Photograph by Chris Sims
Readers were very impressed with the selection of poems this week and votes poured in. However as always there can only be one winner and this week the accolade goes to Lizzie Ballagher with Blue Earth, Green Light. Diane Jackman’s 22nd July 1944 was a close second. If you enjoyed this you’ll be able to read another poem by Lizzie Ballagher in our Autumn Showcase going online during the first week of September. Thank you to everyone who submitted and/or voted.
Poem 1
Blue Earth, Green Light
Cut the earth and it bleeds
Blue blood:
Bluebells among the brutal butchery
Of coppiced beech, of oak corpses
Felled
By cacophonous winds
This winter gone.
While heaven’s hue falls
Full
In ocean pools, cobalt
Below the April leaves,
And cuckoos
Brand the air with heartbreak,
Blue earth gives out green light.
Cut the earth and it bleeds
Blue blood:
Bluebells under the frill and trill
Of singing green, of winging green
Feathered
By starry-eyed blackbirds
This slow, slow spring.
Lizzie Ballagher
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Poem 2
Of love and joy
Things of nature
I feel
have a heartbeat
to give heartbeat
for me.
-the heartbeat of joy,
And I know
as it is love…,
we have a relation
As people say,
”God made me and
them”,
But more I know-
they made me
with
love and joy…
Dulen Gogoi
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Poem 3
For ever
They stand tall
But their heads hang in memory.
Their voices, like tiny bells
whisper
through the woods.
‘We remember her, we remember her walking,
her soft skin trod carefully through our fears.
She would not hurt us for the world
and now she is gone, but her memory
will live with us
and we will flower here for ever
we will never forget.’
Angie Butler
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Poem 4
Arms and A Boy
Bump, and in he comes, my son, my six-year-old lump
of boydom, trundling through the door, his arms
a heaving sheaf of blue, so full the colour hides his eyes.
“Bluebells, Mum,” and the pulled stems bundle in my hands.
Unlike him, they’re lean and thin, their greenness
seeping anaemically to white where light has never seen before
and sap is dripping down his grubby nails.
Heavy with flower, their heads hang with bells
of fragile blues that smudge to purple at their rims.
The only sound they ring is scent that drowns the dining-room.
“Been stung,” he boasts, then keens. And thrusts his knee
with its perfect nettle-mounds, white-islands in the smear
of dockleaves he hurriedly applied. But it’s Mum
he needs. As I apply the calamine, he rubs his cheek
against my dangling hair, and puts his arms around my neck.
Then, leaving me with foolish swabs of cotton-wool, he
rushes out to terrorize the garden with his gun.
How can I explain to him his gift would better be
if left to grow, when in the lounge I arrange chrysanthemums
his father’s brought? And how offset the hope that when
he’s grown he’ll have no need for gun, with expectation
that as a man he’ll greet his Mum with larger arms
that spill with cultivated blooms? Bemused, I plunge
his present in a glass, and start the tea. He is so young.
At times like these you have to play the game; forget hypocrisy.
Roger Elkin
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Poem 5
If you go down..
Under the trees blue dusts the sunlight
Like propaganda, green fronds fight
Their corner, straining high,
Hoping for rescue like refugees
On a hillside. Under the trees,
Like aid piling pallet-high
Shadows fall on everything,
Relieving, allowing.
Like terrorists wasps rage about
Bringing agonies,
Butterflies flit. Like families
They’re uncertain; doubt
If green is green,
Blue is blue, hope is seen.
Shadows fall as the sun,
Like government,
Fades; as glorious, well meant
As the UN.
You’re in for a big surprise,
You’ll never believe your eyes,
You Yazidi; what shall we say
If you go down to the woods today?
Michael Docker
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Poem 6
Woods
My hands sticky with bluebell sap,
pungent scent of trodden leaves
happy picking flowers
when sudden shadow
like hawk crossing sky –
I’m seized, flung face-down
pinioned
mouth full of earth
pain rips my belly in two
gluey stuff down my legs
not bluebells
and blood, so much blood.
Gill McEvoy
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Poem 7
22nd July 1944
When Flight Sergeant Dalby gazed through the cloud
at the dense darkness of Czech pines, he longed
for his forest at home, the cool mineral scent
of bluebells in the April Outwoods,
where he and Mary had lain together, crushing
the flowers into a cloud of remembered love.
Airgraph to Echo:
Ask readers to send me
pictures of bluebells.
Postcards of the Outwoods poured through
his mother’s letterbox, black and white, sepia,
a few hand-coloured, trawled from letter-racks
and drawers, a kindness from the town.
A lover of bluebells painted a miniature.
As he laid his hand on Mrs. Dalby’s gate, he met
the telegraph boy returning down the path.
Diane Jackman
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Poem 8
Sunshine
It has lustred the wood firing trees, grass
sheening enamels flicker in morning light
the green once-fired base of grass and fern
is overlaid by sapphire tints streaming
through shadows cast by a cloisonné
of black bare trunks.
This lustre, created not by potter’s hand,
rises with the warming sun to scent
the wood with wild fleeting fragrance;
fragile stems spring from winter sleep
to bathe the wood with wonder, they
depart in heat as trees break buds
with summer’s rise, leaves open
to canopy the wood in mystery.
Carolyn O’Connell
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Poem 9
Secrets
In the sweet meadow
Where sunlight and shadows dance
I feel your caress
Surrounded by such beauty
Our own secret hideaway
Emma Power
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Poem 10
Ulverscroft
Down the hill from Bradgate, within the beating oaken
heart of Charnwood sits our nature reserve. Look just
over there, the hole in the wall, come on climb through.
Dad was a warden here for five or six years in the
seventies. As we enter the floor is a mass of bright blue
flowers and curling bracken. The smell hits us, nature,
growing and budding, spring rain melting to steam as
the sun fights its way through. Everywhere little bells
nod at our arrival, on short green stems, swathing
colour on a two tone scene.
Dad would patrol while we would adventure, kings,
soldiers, Robin Hood or Oliver Cromwell. Marmite
sandwiches, orange squash, dirty knees and happy
voices. All too soon into the old yellow car and cross
the city through towers and traffic to the square white
house.
Now as I walk with you, I limp with arthritis, I breath
heavily carrying my heavy load. My heart however
still swells at the site of nature, fresh air and sun
open my heart wide and my mind clears.
Andy Scotson
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