Your return is a poem from Fever Tree, my third book published in 2003. The book was featured by Mslexia, a UK mag for women's writing, when they included me on a list of the best new women poets of the decade in 2004.

This is one of my favourites from the book, although I don't normally write in rhyming couplets. I'm posting it today because I was at a friend's house last night for a Christmas supper and she showed me a painting which made me think of the poem again. Sometimes I forget what I've written or I remember it in a certain way. It's great when other people's work helps you see it from a different angle and reappraise it.

I'm working on my fourth collection at the moment. It's moving into new territory and has two sequences based on the Ten Commandments and the Me Who...aspects of self.

Under Your return, I've put some poems which have been published in magazines recently and which are part of this emerging new book.

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Your return

The dust of that remote village is in your hair.
A bag full of mangoes, guava,

peaches from your mother's garden,
cooked in syrup; names on your tongue -

telephone numbers, songs I've never heard.
Your hair's wild, beard straggly. Birds

escape as you clean your teeth and panic
in our house, every window stuck shut.

One by one they disappear. Spiders the size
of a hand crawl from your shoes and hiss.

On the kitchen floor, a caterpillar concertinas
and straightens, looking for masonja trees

beside the unnamed roads in your irises,
overhung with thorns, tracks only goats can use.

You carry the darkness of December's eclipse
in your pupils. They release that earlier eclipse

in Devon, when I too felt the cold of the night,
boat lights sparked on and birds went quiet.

You pull us into a circle - 150 pipers at a barracks
in Messina. An 80 year old woman claps

and dances. I saw none of this, but on the phone
I heard music, people chatting sometimes

in Zulu or Tsonga. Mostly when we talked, though
you could have been in town or down the road.

And me? I spread myself over our bed, changed
the rules. Do you see the timetables scrawled

on the walls? We swap late Christmas presents
like strangers, wary, gauging reactions. I apologise

for the cold as if it's my fault. Your words come out
in the wrong order; English forgotten, you translate

each heat drenched phrase too literally for me.
We'll need an interpreter for weeks.

So we lassoo each other to the old fighting pit,
tie each other to the fence with the same knots,

lash until the other's showing teeth, spit
as we re-open, rediscover, our ritual cuts.

Now those monkeys, porcupines and snakes
are leaving, a fish eagle hovers over terrace

house off the seafront, along Lewes Road.
I've spread out all the food I know you've missed -

olives, bread, houmous, cheese, salad and nuts,
coleslaw, plum tomatoes, vegetable puffs.

And with it slices of dense paw paw; its lush
seeds containing the orchard you planted for us.

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The islands

Here light expands the tunnel you’ve become.
A big sky always takes you in.
There’s no-one but the Hebrides chattering,
a stone leans towards another; a lover listening.
Birds don’t care if you live or die.
Here a cloud tries to be a mountain-top .
Colours need water and you are water.
Silent Steinways replay each odd and even year.
One day an Annunciation will happen.


(published in The North, autumn 05)
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Waiting

Where’s my lover?

Not in the wind
banging on windows,
or clouds,
so slow
to turn pink and grey.

If I whistle
will he rush to me
over the Downs?

I long for Antarctica’s days,
endless
as queues for bread,
squatters reclaiming wasteland.

Children wait for kisses,
mothers stand by graves
until the Resurrection.

In three hours,
I meet them all.

Together
we stare
into the next minute

hoping land and light
will break our fall,
that they will cushion us,
soft as silt.



(published in The Rialto 04)
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Don’t covet your neighbour’s goods

Desire the crystal drop
of a chandelier,
Swiss Army knife,
for the marks they make
on walls, the pauses
they offer. Memory’s enough.
Pick clay from the lost city
you’ll become. Watch
how sea turns mahogany
to driftwood, restores metal
to sand. What cloud wishes
for snow, heavier rain?



(published in The Rialto spring 05)
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The me who’s a window

I face Jura, its Paps, its Sound
where fire left a hole in the night
when someone burned a million pounds,
oh yes, in notes…and couples fight
over loose change. I’m the only screen
you’ll watch here. Playing today:
no mountaintops or blue Sistine
sky - a child’s smeared mess of grey.
A rod of sun hits waves running
towards gorse. Imagine yourself, spotlit
for a second, only to disappear again.
Today I’ll keep you close to me. Sit
with three pianos. I’ll blur the glass
with rain, put on a lover’s face.



CREAR XMAS CARD WINTER 05
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The me who’s a mother

“Watch me dance.” How my back bends
kneeling to tie a shoe, arms stretch
to a pavement with bags, how I tense
anticipating a fall, step forward to catch
a ball. My two children repeat each “bloody hell”.
There’s so much to pass on: stories lost
along the way, the taste of pineapple
sound of gamelan, a Welsh miner’s chorus.
I show them a swan walk on water as it lands,
a child acrobat dancing on his hands,
a brown river break its banks. I conceal
how I pine for them already, let them go
until the radius they describe around me
is the world: equator, two tropics, two poles.



(published in The Poetry Paper, Aldeburgh
Poetry Festival November 04)

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