A Book Club Year

It’s been a year of new companions,
a year of otherness.
I am walking away now
out of the characters’ lives.
 
It’s their landscapes that linger,
surprisingly taken to heart:
a luminous homestead;
wastes of space known only to natives;
or places where only the blood is warm,
spilled or contained
in cosmopolitan coldness.
 
I can find a niche for the names,
stepping back into myself,
wiping their dreams from my mouth.
But landscapes are another matter:
they are relentless.
 
Sometimes they shake out centuries,
sometimes they corner the present
or lack dimension, going beyond –
laying down paths of now or then,
or whenever,
demanding tribute,
demanding pilgrimage.
 

Belinda Singleton

second prize in Barnet Open Poetry Competition;
published in anthology The Barnet Poetry Anthology 2011,
Barnet Borough Arts Council, ISBN 1-900287-26-9

 
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Silhouettes

The cut-out trees stand sharp
against the evening sky.
Twilight and winter conspire
to concentrate their character
in scissored crowns.
Where trunk meets ground
becomes black blur.
Their style suits them,
stripped to an outline, gaunt;
yet they enchant us too
because the memory
can clothe them with Spring leaves
and all the shape and sounds of summer.
 
Once, in Quimper, France,
in the market there,
our small son and daughter
sat for a scissor-man,
a magician with black paper.
He shaped their heads in silhouette,
a quick-snip profile tracing each:
one with jaunty pigtail, serious mien,
the other tip-nosed shadow boy.
Their likenesses were outline-true,
but memorable to us because we
gazed from black to sudden bloom
and caught the quick surprise of breath.
 

Belinda Singleton

published in The French Literary Review, Iss 3, April 2014,
ISSN 1756-2066

 
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EDWARD THOMAS
Now and Then

So immediate is your sense of place
I almost blink at horse-brass winking
at the turning furrow, see grass
that’s easing back at leisure where
you rise from your observer’s form.
I feel the shade of elm, hear blackbird call
and catch the drowsy scent of meadowsweet.
 
Yet always where you go, the past breathes
with you, until all your places –
carrying drift of flowers and new-cut hay
like ghost-scents travelling by the moon –
alert soft water and abandoned stone
to labourers’ voices, lovers’ murmurs
revisiting the turning of the earth.
 
But always, too, this dual present is
itself foreshadowed grief with urgent eye:
a now that’s minus tree-talk, bird-call, sleep,
noxious in mud and smoke and boots of War;
that shapes your vision even as the page
goes flush from earth to sky in keeping faith
with peace, with home, where only aspens shiver.
 

Belinda Singleton

in 4-poet anthology four in the morning – a walk in the woods,
2015, Soaring Penguin Press, ISBN 978-1-9080302-5-2

 
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Secateurs

Like scissors indoors, these can finesse fingers
in the garden, find the living node below
the twig or where the thin branch lingers
feigning life but loath to say ‘Let go’.
 
These cut back brambles, dead-head flowers, with mind
to give some bright young things a Chelsea chop –
that tough-love near-earth sentence to remind
an outrage of fresh blooms to reach full stop.
 
Generations walk the garden, new and old,
acknowledge new-old blossom, new-old birds;
as I shall put down secateurs that mould
my fingers, clear more space for new-old words.
 

Belinda Singleton

in anthology Uncompassed, 2016, Salmon Press

 
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