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Displaying 11 - 15 of 74 entries.

Basket of Memories

  • Posted on August 10, 2017 at 11:30 pm

There is a series of drawings I should have bookmarked, illustrating grief. One shows two people walking side by side, each holding a handle of a basket marked ‘memories’. The grief version of this image is one person, holding just one handle. Memories are something else when shared, repainted, renewed. Something is forever lost in memories unshared.

And then there is the business of separations, and memories that are denied, memories longed for, memories stirred, and not the same from both sides. This poem began in light of my lost family: chosen and deliberate breaking of memories. And I have seen shared belongings in an unshared space, and wondered about the ways in which I am forgotten.

This poem is a poignant and very real portrayal of losing my family to my personal changes with which they could not cope or embrace. But then I thought about it after writing, and realise that it also applies to my mother’s slow loss of memory (even that I am her daughter), whilst well-remembered things could be found in her house. Things shared, that no longer are; things that could be shared memories, but are not.

The basket of my memories

has a broken handle, many spilled—

I found them arranged on your shelves
hanging in order on your walls

where my eyes are pools
not wells, and dry in the sun
between showers.

There is a mother and there is a daughter
who don’t remember, deliberately—
one doesn’t deliberately remember
the other deliberately doesn’t.

I am a memory in a basket
with no handles
a pool without reflection.

There is a photo of a cat who died—
on your shelf, on your wall.

The recycling basket lies by the door.

 

2017 © Andie Davidson

Kiss my breath

  • Posted on June 29, 2017 at 10:08 pm

it has entered
left and some is still of me

a little can be you
or may dispelstay free

some is morning
is cloudsat night

stirring of wings
of leavesand flight

open as windows
like my heartand mouth

stirring in curtains
from eastthen south

some is yawning
or laughterand delight

a little lies in stillness
or a skylarkat its height

it has flown
touchedan ancient sea

kiss beginnings
kiss my breathkiss me

 

2017 © Andie Davidson

Stars

  • Posted on February 24, 2017 at 7:02 pm

Some go to the harbour
for the buoys
or gaze out to sea;
others fly to crested castles
for knights hoping
for a favour, to be won;
we go down to the undercliff
where the spray
catches us, reeling.

Landed, quiet and still
wrapped in you, I feel
your breath on my shoulder;
each exhalation full of
fragments of dreaming;
every inhalation drawing
inspiration for more.

Our limbs become branches
of a single tree,
acquiring leaves;
and stars.

 

2016 © Andie Davidson

Arms, length

  • Posted on October 17, 2015 at 5:45 pm

On our sides we are unarmed:
half the hold, so limbs won’t sleep
before we, wishing the whole
embrace, fall to peace.

Under your neck, beneath my arm,
tightly try to keep a flow
from heart to fingertips—until
our weight draws tingles

and admission, that much as we
are made to hug, we must turn
reluctantly, to curve ourselves
in long touch, nose to toes.

Skin then speaks, not in the press
fully armed, but in a million
minute nerves, ours, counting
what ten fingers can’t.

Skin to skin, folded more fine
than any paper crane is turned
we become one shape, a single
sense of all we need to say—

the extent of which we never know,
unfolded gently by our dreams
then close again in sleep, and wake,
to hold, half-hold, find our length.

 

2015 © Andie Davidson

White

  • Posted on August 9, 2015 at 9:56 am

that’s the colour it will be.
Or maybe not. I imagine
I imagine how and for want
of colour I choose white.
She is beautiful on her special day
I imagine, and remember mine

white

that was the colour of her dress
then – I remember grey. My grey
wanting colour; grey and white
and the green under an overcast sky.
She was beautiful on our special day
I remember and imagine mine

white

the colour of a clean sheet
for writing the best story of
your life, your future, your love
to read, to share, to tell, to live.
To be beautiful on your special day
an imagine-and-remember time

white

that’s the colour it might be. I
may never know. My name
unprinted on any page, unmade
in being unspoken, unable
to see you beautiful on this day
unrememberable, unimaginably

white

that’s the lie, I imagine
when you are asked about your
father who does not give you away
and you say estranged but not
especially on this beautiful day
and you’ll remember without imagination

white

your small lie, if not your dress and
a page in our lives and a wish
to give you a way—and imagine
how a wedding presence could
still be beautiful on your day
I can’t imagine I won’t remember.

 

2015 © Andie Davidson