Last evening
sharp-snipping scissors cut my hair
and white cream squeezed from a nozzled
...
Love’s loss is
endless.
There will be no recovery
of the thing that is lost –
...
On your far journey,
with the sun at your back,
may you be always meeting
Kindness, Gentleness and Pardon,
...
i
before it recedes
a tide brings you the present
...
Brick by brick
we are building a future
with our own hands -
...
Pens are lifted
and there’s the click;
the shuffling of sheaves as we out-breathe
and then’s the intersection of an insistent bird’s trill;
...
Rowen, my first child:
her first glimpse of me / her mum's
first hint of glory.
...
All week,
I’m waiting to go in
to that little, homely, stable-of-a-place
where nothing could be simpler than the grace of God.
...
Thank God for Gaia’s winter refusal,
that she turns her back on the sun
and the expense of growth;
inside the deeps and darkness occupied
...
A book of poems
isn’t worth the price of petrol
for someone’s gas-guzzling battle
into work one day by car.
...
One day
another giant will come –
almost certainly a woman
with hindsight and a strong
...
I stayed in Scotland as a girl, on the East coast:
a kind of salty smell and gritty sand.
When I was ten I learned about selchies;
those seals who are only sometime-seals; sometimes human
...
Acquiescence is
an opening into the world as you
have never known her;
quietude inside you
...
One day love
opens the door.
In comes freedom, with a light step:
you've heard it before,
...
Because I am used to this slow life
pondering the baby
growing week by week in her womb -
when the sudden wind blows
...
B.A.(hons.) Creative Writing graduate (Trinity College, Carmarthen, Wales) . All poems, in previous or present forms, are Copyright Jacqui Thewless. All rights reserved. The author, whose surname before marriage was Hardman, lives in Pembrokeshire, West Wales.)
Strange Thoughts, Tonight.
Last evening
sharp-snipping scissors cut my hair
and white cream squeezed from a nozzled
tube in a box turned
my locks
black
and tonight I have strange thoughts
about love
like ash
stirred in a bronze dish with
the stub of my pen
when I wore
a patterned silk kimono
smelling of
patchouli oil
and moved inside the slight
ghost of my long-haired youth
after the lover’s cigarette
I slept
on newly-warmed
white wedding-bed-sheets
then you were green too weighty in-
between my tender thighs
tonight
it must be the waxing
moon
the red lip-stick’s
smiling reflection and my
black cut glossy hair
I have strange thoughts that are
soft shadows flickering
behind the grey eyes
gazing from the nakedness I wear.
Jacqui, soul-stirring and powerful. Thanks for keeping his humanity alive.
TROY ANTHONY DAVIS - P.S.S.R.