Clearing the Ice

My mother’s twin aunts drink tea with her in the sitting-room.
They are no-nonsense, plain-speaking northerners.
It’s doubtful these methodist aunts will want gins
 
but my father hacks at the white mass
which has billowed round and ‘chockered’
the ice-making compartment of our fridge.
 
Clearing the ice is a habit he resorts to in times of crisis
such as now, his younger daughter’s marriage.
I expect he remembers how the twin aunts demanded
 
back the loan from my mother’s mother
when she became a widow, with two children.
He won’t go into the sitting-room, and neither will I.
 

Sarah Barr

Winner of the Bridport Prize and published in The Bridport Prize Anthology 2010,
ISBN 978-1-9065936-9-8

 
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Reservoir

The massive dam wall reminds me of the strength
of water and how it can destroy a landscape
as well as make it. The reservoir is low today.
 
Sometimes it’s easier for us to draw closer
when we’re walking but in the end
it’s what we don’t talk about that stays with me.
 
These rows of fallen limbs and trunks of trees
covered in emerald moss and grey-green lichen
are like people stretched out in sleep.
 
A sort of light-headedness tempts me to lie down
in the bracken with them even though the Dartmoor
air is clean and mild and fills my lungs.
 
Not talking about my Dad and how he came here
and later was brought in a wheelchair
to sit at these sturdy wooden tables and benches
 
we skirt so quickly. Not talking about
the whole Devon thing, a brother’s anger,
how the farmhouse was sold at a knock-down price.
 
If we had to, we could step our way
along the ledge on the far side of the dam wall,
as long as we were careful not to look down.
 

Sarah Barr

published in online poetry magazine Meniscus

 
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Autumn in Venice

I don’t remember anyone talking to us
apart from shopkeepers or waiters
 
the whole time we were there.
We hardly talked to each other
 
though there were things we could have said.
You bought me a glass-and-gold necklace.
 
Overnight, water crept into the square;
efforts to save this city ebb and flow.
 
The water, beautiful with reflections,
stinks in August though less so in November.
 
We trod up and down narrow streets
trying to reach our destination.
 
The alley-ways looked different
coming the other way.
 
We stumbled into an old ghetto.
We forgot why we’d come to Venice
 
or what we’d intended to do with our days
between houses like crumbling wedding-cakes,
 
shop windows crammed with masks
and stiff-limbed, velvet-dressed dolls.
 

Sarah Barr

published in anthology Poems from the Oak Room, Flagon Press, ISBN 978-0-9562778-4-8;
and in The Templar Anthology, 2016, ISBN 978-1-9111321-7-2

 
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Trees on Lewesdon Hill

They flourish in what we call silence –
rain-clatter, wind-sough,
plant-rustle, path-crunch
and high-spirited hawk cry.
 
Grown, like us, from star-dust,
they take only rain, air, sunlight.
 
They are guardians of the landscape,
and give us a sense of safety.
 
They are characters in a tableau
who don’t walk the undulating path
but seem destined to watch over
 
folded fields of lime, rose, amber,
hedges, copses, the bowl of the sky.
 

Sarah Barr

published in Poems in the Waiting Room Iss 78, winter 2017

 
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