Poetry Rocks?

Well, it’s been a rare old week. Why’s that? Comes the deafening chorus? I shall share all, dear readers…

It’s the Cheltenham Poetry Festival at the moment. I owe the Cheltenham Poetry Festival a huge debt of gratitude, particularly its splendid CEO, Anna Saunders. I found her early on in my online life as a poet. Thanks to her I got to hear lots of contemporary poets via their online presence, I had access to brilliant poetry workshops, made wonderful poetry friends and benefited from Anna’s mentoring. Over the last five years I’ve read at online events, done in-person open mics but nobody has ever asked me to be a featured poet at an in-person event. However, on Wednesday I was one of three headliners at the Cheltenham Playhouse. I loved it and though I will say it quietly in case it sounds a bit boastful, I got the distinct impression that they liked me.

So, there we are, my first taste of the rock and roll poetry lifestyle. Can’t wait to do it again.

Apart from that, I suddenly appear to have a lot of poetry admin to do: firming up another in-person gig for next year (yay!) and getting ready for a series of workshops I am running for a local school, and trying to write a nice testimonial for a lovely poetry podcast series who featured me last year.

As you can see - busy, but then that question that puts me into a spin every time, the “oh yes, you’re a poet who writes about…(insert topic here), aren’t you?” And I have to sit quietly and ponder.  I need to know how many poems about a particular subject have to be written before I should confess that yes, I am a poet who writes about…

Apparently I am a poet who writes about rocks, or geology or something. I have a collection called Chalk Stories so I guess I ought to be out and proud about the geology thing. Anyway, here’s a couple of geology poems from my Cheltenham gig. I hope the formatting doesn’t get mangled in the upload like in some of my post. The poems are about geology, perhaps. Perhaps not.

Chesil Beach

The moon is down

Land me here in the dark

when the sea lies     like

an invitation

I will know my way home

along the shingle bank    

rich with stones of quartz

and chalcedony    harder than

steel    and more enduring

I will heave my sea legs

up to the crest

of this shore     until

my hand closes   around

a pebble that fits

in the cupped hollow

of my hand

Tectonic Drift

We begin, like all beginnings, with an ending,

a heating of the air, a rising of water, a split,

a flood

Pangaea, the mother of continents, drifts

north, patiently succumbs to the ripping

of herself while

I board the boat, sail the Red Sea,

am swallowed by the Suez Canal, disgorged

into the Mediterranean

Pangaea opens herself, lets in the teeming

waves that we will call Atlantic;

under the water home takes shape

The Mesozoic is a holy trinity, creating

the world, not in a week but through millennia

of rising and retreating seas

sand dunes and salt flats, rivers braiding land,

a sinking mass of algae transformed by

the press of time  and ready for

my own drift north, Southampton Docks,

decades of growing, shifting until I settle

on the side of a Jurassic hill

There are stories to tell here, creatures

hidden in its layers, sharp-toothed

monsters that roar in dreams

Landscape histories are exposed by weather,

narratives like curled ammonites held

in the damp hands of children

who bring them home, finger trace the

spiralling ridges, try to imagine a

hundred million years ago

I walk the shingle beach, pick over

the stones exposed by storms, searching

for words gifted by a more ancient sea.