Liz's Poems |
Poems without images? That’s a mistake. I reckon all my poems have images, verbal images: that’s what makes an effective poem. See my blog called Images and explanations.
The following poem is the first in a sequence of poems in the voice of the clothes of famous and not-so-famous women. It won first prize in the Enfield Writers Competition 2015-6 judged by Anne-Marie Fyfe. Agnes Richter’s Jacket When she’s calm, she takes me on her lap, smooths out my creases. She has pieced together strips of asylum uniforms, made them her own. They give her needle and thread and the work begins. Often indecipherable. I hear nurses trying to work out her meanings but I understand her arabesques. I know how she has stitched herself into my fabric. She sings, croons in a low voice while she works. “Ich bin, Ichhabe,” she writes with her needle. In places she embroiders “Kinder, Bruder, Schwester.” Everywhere, inside and out, 583, her laundry number. She has made me herself, her comforter. |
Here’s another recent poem with plenty of verbal images:
Ways of Seeing Mum called them her binnies, Christmas present from Dad: they changed our lives. Every Sunday out on the hills she’d watch a kestrel lift and rise or bent low she’d focus on the shelves of fungi protruding from a fallen trunk. And when we stopped at Arbor Low she’d let the binnies turn the strutting geese into pteradactyls while she cowered in the shadow of the stones as if they still stood upright in their giant circle. She didn’t seem to care that Sal and I had become infant dwarfs, or that Dad had dwindled to nothing in her naked eyes. |