Garrulus Glandarius by Steve Rudd

Mister Popinjay, up on his branch

Considers all the angles

Before committing;

Head on one side,

Matching the slant of light through branches

Jaunty but wary

Like a young lad, out upon the town,

Entering an unfamiliar bar.

Mister Popinjay

Brought me the summer

- a gift for which I’m grateful -

By decking his house with green

And wearing gaudy feathers.

Fluttering down from somewhere near at hand

He lets me pay him peanuts for his trouble.

Mister Popinjay

Is nothing special

In the greater scheme of things –

He gets a bad press, like cuckoos and magpies

And yet his gaudy feathers’re numbered

Like the hairs on my head

As are those of his colourful siblings

- Or so I’m told.

Mister Popinjay,

Millions of years

Turned you from dinosaur to bird

And brought you to my feeding-table

This Sunday teatime, to what purpose

God alone knows;

Now the moment’s gone again –

You’ve flown far from me, like a lover –

-  “they flee from me, that sometime did me seek”

- But you have seared my mind with coloured feathers and

Infected me with your sheeny jauntiness, now my head too

Is held sideways, looking for the sunlight, jaunty but wary,

Even if you never return, though I hope you will, often,

That, at least, I have to thank you for.

Deborah Tyler-Bennett interviewed by Strange Alliances

http://strangealliances.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/deborah-tyler-bennett-on-lacing-words-together/

Storm Damage by Steve Rudd

Counting the cost, the morning after;

Not as bad as I’d first thought

The roof is still in place, and all the chimneys

Still lean as crazy as yesterday

One plastic greenhouse lurches over, all

Seed trays in a jumble, its strained sides

Still ruffled by each diminished blast,

And the fence of willow screen lies flattened

Twigs and branches strewn around

As though God had cast the I Ching,

Sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind

With a power that swayed even cathedral spires

Dislodging bats and rooks, unwilling into the night.

I have lived through many storms,

And each has left its mark on me

Each scar, rebuffed by the vast blast,

Despite the wind’s moan, I remain a survivor

Who has spent many nights lying awake

Listening to the tiles fall off my life,

Too scared to go outside

Or get up there and stop it.

But, today, it’s not too bad,

Like many things in life, it could have been much worse,

And so today we make a list

Of all the things needing fixing,

Sigh, and stoop to build again.

Things that need fixing; a long, long list,

Starting with me, although I fear

There, I might have to manage my expectations;

This sunshine’s only temporary –

Enjoy it while you can;

For there will be other nights

Listening to mysterious crashes in the dark,

The howling winds of despair,

The sound of breaking glass.

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.