Strontium Stories
I thought this post would be the one where I share me actually reading a poem. I notice that when I include more than one poem in my posts the formatting tends to go a little awry and I don’t seem to be able to correct that. So, I thought, maybe a video/audio and one posted piece would be an option today.
Why Strontium Stories as the title? Well, I am a creation made from all the places I have ever lived, all the landscapes I have ever walked, have ever been immersed in. I am all the stories those places have ever told me. I volunteer at my local (and excellent) county museum. Because it’s Dorset, we are full of Roman things, full of remnants of the Stone Age, the Bronze and Iron Ages, as well as all that amazing stuff from before there were even people. Dorset is a landscape made through the Jurassic and the Cretaceous and we celebrate that in our museum. I am grounded by the landscape, by history and by the natural world. Strontium isotope rations are often used in archaeology to identify local and non-local human bones. My bones will tell the future that I came here from far away. My bones will invite a telling.
So, I will try and post me reading a poem called Strontium Story. It’s from my collection, Chalk Stories, published by Hobnob Press. I think it’s going to have to be posted separately. The other poem is The Ridgeway Road. When the Weymouth relief road was being constructed, ready for the 2012 Olympics, an execution site was discovered. Analysis indicates these were Vikings, all young men. Their deaths were violent.
The Ridgeway Road
I
Before they finished
the new road
some wag put up a sign
saying
Welcome to the North,
which made me laugh;
there are pockets of north
in everything,
regardless of the compass.
II
When they cut the chalk
they found
a pit of burials,
heads on one side
separate from the rest
of them.
Fifty Viking men dug up,
Norsemen, Northmen,
men with north embedded
in their bones.
III
They called it a relief road;
incongruous, given
the numbers it funnelled into town.
Imagine a road as the cavalry,
driving over the ridge
to rescue us from the tyranny
of broad horizons.
IV
They made surgical cuts
in the chalk,
scars reminding everyone
that change happens,
even in geology.
The cuts healed, the banks
on either side began to show
the shift in seasons,
cowslip and kidney vetch -
unanticipated gifts;
the sun rose in the east
cast shadows
on the road.
V
In the spring and summer of
plague we stood on the ridge
to watch the cruise ships
anchored in the bay -
whales on the brink of beaching,
panic-stricken,
held between a shrinking
sea and sky, their north and
south always just out of reach,
compass needle spinning.