Trembling I lift the curtain
To let in the morning lightly
Time has taken away its beauty
Falsing the temperature down
And I cannot stem the flowing.

I’d found culture in my youth
Explosively exciting ,excruciating
In its weapons of desiring dressage
But now the limpets cling to a soul
Holding high the corsets of a cage.

love Mary

You are my dream child
Flashing across words
Dancing along the table
With ripe apples and pears.

Nothing is more momentous
Than your smile below blue eyes
And golden hair tied in one braid.
I glimpse myself in your gaiety.

The gift of speech an intimacy with you
Your reading, sharing, laughing, cheeky
I have to say goodbye my dear Evelyn
Stay happy and watch the flowers grow.

Lots of love grandma Mary xxxxxxxx

I caught you kissing behind the hedge
In the field near the onion bed
Thé river was passing by
And I was much too shy.

So stood and watched with eyes bright
While woodpecker spread his yellow head
And the ground softened at your touch
My hair fell flaxen over the feather steps.

Love Mary xxxx

Evelyn is five years old
And cheeky as Mr Toad
She likes using *** and poo
And being really quite rude.

Everything is a bit of fun
Eating cereal, crumb by crumb
I watch her on my télé face
And laugh when she is a disgrace.

Love Grandma Mary xxxxx

Glad to be on the way out
Than  on the way in .


Love Mary ***

Now it is me.
Love Mary

Your poem dances, flounces
Making a rhythm into a hum
Woodland spirits from Isadora
Duncan to Barcelona, flemenco,
The Merry Widow’s mythical song.

Stop it sister
Evelyn as a lady bird.

Love Grandma Mary xxxxxx

The pottery shop at Freshwater
Glassworks at Freshwater
Touching glass
For Nuska

I wrote a list of many a yard
To be followed to the rule
A list to give my short life
A vision of a truth.

It extended all the inches I knew
Held tight to every child
Started at the top of my head
And fell with the evening star.

Love Mary x

Find what you need to sustain you
I can always be their in your heart
My genes have gently infected you
So that can be a fair certain start.

You have all that you need beside you
A family fit for a queen
One that travels the emotions
One that will not let you scream.

Sorry about the wedding, I had always
Hoped to be there, carrying your possessions
And dancing in the night - time air
But the hall will be full so don’t worry.

Love Grandma xxxxx

The trees are blowing houses
In the damp air
I fight for breath but no one comes
My love is getting fish and chips
And the jacket potato will be baked
I have spoken and been silent but
The tree still breaks and what is learnt?
Sorry to those who could not listen
The houses will be re - filled with
Someone.
Love Mary ***


Love Mary

Women - sounds, scents and shapes.
Ingmar Bergman externalisés by
Using women in his films to
Understand himself.
The two sides of himself.
So much of myself and my awareness
Of the graces of women come from my
Mother and father.The way my father treated
My mother was a sustaining influence too.

I remember my mother’s grey curly hair,
large ******* hanging like two full plums.
As she washes in the bathtub
Rounded belly, dark, floating, soapy ***** hair
Mother is forty - four.


Taking me into *******, softly, quietly
Mysteriously, my ******* are budding, two pink *******
A pretty navy padded brassière to wear under my blouse
When I go to school. This blouse is nylon and translucent
Womanhood that place of secret
sounds, scents and shapes.


Thank you mum for helping me to become a woman to take into my ****** form and appreciate it and become all that I did.

Love Mary ,      Your daughter. Love you ..

Ingmar Bergman externalisés by
Using women in his films to
Understand himself.
The two sides of himself.
So much of myself and my awareness
Of the graces of women come from my
Mother. The way my father treated
My mother was an sustaining influence too.

I remember my mother’s grey curly hair,
large ******* hanging like two full plums.
As she washes in the bathtub
Rounded belly, dark, floating, soapy ***** hair
Mother is forty - four.


Taking me into *******, softly, quietly
Mysteriously, my ******* are budding, two pink *******
A pretty navy padded brassière to wear under my blouse
When I go to school. This blouse is nylon and translucent
Womanhood that wet place of secret
sounds, scents and shapes.


Thank you mum for helping me to become a woman to take into my ****** form and become all that I did,Love you.

Love Mary xxxx. Your daughter.

Where is truth, does it exist anywhere?
This is what it is, broken strength.
Lonely, I hear you crying in the hall
Why?, you said,
And a box and a pair of shoes
Were delivered.

Love Mary xxxx

I could have been so much more
One of those girls who was seen on stage
Dancing the red lipstick off the page
Chasing sparks out the window of love
But I died earlier than time allowed.
So goodbye..


Love Mary xxxxx

Along the fence, in a line my pots do stand.
And a row of dried Hollyhock stem heads
This is my life along the fence on a warm day.

Love Mary xxxx

If I was to wear a bikini
Red and orange it would be
With elastic underneath my chest
And below my waist certainly.

I’d pretend the settee was a diving board
And the armchair a ship on the seas
And travel up and down the stairs
With my long seaweed coloured hair.

Love to Constance from Grandma

Xxxxx

Only on week days when the sunshines
Do I chat to my Evelyn about all times
She has mouthfuls of honey and yogurt
Reading new words in her school book.

What is it to stop and watch the day break
Misty on window frames, dewey in grass
To see a young life take a step into this day
Secure in her treasures the drawing she made.

Love Grandma **

I never said goodbye to mother
As she lay all shrunken in bed
Her hair in a grey ponytail
Her face frightened and white.

Nobody told me she was dying
As my father sat by her side
The nurses suggested sagaciously
I needed to come in a short time.

But I never got to her bedside
Before the ringing of the phone
Announcing that she had faded
And would not be back again.


Love you dear mother
So sorry not to be with you , miss you .Mary xxxx

There is nothing left the child said
Opening up the heaviest cake tin.
There is nothing left in father’s pocket
And no sweets in the tall glass jar.
I have no clothes for the Winter and
And my special thoughts have died
It is the end of the month so let’s try.


Love Grandma Mary xxxx

Cousin Jennifer sat two rows in front
In white dress, a handmade cardigan
My nan’s works annual Christmas do
There were two tickets for me and you
I wondered about you, never met before
A once in a life time meeting I saw.

Love Mary ***

When you are old
You live on your own
Nobody cares
Just swears.

Ones clothes are untidy
Shoe soles flat
And all of the mirrors
Show a poisoned apple.

Love Grandma Mary xxxx

What does one forget with years
Is it the exactitude of ordered days?
The way slippers slowly wear out
And don’t get replaced until xmas.

I rarely comb my hair before midday
Or open the packages at the door box
The future goes under the bed to sleep
The past a comforting scarf red striped.

Love Mary ***

The lantern tree at ballyroberts
Held out branches of pink gems.


Love Mary **

1.

In Springtime I recall the lilacs sweet scented
Growing up the right hand fence at the bottom,
Of a rather overgrown and swayward garden.
Each flower part of a composite bloom, opening slowly its tiny
Trumpet like stamens from where the bees suckled
Filling their back legs with yellow powdered nectar
Which made honey for sandwiches at teatime.

2.
On my way to infant’s school I would clasp
Handfuls of sweet cherry blossom petals
The tips of each petal turning brown in the sun
My shoes covered as I kicked heaps of this candy floss
Pink tissue paper along the road as I thought about school
And the day ahead, in my brown Clark’s leather sandals.

3.

The smell of the scrapings of new potatoes floating
In tap water in a blue polythene bowl in our scullery
And on my mother’s cracked, dry and sore hands
Ingrained with the dirt from compost and soil.
I loved these hands rough yet gentle to stroke a face.




Love Mary September 12 /201

I remember the flee circus
At the time I was only ten
By sixteen I began to laugh
But don’t know what it means.

I think the humour very rare
It caught you in the armchair
Only elephants venture there
To make industrial underwear.

Love Mary ***

‘I am an ideas babe’
That’s what my granddaughter said
She is just five.

Love Grandma xxxxx

It wasn’t always that you loved me
Sitting on the floor with crossed legs
But now when the tide left driftings
You came to me with your words
And I remembered even in the sky
You wrote my name with stars.

Love Grandma Mary xxxx

07/09/2019

Tiredness sets in
Round the mulberry bush
Under a fake stillness of rain
The porch door handle opens.

It will be a late birthday for some
Tea at eight with family and food
Such a shocking affair without her
She sits by the open window tears.

The cards stack up on the mantelpiece
And a veggie meal with crisp savoury
A game of Cheat and Misfits completes
A day of chivalry, prowling the boards.

You make the fun festival in bright shirt.
New slippers and a collection of children
You are my lion king flowing silver hairs
On a back broken by labour and lifting.

Love Mary to Roger xxxx

Summer has arrived I see you dancing
Outside a soho bar, gorgeous woman
Humour sharp as ice, heels longer than
Cocktail sticks.

It is five is in the morning and you
Are shopping, food to start the day
The train rattles, jangling the wrist bands.
You uncross your legs, unlatch the door.

The children are dressing, bags scatter the
Work tops. You grab two hands
To walk the two miles to school.

Love Mum

The hands curled fingers like leaves
Overlapping repeatedly the notes
He and her childhood companions
Speaking spirit to spirit, their souls.

Schubert’s Rondo romantics piano
whispy greyness floats her flowery
Dress, while he payne’s grey suited
In tune with life their hands trusting.

Love Mary ***

Reading to her Ducks and Swans
Remembering our morning chats
Somehow we had grown together
Sharing our likes and questioning.

This child radiated such intensity
I felt her spirit entering my spirit
Yet I knew by ten she would have
Outstripped my imaginative life
Would there still be love to hold.

Love Grandma Mary x

The curtains hung in loops
From the missing and broken
Those brittle plastic rail hooks
Unable to be replaced, renewed.

So in the bedroom light entered
From the grey day at their drape
Singing in her sixty seventh year
Her only son a birthday song.

Love Mary

I never bought The Twinkle Annuals
Slipping off the eBay page after six
It is one of those days that drizzles
And bedtime gets closer each time.

Love Mary ***

To be loved to death
Is a remarkable saying
Its meaning, meaning
More than any card
Any bunch of flowers.

The lifting is divinities
Holding out anniversary
Slight flickering fingers
Touch flaky, silver skin
And love breaks the sky.


Love Mary **

There is not a drop of hope
All pages completely tight
Feeling it must stop soon
They all went to the party.

The moth eaten cat beams
At their return to number
Wall tapestry girl waiting
For an overdue love letter.


Dying is a miraculous gift
For the suffering confused
The freedom of the garden
Wooden trowel and sweets.

Love Mary ***

The tree stood in its shadow
Branches leaning slightly left
Surrounding field stretching
Green acres  of sun bright
Shapes against a cloudy blue.

Stone dry wall built to last
Marks out the foreground
Of sparkling citrus breath
Emptying of all bird sound
To the movement of a lens.

Love Mary ***

He collects his bag
Catches the bus
Returning with two items
From town centre.

Tomorrow; gardener,
Lady sort.
First gardener in fifty years
Mowing grass, bush cutting.

He wonders how far
He has come after that call
Stating changes
The dust settles slowly.

Love Mary xxxx

I never thought
It mattered
All those years
Ago.

Knowing he was
Mad
At twenty-five
It glowed.

Sadly sandust
Besieged hope
Now in poverty
We *****.

Love Mary
Xxxxx

Where the tops of the trees
Have been chopped
The looking down
Flows easily along.

Love Mary ***

Today lent itself to lending
Borrowed number
One hundred and four
The care carrying gardener.

Now the Robbina is robbed
Of half its branches
The grass a carpet
Of strewn lances.

And Rosalind
The pretty repaint
Sits on the shelf
And smiles.

Love Mary **

They give you this
To hide
The pain
That hacks the brain.

And all the blame
Of man disdained,
Dismounted.

The blight on the rose
Hesitated, grey dust
Mildewed, mated.

The cabinet makers’
Opened the latch
Threw the petals in.

Love Mary **

She came into my arms
Soft flesh over bones
Sweet smile curved lips
Only for a while we played
My new grandchild Primrose.

Love Grandma ***

Bleached heat, the sun hot
Tarmacadam melted up
The playground equipment
Too warm for little bottoms


Children climbed the wood
Inside were imaginary cats
Daddy stayed outside watching
The crisp grass blew in the wind.


Love Mary
For Evelyn ,Alex and Florence **

Float me Abraham in my country’s fields
Where the white mice come forth in shields
And bargain with the great provider that
We may cup the day of peace without harm.

For in the time of sanctities the cloak glows
And we look to freedom in those fields.

Love Mary ***

They were moulded together like turned wood,
Carved and twisted made to last,
A man and a dog, a Boxer dog,
Travelling along our road.

Love Mary **'

There was silence at the station
The waves crawled up the beach
The angels blew their trumpets
The seagulls gathered in heaps.

One hundred and one jellyfish
Spreading out in golden bands
And a line of iced cream cones
Danced along the yellow sands.

Love Mary xxxx

He took up his stealth
And went to Norfolk
To where his boat was moored
Near a small hotel he rested well
And watched the sun go down.

The peace beyond all understanding
Overtook his mind and all the days
He sailed away over the Norfolk Broads.
Until it came to the crunch and he had to
Write,
Some poetry to linger in the wind.

Love Mary xxxx

I got through another Winter
It being not too cold
I wrapped myself in blankets
Gave my room a rosy glow.

Then the Hollyhocks came
Tall and straight and bright
Waving in front of the window,
What a complete delight.

Managed to see the Azaleas
With their very tangerine buds,
The red rose climbs the Plum tree
What wonders do we have.

I got through another Winter.

Love Mary **