Bench Friday - Queens Park

a line of benches
watch an empty cricket field
water drips

A Novel Construction

she stares at the buckets of words for several minutes
then picks one – the one that used to hold the paint for the kitchen wall
and still has the colour splashed on the rim – and upends it.
Words tumble out in a great clattering, spattering, spilling over the table
and small, rounds words like 'on' and 'ere' skitter across the pine
fall on the red clay quarry tiles and slide under the fridge'
She takes a handful and arranges them on a fresh sheet of paper:
"Margaret Daly was surprised by the amount of blood..."
and takes a second handful and a third; interlocking phrases
with prepositions and conclusions, the prose climbing
higher and higher, layer after layer like a Lego tower.

This is how she constructs a novel, with each part dependant
on the one beneath; page after page climbing to the roof.

Hady Hill Cemetery

The Solace of a Crow in a Cemetery

she was promised a wish come true by a crow with a broken wing
as she took the short-cut home from school though the cemetery
(it was a Thursday and she'd had cottage pie for dinner
served by the lady who always wore a hair net, even at weekends)
"Why me?" she'd asked, but the crow nodded five times
and if it were doing chin-up before it limped away.
The following morning she asked her English teacher, Mrs Maguire
(who was Scots) whether there was a precedent for such things
but the teacher just shrugged and said crows were bad luck
but if she became Queen remember who gave her an A.
On Saturday she went to the lake and waited for the sword
to rise up from the water but nothing happened
but the soughing of the wind and the reflection of a kite
and she was just wishing she'd brought a sandwich
when her dad appeared with a picnic and a bottle of Tizer
and told her stories of her long-dead mother.

Rainy Cemetery

Old Stone

she weeps,

her face pressed against old stone
weathered by wind and rain
until the engraved letters are merely
lumps and hollows;
the phrenology of a grave
hiding her daughter
from the moonlight.

downpipe and ferns