I gave up following little footprints in the dust long ago. I was bored with finding them on the table, wooden floor and stairs, invisible to everyone but me. I’d started to feel sick each time I felt her fingers flick and pinch my arms or stroke my cheek, and moved to the other side […]
Tag: Weekly Scribblings
After the Virus
Megan closed the Chat Window, replacing it with the World Window, and sighed. The daily chat with her mother was becoming a chore and she felt ashamed to feel that way. None of her Friends seemed to have a problem with their mothers, but then hers had been much older when she ‘gave birth’. There […]
Chalk Marks, Bears and What Lay Beneath
When I was a child the pavementwas a canvas, a joyful defacement:I made colourful chalk marks on the grey,a street artist, until the rain cameand washed them away.Hopscotch boxes led my feetacross the concreteand cracks warned of bearswaiting to eat meif I didn’t stay in the squares.I was curious about what laybeneath the heavy grey;grass […]
Unexpected
Immersed in a poem, I was a lovelorn mermaid enchanted by vampire squid in fluorescent coral glades. Raised from the deep by the ring of the telephone, I looked out at the garden, dappled green and overgrown. I spotted it suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, the unexpected flash of an electric blue […]
When all else fails…
there is the shade of the willow tree the stone gnome sleeping peacefully the deer that chew its healing leaves the green light shifting in a gentle breeze the piebald magpie with its chatter about things that do not really matter the cat that climbs its crooked branches the scraps of sun in rays and […]
Tingle
Ice-cold loneliness numbed her body and soul, shielded her heart, with starry snowflakes. With her eyes the colour of slush after snow, embrangled in winter’s undertow, her personal winter drifted into spring, hoar frost still sparkled on everything like a silver Midas touch, until she found a crow, ebony black, stiff on the ground. She […]
One Step at a Time
The first weeks of interior life were hard: only one real person with whom to share my troubling thoughts, my hope, my fear. I spent weekdays with me, myself and I, those dubious sisters of doom and gloom who haunted my pandemic room. The silence outside was as deafening as my twisted sisters’ chattering, and […]
Raven Rain
Ravens sweep the sky, wheeling and tumbling stringless black kites, until the sky weeps with impudent little tikes, whose sooty wings stir up a storm like dust, each curious eye a piercing stud of black diamante, until the clouds break. By afternoon, the earth is damp and green and lush, and somewhere a blackbird in […]
Rossetti’s Harp Player
The harp is made to play laments, and her fingers pluck its strings mournfully in mellifluous torment. Notes spill like dawn birdsong from the instrument she clings, as if it were the first song the harp had learnt to sing. Her velvet gown is black as night, the harp of ebony made, but light shimmers […]
Confession
Around the village green, May blossom turns hedges into rich swags of cream, cow parsley frothing at the edges. As I walk (or trudge) alone, birds and daisies cheer me on, panting through the second lap, by the village hall, past empty goalposts, along sidelines vanishing in rampant grass. When someone asks how I keep […]
writing in north norfolk 