Twelve Days of Christmas

Tonight I’ve escaped
tinsel December and the clinging ghost
of childhood’s candledark morning.
Lord of Misrule, King of the Bean,
I know his domain – twelve days
of ambivalence and power,
when the dead live, and chaos
drums through the dark.
The impossible is warm in my arms.
Through torchlit hours, dusk at noon,
twelve days dance; joy
is believable, joy is now.
 

Ruth Bidgood

in collection Land-music / Black Mountains, 2016,
Cinnamon Press, ISBN 978-1-9108363-5-4

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Enigma

I’ve never been sure that, when the brain
drops into death, it takes with it
all that jumble of half-remembered
sights and sounds, half-shaped ideas, hauntings ,
atmospheres, premonitions – the hinterland
of a departing life.
                                     More likely, I’ve thought,
that gallimaufry escapes dark sleep, floats free,
its diverse entities gone sliding – can it be
randomly? – through chinks and windings
into a living brain, bringing bafflement, or even
once in a while unlooked-for hope of meaning.
 
Whence does that quirk of roadway come
I’ve visualised so often, twisting up
past a pale field of unfamiliar corn
and damply mirroring a darkening sky?
This picture has no feeling of memory, seems
to have no part in any life of mine.
 
Yet it has forced an enigmatic,
determined way into this brain that works
and works at it, finding no answers,
only a sense of what may be mine
by adoption – a possible meaning
endlessly to be sought, for a richness
hidden within it, wanted, apprehended,
not yet understood.
 

Ruth Bidgood

in collection Land-music / Black Mountains, 2016,
Cinnamon Press, ISBN 978-1-9108363-5-4

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Toad in May

Weeks of drought; now
this unreal day of sultry sun
and thunder building.
 
Battery almost dead,
the radio, tilted on clumps
of yellowed grass, has rasped
to a harsh whisper.
                                      Reaching
to switch it off, the girl
sees, half-hidden by wilting leaves,
a bulging toad, that seems
uncensoriously listening.
 
In case this is no illusion,
in case a small creature,
warty, pulsing, rapt,
has any sort of pleasure
in such a sound, on this tedious
unpropitious day,
 
she leaves her radio on and goes,
allowing the scrapiness to grate,
. in its own time, into silence,
and the toad to make what it will
of a lack, an ending.
 

Ruth Bidgood

in collection Land-music / Black Mountains, 2016,
Cinnamon Press, ISBN 978-1-9108363-5-4

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Reading Traherne

‘We are Flames and Lights and Thrones
to each other’, said Traherne,
seeing in all of them the Sun
and ministering Angels.
                                                He lived
in a world of astonishment.
Still, by his words, slaves to the ordinary
are lifted from their chains.
Loss, timidity, doubt shrivel
in hot light of a vision whose terror
has made an alchemical change
into love.
 

Ruth Bidgood

in collection Land-music / Black Mountains, 2016,
Cinnamon Press, ISBN 978-1-9108363-5-4

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