It was so sad to hear of the death of two more British soldiers in Afghanistan, today of all days, when we are reminded of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of other men and women killed in wars.

There’s nothing new I can add to this topic – the pros and cons of this war or that - the justifications and condemnations. I can only feel immensely grateful that virtually all my friends and family members are in good health, and (as far as any of us can know) are not in present danger - all except one, a fairly recent addition to our extended family, and he is often in my thoughts, particularly today.

The Sunday Times News Review has lain on the kitchen table all day. My eye was caught by the headline ‘ HIS LAST LONELY WALK’ and a picture of a beautiful young man, Olaf Schmid, who died last weekend, attempting to defuse his 65th bomb, on the eve of returning home on leave.

I was resisting the article – I didn’t want to read about that tragedy. I’ve just done so now, with a big lump in my throat. My heart goes out to his wife, Christina – his parents too. My son is one year older than he was.

What a courageous young man. The newspaper article quotes his words, “I go home, and people go,’ How many f****** Taliban have you killed?’ Well, it’s not really about that. It’s more about how many lives I’ve saved, I think.”

I live not far from Cannock Chase, 26 square miles of woodlands and heather-covered hills, a wonderful place for walking. I’d been visiting the Chase for years before I first came across the German Military Cemetery. Attached to the memorial building, there was a small, obviously lived-in, house probably occupied by a caretaker.

It just happened to be on the last day of the last millennium – a time when the whole country –indeed, the whole world – was in a state of excitement, some anticipating all the computers on earth grinding to a halt, with disastrous consequences, and others getting ready for the party of a lifetime. Hemmed all around by dark pine trees and a wire fence, were the final remains of 5,000 German Servicemen from two World Wars. So many young men. Just a small percentage of all the others from those two wars

There was something unbearably poignant about the headstones in their neat rows – each one shared by two names. This is the poem it inspired.

Millennium Eve in the German War Cemetery, Cannock Chase.

They’ll be restless tonight, mutters
Mr McAllister locking the door.
There are no windows in the back wall
of the bungalow. It looks onto
its own courtyard. Better that way
he said when he took the job.

He keeps all green blades clipped
to the regulation inch – or rather
two point-something centimetres now.
They’d like that. And each brown mound
in every row of every phalanx shows
no hint of grass or pale unfolding leaf.

Beyond these lawns, where Fritz and Heinrich
Hans and Gunter lie, two to a bed
dark pines mass up against the wire fence
that keeps out deer. No place in here
for their unruly steps. Their eyes
are too alive, their breath’s too warm.

He switches on the tele to Sky News
from all around the world. But those Chinese
don’t even have the same New Year as us!
Fireworks cascade above the city squares
on the meridian as midnight after
midnight fizzes past. Hush, he murmurs. Hush.

But all explosions are too far away
to stir the random couples underground -
no trace of sleep inside their hollow skulls.
If they could dream they’d be where only time
can measure distances. They’d watch those stars
whose light has not yet reached our skies, burn out.

What a lovely afternoon it’s been - even the weather cheered up for my long drive to Leicester on a very special occasion: it was the launch of yet another collection of poems by Alice Beer. I wouldn’t normally draw attention to a writer’s date of birth, but this information on the back is relevant to the content of “Window on the Square” :Alice Beer was born in Vienna in 1912, and moved toEngland in 1937. She lives in a flat in Leicester overlooking De Montfort Square

The other important statement on the back cover is:
ALL PROFIT FROM THE SALE OF THIS PAMPHLET
WILL BE DONATED TO HAMLIN FISTULA UK

If you don’t know about this life-destroying condition, (and even if you do) click here to find out more about this charity, and, for a very brief photo story of one young woman’s path to recovery, and a chance of having a normal life restored, click here.

I met Alice in August 1996 at my first residential poetry course with the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire, and, like many others who have fallen under her spell, have kept in touch ever since. This contact was easier to maintain because of the fortnightly poetry group, Soundswrite, that held its first meeting in 2000, and I was delighted to see that Alice also was joining this wonderful group.

If you’d like to find out more about Window on the Square, and support this very worthwhile charity, this book is available via the link to Alice’s web-page above, and also the link to Soundswrite.

One of the poems that were read this afternoon has helped me to decide which of my own will be Poem of the Week. Alice’s is called Puzzling, and recounts her sighting of a fox on three very different occasions . The most recent of these took place below her window on the square,
‘it trotted off,
not leisurely and not in a hurry, intent
on its own business and left me wondering
why I felt as if the clouds
had lifted on this dark December morning
a gift bestowed on me.’

I, too, am fascinated by the urban fox, and its parallel world –

Shifts
Monochrome foxcubs tumble on the lawn.
Sparrows and finches stir
and test their voices.

As day noses up behind next-door’s
privet hedge and sycamore
the cool earth yawns and calls.

Wet grass springs back after each footfall.
A tunnel strokes damp fur as cubs creep down
into their solid sleep.

Their dreams dissolve above them
and this house, a block of shadow
is rubbed out.

In my latest post, I was talking about re-writing in general, and I mentioned a poetry blog site, How a Poem Happens, that had inspired and impressed me, and I’d intended to write in more detail about this today – But this has been a great week for poetry and that’s now going to have to wait a day or two, as I’m too excited about a package that was delivered by Royal Mail on Friday: I received my own ‘contributor’s’ copy of a wonderful anthology, ‘Cracking On’, in which I’m immensely privileged to have two of my own poems.

It’s edited by Joy Howard, of Grey Hen Press, and this short extract (below) from the Foreword by Guardian writer, Michele Hanson, will give you some idea of why you might want to take a look inside!

“ Outrage is easier for me, but that is here too, particularly in Mind the Gap, which challenges the young head on, rather than fading out quietly and letting them, and everyone else, continue to believe that youth is everything and old age is nothing much at all. Unrepentant, unapologetic, brave, confident and beautiful, these poems show that we older women deserve to live as full and rich a life as any other generation. And the nearer we get to the end, through Sick and Tired, Nearly There and into the Departure Lounge, the braver we get. Or at least these poets do. For those of us who are scared stiff, then these poems can help us through it.”

I’ve not yet had time to do more than dip into a few of these, and what struck me at once was how fresh and unusual these poems are, and how rarely I’ve come across any poems that deal with aging at all, let alone ones which, as Penelope Shuttle is quoted as saying, are ‘Electric, formidable, challenging, witty, sombre, enduring, heart-felt, tender, reflective, valedictory poems.’

No wonder I feel privileged to be among this company! One of mine, (Legacy)has already appeared in a previous post, so this Poem of the Week is the other one from Cracking On.

First Born
For my mother

My other dead are setting out to greet me,
their sprawling years
weighing them down like clay

but your compacted life, each heartbeat
counted, speeds towards me
light as a bird.

When my time comes, I’ll skim across the waves,
follow the scent of that girl pacing the deck,
Suez, Gulf of Arabia, Indian Ocean.

I’ll be that self once more under the peepul tree
as I lick the tip of thread for the needle’s eye,
stitch the final daisy on your gown.

I won’t know, yet, the cataclysm of
that love, the danger of giving
too much too soon.

My hands will cup the tautened belly, catch
the undulations of your limbs
against my palms.

I’ll mould my lips into the secret smile,
recover that sense of wonder - the key
to heaven. They’ll let me in.

This might seem a bit confusing to some readers if they don’t realise that the ‘I’ of the poem is my mother, and the ‘you’ is her first born child, the one referred to towards the end of ‘Legacy’ as ‘our long-dead brother’.

The journey through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean in this poem was made by my mother as a young woman, travelling out to India to marry my father, who was in the army out there during the war. Throughout our childhood,our oldest brother, who only lived for about three days, was regularly mentioned in night-time prayers.

It was only when I became a mother myself, that I started to realise what a tragedy that baby’s death would have been.

What a lovely day yesterday – almost warm enough for swimming outside, something I’ve done little of this year. Living in the Midlands, I don’t get many opportunities these days for swimming in the sea, so for me, the combination of warm air, willows and alder, grassy banks and a wide expanse of clear fresh water is (almost) irresistible. However, neither the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal,

nor the Severn Estuary near Slimbridge Wildfowl Trust,would have been a suitable place for me to indulge in that particular hobby.

It reminded me of a different swimming experience a few years ago in one of the lakes in Sutton Park. Sometimes in May and June early in the morning, before there was anyone around to challenge me for breaking the park rules, and the sun was already hot as it rose above the willows, I’d quickly change into my swimming costume and wade carefully over the smooth pebbles until I was in deep enough to swim.

I knew that the water was clean enough at that time of year (before any possibly dangerous algae that sometimes appeared in long spells of hot weather had spread across the surface). When I splashed my feet around beneath me, I could see them gleaming white in the pale brown water, but I knew that this colouration had come from layers of dead leaves and pieces of bark.

The most exotic birds I saw that day were the flamingos,
but nothing there could thrill me as much as the two described in the poem below.

Heron

If you see me, it’s disdain
not fear that lifts your wings
in that slow beat,
legs stretched out behind you
like a spear, angled breastbone
a flint arrowhead.

Sun rises into hazy blue
above alder and willow.
The lake’s cool skin
exhales an earthy scent -
in the bark-brown depth,
my white feet gleam like fish.

Here, I’m on a par
with moorhen or grebe.
Kingfisher flames by, inches
from my face – jolts my heart into
my mouth so heart takes wing
almost settles - till you,

heron, reveal your self,
perched in a shrine of leaves,
not bird, but acolyte of sun,
icon, blinding wingspan
wider than a swan’s
or angel’s, even.

This poem was written about five years ago, and it’s a true account of what I experienced that day.

I still like it, as it reminds me of that ‘magic moment’, but I’m not really able to make a subjective judgement on its quality as a poem – Not that great, I’d guess, but good enough for what it is!

I was in Sussex visiting my mother this weekend, and for a change, Gardening Husband came with me. I’m always happy to let him drive, because it means that I can have a good long stretch of reading time. (Something I often find hard to do at home). I’d just started Breath, by Tim Winton, and was able to finish it by the time we arrived. I need more time to mull over this book – I found it enthralling, but haven’t sorted out my thoughts and feelings enough to write anything coherent about it yet.

My return journey took me about a third of the way into RJ Ellory’s A Quiet Belief in Angels. I wish we’d been driving up to John O’ Groats, and back to give me a chance to finish it. I don’t think I’ll get much of a chance to read more long chunks of it this week. I’ll just have to be patient, and wait to find out what happens next.

Yesterday was cloudy with an almost gale force wind. Coming down over the brow of the hill towards Seaford, I could see the white horses scattered across the dark green and purple sea, but today has been another one of those Indian summer days, with a clarity of light that I associate with fine weather in October.
That leads me nicely to this week’s poem – especially as it’s the traditional time of Harvest Festivals.
Light Harvest

October is the time to harvest light,
on days when lingering strands of summer
drift into a sky that rings like glass,
honing the dulled edges of your sight
to gather all the shift and shimmer
of slanting sun on trees and tawny grass,
gilding the familiar with surprise.

This morning I escaped into a park
where light lay ripe and waiting for my eyes,
trapped on wet black mud – splintering on dark
green spikes of holly into shards so bright
I’ll feast all winter on this hoard of light.

The original inspiration for this poem came while I was on my MA course at Nottingham Trent. We had one of the occasional Saturday meetings, and went out into the nearby countryside. The sky was absolutely clear and blue, the sun was warm, but there was a hint of chill in the air, and we gradually became aware of strands of tiny threads of cobwebs drifting around us and glistening in the sunlight.

I was delighted when this poem was accepted for publication in Acumen 2000. It’s one that I’m still happy to be reminded of at this time of year.

It’s a funny thing, looking back at poems I’ve written several years ago. The poem of this week is one I wrote for my daughter, and now reading it again I find that it’s the secondary theme of this poem that strikes me first.

Both my ‘children’ now live in London, and I always look forward to their visits home. This weekend, it was my daughter who came with her boyfriend. There were a couple of things on their itinerary which we managed to achieve on Saturday – the first was a guided tour of her dad’s allotment.

It was several months since I’d been down there and I was overwhelmed by the amount of vegetables still thriving and demanding to be harvested. Of course, I knew about these, as he’d been bringing samples of them home for supper week after week.

The other was on the request of daughter and boyfriend: a trip to Imran’s in Birmingham’s Balti Belt. It was getting on for two years since we’d been there and it was even better than we’d remembered. I was glad that the honour of Brum was upheld!

So where does Dublin come in to this? It’s not even mentioned in the poem below. Daughter and boyfriend have been together for two years now, and the poem dates from about six years ago. This is a mother and daughter poem, so yes, it is about her, but it has a more general significance, in that it’s about the state of being in love. She looked so glowing with happiness when she arrived that it brought it all back to me (but not, I hasten to add, the previous cause of her joy) .

Take a look at the poem now, and if I tell you that I was at Trinity College in Dublin, and met my husband there, you might get the Dublin connection.

That Place

She’s a sunlamp! Her voice on the phone
emits a radiance that fills the hollow space
behind my breastbone, filters down

to where she used to prod and ripple
under my skin, strange little engine,
humming and growing.

Now, if I should touch the screen
when I download her emails
they’d scorch my hand.

I go to meet her at the station
and people step aside to let her pass
as if she’s ringed with flame.

My headlights seem redundant -
it’s her eyes triggering
the cats’ eyes on the road.

Her words are morsels of joy that she
feeds me like crystallized ginger
or Turkish Delight.

She’s reached that place I visited
so long ago I’d quite forgotten
how I used to tuck my left hand

in the small, back left-hand pocket of his
Levi’s as we trod the air
an inch above the pavement

and my heart, a supernova,
flaunted itself on my face with such dazzle
that passers-by would flinch and shield their eyes.

Unlike some of my other poems, there’s nothing in this one that I’d want to change. It’s also a good one to read aloud and I find that most people who hear it seem to be moved by it.(It’s funny how little things like a back pockets of a pair of Levis can be forgotten for years, and then make such an impact when they suddenly surface.) Ah, youth!

Like most things in my life, I only get round to making a major change when I’m more or less forced into it by some outside intervention. In this case, it was having double-glazing installed in my lovely little writing room – not just the door and the big window overlooking the garden but also the French windows that we’d never opened in the twenty years since having this room added to the back of the house.

So most of today and all yesterday, I’ve been rearranging everything in this room. It opens onto the garden and is full of light on sunny days, so, with the doors and windows open it almost felt like being outside.

I hadn’t realised quite how long this would take me, and once I’d piled up all my books from the three bookcases onto the floor and every other available surface, I had to carry on. And it wasn’t just the books. The knee-hole desk I’m sitting at now has nine small drawers, and the tiny table I was using as a desk , also has a drawer, and then I’ve got a large carved camphor wood chest, and all these were crammed with accumulated papers and other odds and ends that had to be sifted and sorted.

I feel very pleased with myself now that it’s all finished, but I do regret not being able to catch up on other things I wanted to do, such as writing a post about R.J.Ellory’s inspiring talk to Bookcrossers on Friday night at Hudson’s – but that will have to wait.

Meanwhile, here’s my poem of the week:

Preservation

His mother’s fur coat sleeps under their bed.
Each night she listens as another stitch
that binds those skins together snaps.

There’s barely room to navigate the back-log
of newsprint, stacked on the carpet
like dry-stone walls.

Beneath a camouflage of photo frames
and bric-a-brac, the clenched piano
chokes on silent chords.

One winter, on the edge of Lovers’ Leap
He’d lectured her on limestone crags,
fossils of crinoids from aeons ago.

To her delight, she’s found them on the net,
sea-lilies, feather stars, swaying
and feeding in tropical seas.

Now sun slants in between the blinds
jostles motes of dust, and something
like a boulder is worked loose.

This is a poem that I first wrote at least seven years ago and was published in my small collection, Single Travellers. In spite of it also winning a place in the Ragged Raven Anthology, Writing on Water, (2005) I’d never been quite satisfied by that version (see below) so I’ve spent the last hour chopping and changing it. At the moment, I think this version is more effective, but when I read it again tomorrow,
I’m very likely to want to make other changes. (I’ve just read it again, and am not sure what I think now!)

I’d be very interested in your comments about these two versions.

Preservation

There’s barely room to navigate the decades of newsprint,
calcified narratives stacked on the carpet like
dry-stone walls. Does he believe

they can shore up the present? Beneath accretions of
photos and bric-a-brac, the clenched piano
is choking back old tunes.

Her mother-in-law’s fur coat sleeps under their bed.
At night, lying above those stitched-together
skins, she feels them stir.

Years back, on the edge of Lovers’ Leap, he
told her about limestone crags, billions of
fossils from aeons ago.

Now she’s found them on the net, sea-lilies,
feather stars, swaying and feeding in tropical seas.
All that life!

Sun edges in through smears of condensation,
its slanting shafts jostled with motes of…dust, is it?
or particles of

something more ingrained, intangible,
worked loose at last
from the boulder in her throat

I love the sea, but I’ve lived in the middle of England for more than thirty years.

I grew up in a small Sussex village which has its own mini-climate within a ten-mile radius of the family home where my mother still lives, just a few miles from the sea. When I’m at my own home, especially during the holidays, I sometimes find it hard to hear about the glorious sunshine they’re enjoying down there, while Sutton Coldfield is living up to its name, and is shrouded in cloud.

In keeping with Sod’s Law, when I drive down to Sussex after a week of fine weather, the sun usually goes into hiding as soon as I hit the A 23 and the downs come into view. So this weekend, on one of my regular visits to my childhood home, I was pleasantly surprised by the warm breeze and blue skies on Saturday afternoon.

I knew this would be my last chance of the year for swimming in the English Channel, so I took my chance, and the sun was hot on my shoulders as I trod gingerly over the grey stones to the edge of the clear sea. It wasn’t as cold as I’d expected and I relished again the feeling of freedom as I swam out towards a bobbing orange buoy, with the dazzling glare around me and several metres of water below my feet.

When I’d started going to the North Norfolk coast years ago on visits to my husband’s family, it took me a long time to get used to the sea there, with its treacherous currents, and the sun in the ‘wrong’ place, but I grew to love it for the wildlife and emptiness, particularly Blakeney Point with its colony of grey seals.

So this is the obvious candidate for my poem of the week:

Becoming a Seal

Becoming a seal takes dedication.
I’ve time for little else now
what with days in snack bars
accumulating layer on layer of flab
and evenings stretched out in the bath
holding my breath under water.

Night swells with dreams of blubber
light as airships, supple and strong
as branches of willow. Sometimes I lurk
by plastic ponds in garden centres.
After a little practice, Koi carp
slip down smoothly as noodles.

My place of pilgrimage is Blakeney Point.
Those massive bolster shapes basking
on sandbanks barely glance towards me
as I wriggle inch by inch a little closer.
Now that I’ve tuned in to their grunts and barks
I understand their conversations.

Lately I’ve noticed changes in my skin -
it’s thicker now and turning mottled grey.
Each plunging struggle against
North Sea tides creates a tingling glow
though I still have to coat myself with grease
before I slide into the waves.

When my legs have fused together
they’ll propel me faster. I’ll have no need
for arms – the sinuous seals caress
from head to tail. Soon I will smell
as they do. They’ll nuzzle me gently
gliding around me along the sea-bed.

This is not an autobiographical poem, but I have swum in the shallow channel at low tide ,while the seals’ heads bobbed around me,staring with their spaniel-like eyes.

An early version of this poem won 5th prize in the Poetry Life (2001) competition - since then I’ve tightened it by cutting out at least one other stanza and re-organising some other parts that I later felt were a bit clumsy. I still do like this version - it reminds me of those experiences and it’s fun to recite to an audience - it seems to go down very well at readings.