’ imagined nightmare of a horde of refugees appearing as a deluge on the rim of the moors above a Pennine valley….it’s comically, horribly realised. And it’s right. This is Advent, the coming of a child from a temporarily displaced small family in the Middle East. The collection riffs on themes of motherhood, of the condition of the refugee, on marital stress, on sibling rivalry. There are many voices. The landscapes range from Nazareth to Withernsea via Berlin. The forms range from couplets, triplets, blank verse, a prosepoem, regular 5 and 6 line stanzas to Ginsberg-inspired 17-syllable lines, and (one splendidly insouciant) ghazals. It’s serious, playful, loving,  bleak and joyous. So you know that you just have to buy it…the ultimate stockingfiller for someone you love who knows good writing. Two poems to give you the taste…then off you go (please) to Amazon. First, the wise men of good northern stock….who you hear via the distracting echoes of T S Eliot’s Journey of the Magi. A cold coming.

The three wise men

To cap it all it was cold. Really cold,

and rough terrain, and all of us old,

and nearly coming to blows over the route

through those dark dunes to get to the bairn,

and we were loaded up. So heavily loaded

and the camels weren’t good. How they groaned

under all that gold. But we had a role,

and there is no record of us moaning,

nothing of three wise men with frost-bitten toes

missing strong brown Yorkshire tea

in that strong-brown-tea-forsaken desert

and nobbut camels’ milk, no cows,

and no really boiling water, nor proper pot,

and blaming each other for who’d forgotten it

and as we plodded, read in the stars the laddie’s fate –

what we each thought we could well foresee –

but disagreed on every time and every date,

and finally had to agree to disagree.

There’s more to this than meets the ear, isn’t there? A story of redemption, about which no one can agree. Especially the officially wise. I’ll finish with another monologue which, unsurprisingly, stood out at the reading at The New Beehive. It’s the one that straight away made me want to buy the collection. It’s another with a distinctive voice, another with its own dark humour. It’s not ‘typical’ of the poems in Adventus…mainly because there are aren’t any that are ‘typical’. Each is distinctive and different, as befits an advent calendar of a book, where each turned page is a door into a new and fresh surprise.

Jesus’s big sister

It’s not in the bible, what he had to put up with

in that stable, poked with a sharp straw –

his torn, sore mother too weak, Joseph

dealing with guests – that poor child

smothered nearly to death with false kisses.

What did it do to him,  having hot wax

dripped on his cheek, his blanket set fire to?

The shepherd starts saying All I’ve brought is

but Big Sister snatches his lamb: I want that!

You take the brat. The scuffle wakes Jesus.

She stings his face with donkey-poo bullets

then spots a gift tucked into the manger.

Frankincense. She flings it everywhere, Joseph

laughing it off, putting the myrrh on a top shelf,

the kings nice about it – she has made a temple,

holy air, the first woman to honour him.

Take our word – they’ll come in droves, beg

for his touch, clean his feet with their hair.

Big Sister gives them the finger.

And when her brother shines at theology

she snickers at the back mocking him,

smokes pot, flunks her catechism.

My brother thinks he’s so good. Arsehole.

Down the souk Saturdays, she starts nicking

and at night, on the shared roof where they lie

on their mats beneath the stars, she spits

bad words at him – When you were born

I dropped out of our parents’ orbit. Bastard –

he silent, she sneering into the dark  –

you make me puke. Why love everyone?

People hate people like you.

Every good thing, she does a big yawn.

When it turns out he has healing gifts

she goes in the dunes with camel-men

then when his ministry takes off full-blown,

she steals the gold and elopes to Babylon.

What made him forgive so much sinning?

Why didn’t he hate all females? His mum

For letting her bully him; Mary Magdalene?

How come, right through, Jesus still loved women?

There’s a poem that ends with a question worth the asking. Thank you Sue Vickerman for being our guest on a December Sunday with snow coming down.

The next three posts will celebrate a particular milestone, with three special guests who have been in one way or another inspirational for me. They won’t necessarily appear on Sundays, but I’m hopeful that the third will be on New Year’s Eve. I’m looking forward to seeing you all again, and hope that your Christmas tree hangs on to its needles. Oh, and if you were wondering, the church full of trees is St Mary’s in Whitby. Worth climbing all the steps for.

*Adventus.    [Naked Eye 2017]    £7.50