As I write this, the sun is shining down onto my husband’s onion and shallot harvest that is spread out across our patio, so I didn’t need to put much thought into my choice of this week’s poem. To say he’s a keen gardener is an understatement. (This picture shows just a small sample of this year’s crop.)

Some people might decide to reduce the size of their allotment, once half the members of the household have left home (in our case, a son and daughter). But though he’s always been good at maths (unlike me), he’s not one to do things by half, so instead of reducing his very successful production of vegetables, he has now acquired a second plot so that he can grow even more.

Not that I’m complaining, of course, and actually I do appreciate the year-long supply of delicious fresh veg, but occasionally the excess can prompt a poetic rant.

Storing Onions
The boiler room is out of bounds to her -
a Bluebeard’s chamber crammed with hanging rows
of surplus vegetables.

She used to cook him soups and casseroles
chopping the slippery white rings, half blinded.
It stings her eyes now, just to think of them.

Regardless, he produces more each year.
She watches him in silence from her window
unloading brimming boxes from his car.

He always waits till every plump green stem
fades pale as straw and flops exhausted
onto the nurtured soil of his allotment.

Back home he spreads a dust sheet on the terrace
and tumbles out his harvest
gloating over each brown globe in turn

rubbing it between his thumbs
fumbling through loose layers
brittle as wings of winter moths or flies.

He loops the twine around each fractured stalk
and tugs , to stifle any flow of juice
without quite severing the stub of neck

then calls her to admire his handiwork -
bunch after bunch of dangling heads
with grains of earth clinging to wiry hair.

She knows they’ll hang till swarms of tiny flies
feast on sterile shoots and rotting husks
while rust-brown liquid drips onto the floor.

I wrote this poem about ten years ago and as well as appearing in my own collection Single Travellers, it was first published in Weyfarers 2000. Since my husband (fortunately) has some understanding of poetic licence, he doesn’t take this personally, and in fact it’s his favourite poem of mine.

As it’s quite a dramatic narrative, it’s a good one to recite, and I’ve used it in performances with Late Shift. (I’ll be posting more about Late Shift soon)

It’s the month of August that links these two very separate items. The first is my aunt’s 90th birthday celebration lunch which was held today; the second is the title of the poem I’ve chosen for my Poem of the Week, Fat Woman on a Trampoline.

There were no trampolines in my aunt’s garden, where we enjoyed our pre-lunch drinks in the glorious sunshine, but I did mention this blog to some of my cousins, aunts and uncles when they asked if I’d got another novel published yet.

On my journey back home along the M 40, I was thinking about the group of friends from my MA Writing course, and how we arranged a writing weekend in a B & B in Derbyshire exactly ten years ago this month.

Fat Woman on a Trampoline

She waits until the children leave.
They haven’t noticed her
leaning over the stone wall
of the formal garden.

She saunters down the path
under an arch, past broken flower pots
and onto the rough grass
of the venture playground.

A walking holiday.
She sketches too. This B & B,
a family home to late Victorians,
broods above a wooded gorge.

Yesterday her heavy legs
hauled her, panting, up the ridge,
stiff boots guarding against rock
and contact with the springy turf.

She’ll just remove her shoes
and lie flat on this trampoline
large as the double bed
she sleeps alone in.

Above her a blue sky, white clouds,
sheep on the far green slope.
No one around. She stands
knees bent. Sways. Jumps.

Soars, arms outstretched
light, light, light
on taut blue plastic.
Light. Light. Light.

Several of my poems have a narrative strand, and often the first spark of inspiration comes from an emotion I’ve experienced myself. In this case, the actions and feelings in the final two stanzas are mine, though the character’s situation is invented. The description of the trampoline itself was accurate.
It’s not a ‘great poem’ but it reminds me of a happy and productive weekend with my friends. I was thrilled when it was a runner-up in the 2001 Kent & Sussex poetry competiton,. It was also published in Obsessed with Pipework, the magazine run by Charles Johnson, the then publisher of Flarestack, of which, I’ll be posting more soon.

In my last post, (see below) I mentioned that I’d been interviewed last Wednesday by Chris Morgan (the current Birmingham Poet Laureate) for his Poetry Show on Unity FM.
The time went surprisingly fast, during which Chris asked me lots of questions about my poetry and other writing. We paused in our conversation from time to time as Chris invited me to read one of my poems.

Being interviewed on the radio is a slightly unreal situation - during a ‘normal’ conversation with another individual, sitting opposite each other acoss a wide desk, it would seem a bit odd to punctuate the conversation with a poems. I felt very relaxed, but at the same time I was also aware that there could be several other people listening in. (And on the other hand, there might be no-one at all)

In a way, it felt a little like writing this blog - creating an illusion of communication with unseen readers )

I had selected several poems that I might want to read, but realised I’d probably need to make some kind of link to the latest topic of conversation, and I didn’t know in advance what questions Chris would be asking.

This Poem of The Week is one that I read during the interview - I’d been explaining why my soon-to-be-published-novel, Paper Lanterns, was set in Hong Kong, and this poem is one that I wrote after my first visit to Hong Kong with my husband and son, when my daughter was out there during her Gap year.

Snake Stall at the Night Market,Kowloon

I knew this was a language understood
by the rapt crowd of men and the man
performing and the woman holding
the bowl and knife -

not the Cantonese, rapid as gunshot
peppering shadowy figures on the pavement
nor the manic cacophony
of plastic alarm clocks from

three stalls away, nor tannoys blaring
White Christmas and voices bawling
Kalvin Klein jeans one hundred twenty dollars
and long-past-bedtime toddlers keening.

This was beyond vocabulary
an alien body language
of animal and human locked
in ritual more primitive than speech.

I’d have been swept along by the mainstream
alert for siren voices chanting silks
and watches, perfumes and leather
at must-have prices, but

my teenage son stopped
entranced. So I had to watch
as the four-foot, green and yellow snake
was gripped at the throat, its tail

pinned under the man’s boot, its belly
squeezed upwards, again and again
in the deft hand. The crowd knew
what this meant, what the man was offering

to one who was rich or brave or
foolish enough to buy what was about
to happen. All I could decipher
was the snake’s tail escaping

and the way the creature looped itself
into a knot until the man untied it
clamped the tail again, and took the knife.
I turned away, but still could hear

the many-headed monster suck its breath,
and commentary from my son’s mouth
that I would not interpret, for fear of
falling through a crack in the paving.

I wrote this poem a few years after the experience I’ve described. The incident had made a profound impression on me, but if I hadn’t made some detailed notes at the time, I would probably not have recalled it all.

I strongly recommend the use of a note book for jotting down a few words about things that you notice - however, I don’t do nearly enough of this myself!