Deborah Tyler-Bennett at Warwick Arts Centre

King's England poet and short-story writer Deborah Tyler-Bennett will be reading at Warwick Arts Centre on May 20th at 7.45pm

Ambulances by Steve Rudd

Touch my head,
Touch my toes,
Never go
In one of those;

My warding-off rhyme, as a snotnosed kid
Fear tightenng my chest
Whenever I saw their white shape weaving
Through traffic; or heard their urgent bells on the main road.
Always, it meant trouble - someone gasping on a carpet:
“Meat wagons”, my dad would call them, dredging up
Words from his war, when they hosed them out,
Their floors red with shedding.

Women down our street would stop their gossip
And nod, knowingly, at these omens on wheels;
Wishing them on their way elsewhere, the clang
Diminishing to distance; a slight pause
Then everyone pretended nowt had happened,
While those who summoned the pale carriage, elsewhere,
By paradox, were willing its approaching siren stronger.

These days, I’ve been in so many ambulances.
They’ve grown to be part of my life.
Bigger, yellow, and friendlier now somehow, these days;
But they still barge along the road wailing
Like widows, their blue lights strobing distress
In all directions.

I can handle it better now, though; now I’ve been in one -
Been to the terminus, been that sick white face
Above the orange blanket on the trolley.
Slam the doors, accelerate away, woo-wooing.
Been there, done that, and now,

I no longer dread all ambulances;
Just the last one.

Deborah Tyler Bennett at Nottingham Festival of Words

Deborah Tyler-Bennett is writer in residence at the Nottingham Festival of Words.
She will also be reading at Debbie Bryan's shop, Lace Market, 18 St Mary's Gate, Nottingham event 5-7pm, Friday 15th February 2013

The Year of the Two Comets by Steve Rudd

There will be two comets this year, they say;
Neither of which we’ll ever see again
Or so they theorise - nothing is certain,
After all. Things come around again.

The earth itself, cold as a comet today,
And the snow trails drifting out there
From upright rocks around the pond
Ice glazed as it rotates around its poles

Snow drifting across the garden in the wind
Like the cold tails of oscillating comets
“An eemis stane in a Yowdendrift”
Singing, bumbling endlessly through space

Many times I have been cold enough myself
To mine, and to those in my atmosphere,
To make the planets wobble in their spheres;
My eccentric orbit trailing wreckage across
The night sky of my life; so many ruined skies

And now the comets scar the spheres
And there are drifts in snow,
The snow, beneath which each of our cats lies.

Winter, the ice-world; vast clouds of lights
Caught in the bare trees like the fishes
In a stargazy heaven, jewels in a blue fire
A net four billion years old, pointing this way and that

While the singing gas and vapour bumbles on,
Always inexorable, on its path towards the sun
With no idea of our years, no concept of wise men,
Staring and pointing in the desert,
Or dinosaurs distracted by their light,
Crashing in swampy undergrowth.

This gift you gave me, Mam, my atoms,
Are gas and vapour, this wheelchair
Genes that made me what I am tonight,
Were forged in fires of Aldebaran.

I was my own comet, my coding
Carried by celestial messengers
Long before your atoms became you
Or Galileo even put his quill to parchment.

Your atoms became you, carbon hardening,
To points, as jewels become a woman,
A woman with a gift to give, pearls on a box of sky,
A gift with only one slight imperfection,
One bit missing, so as not to offend God.
Giver and taker of all gifts.

And back in autumn, back even before I knew
Two comets due this year would lace the skies
With stitching through the fabric of the night,
Even before the Mayans said the world would end,
My friends found, in dead November’s garden,
A shuttlecock wedged high in winter branches
Caught like a star, a perpetual comet, in a bare net,
Tending always back towards the joy of summer.

Sometimes the portent isn’t realised, interpreted,
Till long, long afterwards, after the comet has left;
After it’s whistled off again into the dark.
The radiation cast by stardust slow to spark.

Well, Mam, we’ll both be gone, and so will many men,
Before the year of comets comes again,
But come again it must – it surely must;
God made us both of singing cosmic dust.
Inevitably comets will be back;
Their permanence, the comfort that I lack.

Dog Days by Steve Rudd

No man steps into the same river twice – Heraclitus of Ephesus

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend, and inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read anyway – Groucho Marx

Dog Days: I

Going back, to places we were happy, once
The fields, bare, along the roadside, en route
All flat, mown, sere, this late in harvest,
As summer piles a year’s confected clouds
On top of distant hills, improbable
Sky-meringues, floating islands of sunset fantasies

Fifteen months since we came here, and yet
Still the potholes, in the rutted roads
Down byways here, where few, if any, come
Are bad as ever, moonscape lakes
To break and crack unwary axles

But, finally, we’re here, and I quarter off
By eye, the lumpy Mull of Kintyre
Across the horizon; the red can buoy
At Carradale, the lighthouse, Island Davaar

Wind-waves twinkle out in the Sound, flash points of light
Jewels, tempting as ever; she says she’ll walk
Along the beach for driftwood, for a fire,
But on her own: we both acknowledge
But do not say, that there should be a dog
Yes there should be a dog

How can we carry on, curating our life’s museum,
Her erstwhile stewards, and her being out of sight
Yet always somewhere just round every corner?
Are we doing it to prove that she’s still here, somehow?
Or we can do it anyway? Or both?

Going back to places where happiness, that
Fleeting concatenation of atoms
Welcomed us and opened our hearts to gladness
Such as it was?

What will it take? I’m scared to think,
To admit without the final missing pieces
Lost when Heraclitus upset the puzzle
The jigsaw stays forever unresolved.



Dog Days: II

Like Bede’s sparrow, time’s arrow,
We fly from dark to dark.
Dark to light, warmth – gone to dark
A fleeting spark

Dark for us, was winter littered with bricks and broken glass
And work, of course, treadmills of arguments, and pissing rain
Ice-cold; the never-ending fights
Endless, pointless, as the monochrome street-lights
And waking to the sound of car-alarms

All that’s behind us now, here, on Kilbrannan’s shore;
It all awaits us, still, again how soon, when we get home
How soon shall autumn over-reach itself and tumble
Decay to darkness as before, leaves despairing clutching hands
Struck down by rain?

But now, on this far-distant North-West shore
The sun beats on my page
Fusing ink to paper in one word:

Heat

- Already dry, almost as soon as written

The sound of the waves; the lap and swish and soothe of the waves
And the shush of the waves, the sun on the waves, the smell
Of ropes and tar, ozone and seaweed, of the waves

The waves to carry her back from Carradale
To Dougarie, to me, sadly alone and waiting,
The bees busy on the wind-nodding cowslips

But no dog asleep in the long, soft, aromatic grass;
Instead, the heat’s translated her to ashes
Atoms of ashes, and the seagulls wheeling above
Cry “weep, weep”.



Dog Days: III

These waves are not the same waves
That lulled and lapped us last time
When she was still with us; those waves now break
Long gone from here, on Bermuda’s shore
Or crash rocks on Tierra Del Fuego, those waves
Are gone, long gone, says Heraclitus

Those atoms have moved on, we cannot see
them now; her atoms also
Could be all around us, never-known

All we can do is hope her quickness
Is the lapping of these waters, the
Start of the birds; her dignity the grace of clouds
Her anima the gulls along the shoreline
Keening our grief still; where two herons stand, disputing
Like Pythagoras and Heraclitus, each contending about souls
And where each other’s atoms are, right now.

Meanwhile, in heat, some other atoms have become massed
To cowslips and marram grass
Burnet, sorrel, milfoil ragwort, whin,
But these are today’s plants, not yesterday’s

And even the Mull of Kintyre is vanished by the clouds
And reappears, with Ireland smudged behind it, but
These days are not those days, insists Heraclitus
Grave as ever, even though they look the same
Sound the same, and feel the same – no dog.

I am getting pissed off with Heraclitus, to be honest;
Nobody likes being told uncomfortable truths
No doubt he’s right, but God, the man’s a pain!
Reminding me, as if I didn’t know
I’m not that person now
Nor will I be again.

Household Gods by Steve Rudd

And in whatever houses a cat has died by a natural death, all those who dwell in this house shave their eyebrows only, but those in whose houses a dog has died shave their whole body and also their head. The cats when they are dead are carried away to sacred buildings in the City of Bubastis, where after being embalmed they are buried - Herodotus

Somehow, we’ve acquired a statuette of Bast,
Egyptian cat-goddess, at some point in the past
This bric-a-brac that lumbers
And infests our house produced her;
A manifestation, bronze, she sits in the hearth
Uneasy alongside the firedogs
With a bland, impersonal gaze

Somehow, and also in the past, of course
We acquired four real cats,
Real cats, for real, for better or for worse
Real cats familiar with witches’ curse
And invocations;
For midnight duvet invasions,
For yowling for food and
For sleeping curled up in a tight
Yin-yang ball, by the fire,
On a bed in the hearth.

The Egyptians, so I’ve heard
Would have worshipped them;
And when the owner died, he too went in
The same tomb, mummified,
In the Temple at Per-Bast
And why not? Look in any English church
The chainmail knights’ feet, pointing forever
Towards Jerusalem, are resting on a bratchet.

Worshipped in Egypt, cats; gods of the house
Foe of the mouse, the rat the snake
Guardians of grain in times of plague, ague and ache,
Allowed to eat from the plates of humans,
Milk to drink, (that much, at least was true of ours,
Sometimes, before we’d finished…) and I think
Maybe we also worshipped them, but
In our own inadequate way

Bast was their guardian, throughout,
The Lady of Cats - when the last one ailed
We lit incense, smoke from the joss stick
Hung round Bast’s statuette, veiled her,
As we prayed to every deity we knew,
But this time the Nile refused to flood,
There were no miracles in the bulrushes, and
The Red Sea stayed unparted, all spells failed.

So go, and bring me Cassia and Cinnamon,
Juniper Berries, Oil of Cedar, Myrrh and Henna,
Raise her a garden-cairn, a pyramid;
Bring me Nile-water to wash me and console me
Bring me incense of Dittany of Crete,
And soap that I may shave my eyebrows off,

While I’ll still miss her whiskered kiss, old puss,
Purring companionship, look down to find my ink
Blurred by the tears that rain on the papyrus
My grief wrought with this metaphor of Bast
Ringing on the dull anvil of my brain

Moments by Steve Rudd

Sometimes there are moments,

Like this one in the car park

An afternoon of eternity

Seems fixed in the moving of a cloud

Over the rooflines of town;

Or in that plane that droned across the sky

The morning of Aunt Sadie’s funeral.



Why should they etch themselves

Acid-deep onto the retina of memory

When all those other days

Days we’d looked forward to,

Anticipated, long and eager,

Passed flat, anticlimactic, unremembered,

And finally unrecorded?



Is it because, I wonder,

What some might call God

(but only when pissed, or sad, or both)

Bids us to remember in this way only

Things it deems important;

Sunsets, or the movement of waves

Across the bay; these transitory clouds,

The sway of the branches all around;



Moments in eternal stasis

Leaves, alternate green and gold

In lux aeternam

Even though the trees themselves

Will die in time to compost?



A holy juxtaposition

Sears like a branding,

A momentary hiss of painful joy, then

Leaves white clouds, towering in summer sky:

I will remember this, although I don’t know why.