A Woman is About to Break
'Leave yr streams for to come hether/make haste say have noe delay
here that's above the weather/A flower of May is prung today'
Gaps in the hedge beside the silent river and
round the corner Tawstock's Tudor gatehouse birth-
frames the canal to another world; left behind
plane and mower thrum, rook kerfuffle, traffic buzz.
In the field Friesians swoon summer's late afternoon heat.
The church is gravely cold,
sun's cross-beams refract
stained light from glass,
splash monuments, stream
a river of blood along nave's inscribed stone-slabs,
until, at the vanishing point,
it seeps from floor into crypt beneath.
A woman is about to break out of her marble abstraction,
begin to breath again; in this version,
merry new bride,
she steps from her carriage; bells
tintintabulate across Taw's happy valley,
hum-tones loop with Maypole's rainbow braids
cascading chiming confetti over her white dress brocade.
Pearl rising, falling, at her neck.
Imagine; Dramas; Masques; reputation
wedged sometightplace between Shakespeare, Webster, Milton.
Shut in the strict enclosure of the entrenched canon, a
woman is about to break free; in this version, they say,
the abuser, her husband, determined
vicissitudes of her lettered fate; thus,
body, papers, rescued from the repository,
still gasping for the light of day
only after scholars,
carving space for contemporary daughters, decided to uncover,
then decipher, cross-dressings, followers of Comus,
with after-lives of Shakespeare's girls -
Bianca. Viola. Sylvia. Julia.
If, that is, they had a voice.
Note: Rachel Fane, Countess of Bath, 1613-1680, spent her childhood at Apethorpe Hall, in Northumberland, where she wrote sophisticated pastoral masques, including May Masque at Apethorpe. When she was 25, Fane married Sir Henry Bourchier, 5th Earl of Bath, and moved to Tawstock, in Devon. Nine months after Bourchier’s death, in 1654, Fane married Lionel Cranfield, but the marriage didn’t last; in 1661 Rachel was granted legal separation on the grounds of cruelty and desertion. Ironically, it may be due to acrimony apropos the divorce proceedings that Fane’s writings survived; kept by Cranfield, her papers were later discovered in the ownership of a descendant. A white marble statue in Tawstock church commemorates the Countess, who retained her title after her second marriage, and after death was returned to Devon for interment. Quotation, from May Masque at Apethorpe.
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Footloose, Fancy Free
for Sylvia Plath
They think I'm beneath the cold slab
high in the footloose winds
under York's barren moors.
When they despoil the grave
do they not know -
but for spring-tails, brittle-bones, worms -
how empty it is inside?
Do they not realise
how many air-miles a waft of breeze will
carry the dormant seed -
be it daisy, dandelion,
grass green with life in gravestone crevice,
or willow-herb at the edge of the field?
But, I'm none of these.
Look instead in the pallid face
of the paper-white narcissi.
Every little seed hooks
to every other little seed,
criss-crossing our country's patternings
and boundaries - fields, lakes,
motorways, woodlands and mountains.
Admittedly, it took a while
to get to this, my final destination -
still black-faced sheep, occasional
trailers on the lane.
From above, on garden's east,
we are sheltered by the wise tree
tasting darkest history and her
brood of otherworldly wings.
She's our and their mother.
Like children, we look up to her.
She stretches her limbs to the tips of her twigs
straining to pick up hidden writing
rising from her roots across the woodwideweb.
A clutch of doves from the east
settling in their nest post-flight
discarded us in the sphere of seeded grass,
that was a few years
after setting its mud-caked prints
in the snow the fox hooked us up in its paw -
we were expelled on a southern heath.
That was almost ten years
after the shrew regurgitated us on a motorway verge
with the beetle she'd devoured in the pile of autumn leaves
two decades or more after a gust of ghost-wind dispersed
its disclosing fruits.
They'd matured inside the capsule's green fuse
from stems of flowers sprung up
on grave's earth during the years following
that first winter's blackest season.
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On Whitehorse Hill
Godgifu.
Eadgifu.
Aelfgifu.
Aelfthryth.
Reel the names a-
way aural sliding into slip-shod
Anglo Saxon history, away,
like iconic eastern dolls
they recede, expanding into distant pasts
the way a-
way, they remind us of
the blue-grey layers of Dartmoor's mists and tors.
The last of these - later,
Queen of our Lands,
Aelfthryth,
weaving her own fairy-tale -
left
following the before-day, a
way day beside her mother's recent grave
at the abbey on moor's western edge,
stole away for a lange day
and another
from the place of her birth,
pursuing yole-ways to seek new tracks -
criss-crossing paths to the north,
lych-ways on the tracks of the forking droves.
Up past the cleave, over Bellestam where are the Nine Maidens
she took up with Tola,
daege, on the summerlands at the gentle green coll -
churned milk plashing to pail -
at dusk, sleek cows slumbering,
they eat meatonastick,
sleep in the hut
raised from earth
under stars on a green-rush and black-
sedge floor.
Sun up, up and a-way early Aelfhryth leaves the cows on butter-hill's dew-covered down wanders along drift-lanes gathering seedsofgorse beside purple-heather and green- light fern, crosses the steps by Cullever up as far as the Winter Tor, she climbs overthestone by the brook & over the ford of the Taw to the stile beside the gorge as far as Steeperton then over the clapper & beyond upthetop to Whitehorse Hill near where her mitochondrial mothers came from the highest, wildest moorland tors. Knowing her true destiny is far a-way from here, she's come to bid farewell to her ancestor, foremother, on the White Hill, she who went to ground a thousand years or more, the stories they tell round these moor parts, a legend passed on by word of mouth down the daughters' line - the procession, wailing in the wind. Hands opening high to sky they brought her here fall of the year when ferns waved like arms of fear, laying their Bronze Princess gently on the pyre to rest decked in her bedazzled dress amber bead bling fixed at the nape of neck. After fire's embers died a- way, wailing, they swaddled her ash within the pelt of bear bound up with a knotted woven sash then, on agnysse min, laid her beside the basket, nested inside it, a cow-hair band, the rings, still glistening tin, two spindle-wood studs once hung from her ears. At the time of setting sun, they settled her in the cist.
When sun's down,
Aelfhryth
turns west,
leaves by way of the peat pass
at Taw and East Dart source
as far as the great lime tree
over Black Ridge Way
blue graze of sea in the distance
granite-clitters
spilling down
over the descending
fringe of moor
she skirts the bog
by the right side of the stream
at the bondstone
marking the two Great Hills,
crosses stepping-stones by the Lyd
climbs over Nodden,
finds the Chi-Rho stone
& the ancient L stone,
by Bridestowe boundary,
then, fairy-tale settling with her again,
before the next day
of the fresh path of her new life a-
way in faraway lands, reaching the Green vale
Aelflryth looks down to where is the Way of the Dead
and her own home, from on the High Down above the Olde town.
Note: Ælfthryth (c. 945 – 1000 or 1001, (also Alfrida, Elfrida or Elfthryth), who was probably born at Lydford castle, just below Dartmoor, in Devon, became an English queen, the second or third wife of King Edgar of England, mother of King Ethelred the Unready and a powerful political figure in her own right. Godgifu, daughter of Etheldred the Unready, was Aelgifu’s granddaughter; Eadgifu was daughter of Edward the Elder, King of Wessex. Aelfgifu was a popular name; she might be Aelfgifu an Anglo-Saxon saint, whose relics are in Exeter Cathedral of Normandy, or Emma of Normandy, wife of Ethelred the Unready and daughter in law of Aelfthryth. Bellestam in The Domesday Book is Belstone. The ‘Bronze Princess’ is named after the important recent archaeological find of a prehistoric cremation burial within a cist at Whitehorse Hill, on northern Dartmoor. Lange (Anglo-Saxon/Old English), ‘long’; on agnysse min,’ sorrow’/’anguish’; daege, dairy-maid. |
Anchoress
Closed within a breath
her sin a countryside hollow of moss her fingers close round
the Book of Hours held open on her lap
margins
full of flowers prayers and swirls
she plays its music in the keep of her mind
the leaves crisp her heart in this cell cold colder than the blackest medieval night
where owls and moon
and those who wander in grey outside in the sanctuary of garden
green arches holly oak beech take you with her to the centre
the heart that never stops to the garden that closes round around her heart and
yours and takes us to that beat at its very centre where the roses and the
sacred arts and the woman looking out at the winter that has gone with the
whitest snow turns to her new manuscript begins to script the notes
black upon its stave l’amour
l’amour de moi
L’Amour de Moi, usually translated as My Lady’s Garden, a C15 French Chanson.
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At JacobStowe I could take you with this poem and this photo back one hundred and more years to 1898, when Annie, just 16, maternal Grandmother, pupil-teacher in the village – the one second from back on the right – had to tell Will Stone the young delectable rector (who she thought hot) the bad news – Bessie her eldest suavest sister would not be at the altar after all, was jilting him, |
or, we might travel westwards on the road to others where once
holy sites the sacred well lies in hollows near damp grasses in the
hedge next the wildflower patch where children own hidden designs
whose colors hide the deep space of beyond.
But I won't.
instead, I'll gather these flimsy lines up with her other belongings -
collections of trochees, prosody & half rhymes,
her intricate imagery & end-stopped lines
and after locking the photo back in its darkness between the pages of
lost years in the family book
we'll remain here within the origamic folds of the church where
the crypt of the ancient found apse
limns its semi circular curve
and outside
keening lavender steals in with its rooted essence under the fence from
a nearby garden
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Julie Sampson’s |
poetry is widely published, most recently, or forthcoming, in Shearsman, Molly Bloom, Allegro, Dawntreader, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Journal, Noon, Poetry Space, Algebra of Owls, The Lake and Amethyst Review. Her work has been shortlisted or placed in several competitions, including erbacce, Wells Festival of Literature Poetry Competition and The Page is Printed. Her poetry collection Tessitura was published in 2014 (Shearsman Press) and a non-fiction manuscript was short-listed for The Impress Prize, in 2015.
Ceinwen E. Cariad Haydon lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and writes short stories and poetry. She has been published in web magazines and print anthologies. These include Fiction on the Web, Literally Stories, Alliterati, Stepaway, Poets Speak (whilst they still can), Three Drops from the Cauldron, Snakeskin, Obsessed with Pipework, The Linnet’s Wing, Blue Nib, Picaroon, Amaryllis, Algebra of Owls, Write to be Counted, The Lake, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Riggwelter, Poetry Shed, Southbank Poetry, Smeuse Bandit Fiction and Atrium and with work coming up in Marauder, Prole and The Curlew.
Chris Murray 