Bird Sanctuary

Seals sunning themselves,
women all shapes and sizes sprawl
with bird’s-foot trefoil, buttercups,
flowering grasses, wild geraniums
and self heal on the lower meadow
of the Ladies’ Pond Enclosure.
 
Whish! goes a kingfisher,
its turquoise matching the dragonfly’s,
bird akin to insect as woman is to seal.
On the next pond down, swans,
moorhens, ducks, coots
pursue their wild lives in peace.
 
It’s called the Bird Sanctuary.
Switch off your mobile,
sisters under the skin,
twinned, one pond for ladies
and one is for the birds.
 

Dinah Livingstone

published in Morning Star, 28th May 2009;
in collection Poems of Hampstead Heath and Regent’s Park, 2012, Katabasis,
ISBN 978-0-904872-46-0

 
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Millfield Lane

When Keats met Coleridge here in Millfield Lane
hard by the next pond up from the Ladies’ Pond,
did the Highgate sage feel death in the hand
he clasped and pity the promising, younger man?
Another April now I see the trees return
they might have seen – oak, sycamore – and stand
ravished by the giants’ delicate flowers, on ground
where they stood talking under this fresh green.
New-burst from sticky buds, horse-chestnut leaves
droop like unfledged birds until they spread.
Rabbits. Cowslips in a sunny ditch:
like the poets, these still share our lives
as fellow Londoners, interconnected,
re-affecting, making each meeting rich.
 

Dinah Livingstone

published in London Magazine, October/November 2002;
in collection Presence, 2003, Katabasis,
ISBN 978-0-904872-39-2

 
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Great Fish

Coming from beds of deep secret roses,
crimson velvet with swoony smell,
I stand by the lake bewitched.
The white, the black and the golden carp
glide silently under the water
at will like thoughts in the early morning
before they are organised
or memories still half submerged
in murky depths. They are so many.
Quick-slipping, their big bodies,
charged with graceful energy,
have the kick of an unborn child,
a person swimming into consciousness
with powerful emotions of the soul.
 

Dinah Livingstone

published in Camden New Journal, 20th September, 2012;
in collection Poems of Hampstead Heath and Regent’s Park, 2012, Katabasis,
ISBN 978-0-904872-46-0

 
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Joint Operation

Healing happens like spring,
creeps up, hesitates,
steals another march, leaps,
settles in her lap,
then, distracted, disappears
and she thinks she’s lost it.
 
But slowly her body remembers
how it feels to walk normally
and she wants to rejoin the world.
Is there anybody there?
 
She’d like to say what she sees,
how it is with her.
Who to? To you. Another.
Hear me as I hear you,
holding to what you are.
Please hold me too.
 
Alone is the essence of damnation.
What is the point
of talking, walking,
if it is not towards?
 

Dinah Livingstone

published in The Interpreter’s House 43, June 2013;
in collection The Vision Splendid, 2014, Katabasis,
ISBN 978-0-904872-47-7

 
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