Winter Feeding Station

Every day the goldfinch squabble around

the niger seed in the metal feeder. 

Flashes of red and gold tumbling through air; 

not so much a charm as a bickering..

Plainer sparrows, males sporting neat black caps, 

perch on bare branches before swooping in.

Their tastes being  much less specialised, 

sunflower and nuts will serve well enough.

Winter guests include bramblings and redpolls

but the robin is never far away,

while starlings dressed in snow spotted suits

gather on the boughs of the Elder tree.

The greater spotted woodpecker not yet seen,

still deterred by the pesky squirrels

Joan Bailey

Advent

 Twenty-four days to Christmas, twenty until the shortest day.  Time to light an internal flame, prepare for Christmas, burn a blend of orange, clove bud and cinnamon oils - and frankensence, unblended - and try to fight the urge to sleep forever due to diminished light and arthritis.

In November, I attended a local poetry event 'Write Out Loud'  where we were challenged to write a performance poem on a seasonal theme.  This is my effort. 

Advent Homily 

Mark the days of Advent now the year is drawing in.

Wrap a blanket round your shoulders as the shortening days grow dim.

Take a walk towards the farm house at half-past three

and watch the distant sun set through the branches of the trees.

Pour yourself a drink on reaching home and send a festive message on your mobile phone

to those in your address book now facing life alone.

Read a seasonal story or a verse.

You don't have to share a faith to appreciate

The Journey Of The Magi or Mole's happy carol singers,

or enjoy the old familiar rhymes of In The Bleak Mid-Winter.

Or to learn how loyal Gerda melts the Snow Queen's icy splinters.

Create a festive playlist with your favourite Christmas tunes.

Bake a batch of mince pies on a Saturday afternoon.

Burn a candle on the Solstice to mark the longest night

after which the Earth will journey back towards the light.

On Christmas eve, when Advent ends

be glad if you're at home with friends,

while others face uncertainty

on a scale hard to conceive

on which it's estimated there's 43.4 million refugees.

Resolve to make a sound donation or attend a demonstration or write to your MP.

And when on Christmas Day you toast

to peace with woman and with man,

know you have the power to make

a difference where you can.

Joan Bailey

Diming the light fantastic

 My parents are tiny now. 

They have shrivelled and lost their minds;

separated for more than half a century and by over two hundred miles.

They live in nursing homes cared for by people who have travelled several thousand miles for a better life

of cleaning bums and serving small portions of food to nonagenarians who think they are on cruise ships

or back at school

or dancing in the Tower Ballroom in smart suits and spangled dresses.

'I could have danced all night'.

Quick stepping to the light fantastic as the tide comes in.

It's depressing to see them like this

To see the look in their eyes.

The look of puzzled longing when I say goodbye,

wondering if it will be for the last time.

Joan Bailey 

Earworm

I listen as I sit beside my mother's bed,

which she thinks is a bus, though, unlike me, she is unaware of its final stop.

I sit by this static vehicle and listen 

as she dredges broken fragments 

from a seabed of confusion. 

Her index finger keeping time like a metronome. 

Tick tock. 

Tick tock. 

To and fro. 

To and fro.

Tick tock. 

She's been like this all afternoon

addressing the blank wall, 

ignoring visitors. Her rhythmical babble full of strange surprises:

'Under the Zion Methodist

Under the jelly belly

Milly Molly Mandy. 

As Mae West goes under her vest

Onion jelly 

Under the Zion Baptist 

Zane O' Mally

at the gay call centre

with the yellow rose of Texas. 

under a lilac sky. 

Oh Rachel! Oh Rachel!' she cries. 

Rachel, the grandmother she never met.

Rachel, who took her daughters to Australia 

from where they would return leaving her bones interred in the dry earth beneath the thirsty Queensland sky. 

I remember the lock of Rachel's hair, 

which I found in a little round tin inside a sewing box. 

A careless child: I would curl the auburn strand around my fingers, until it eventually disintegrated much like my mother's mind. 

'O'Mally,' she mutters, 'O' Mally.'

 No one in the family  knows this man  but whatever Mae West is doing under her vest is a mystery best left unresolved. 

I almost hold the yellow rose of Texas in my hand, knowing I will be  earwormed by the tune for the rest of the week. 

Joan Bailey 

Oasis

 We - well, you mostly - created an oasis in our back garden. I helped but in a random way, buying plants here and there but you did the digging, the planting, the tending.

I took advantage of the council's offer of a compost bin. Twenty years of good, rich fertiliser from vegetable peelings. Twenty years of decayed soggy lettuce, sprouting spuds, wet parsnips and wizened  carrots. It made me feel less guilty for over buying and not producing as many home cooked meals as intended. 

You made the little pond for frogs, filling it with tadpols and oxygenating plants with the help of interested friends. 

We left the self seeding Elder, which was little more than a bush when we moved in, to  grow tall. You hung seeds, peanuts and lard cakes for the birds on its boughs.

I saw some gold finches in the clough and a colleague told me how nyger seed would attract them to the garden. Flashes of red, and yellow jostling for places on the feeder. Their high pitched musical twittering a sweet addition and, in the evening, the blackbird's resonant song. 

We - you mostly - created this green space between the high laurels, planted by a former owner, a miserable bugger by all accounts, who wanted to screen out his  neighbours and, in doing so, gifted us this private space, this little oasis visited by hedgehogs and squirrels.

Somewhere to chill. Somewhere to forget the petty conflicts of family or work and the state of the nation with its never ending meaness, injustice and scandals 

Somewhere to screen out thoughts of people being bombarded by bombs thousands of miles away. People whose oases have been ripped up, ripped apart, ripped away. 

Destroyed. 

Thousands of people who have lost those they love. Injured, uncertain. afraid; who have to start over with nothing. 

Joan Bailey 

Herb Robert

Herb Robert has crept in and colonised some pots near the bin without my permission.

Yet I find him to be a welcome addition.

Trust this invader the experts say: he will bring bees and butterflies. Just cut him back if he gets in the way.

Rub his leaves on the skin to avoid midges but never cut his flowers and put them inside overnight or death will surely follow. 

Who would think such as this could herald such sorrow? 

Sources speculate about the origin of his name.

Views differ. 

Some believe he was named for a medieval monk, who used plants and flowers to relieve sickness and pain with their curative powers. 

Or is he named for the puck known as  Robin Goodfellow, the Shakespearian sprite, who circled the earth for King of the Fae on the titular midsummer night?

Whatever...

He can live anywhere: woods. commons, hedgerows, cracks in the pavement. 

He doesn't much care. 

All he needs is some soil, the rain and the God given air.

Joan Bailey 

Mudlark

Rooting through debris like a Victorian scavenger. Clearing a window on the foreshore of time. A glimpse of the past in a piece of old pottery: figures of rowers on broken blue Delft. 

And not  just the boatmen but some unknown person who ate bread and cheese from this long gone plate. Long gone, like the woman who once wore the glass beads displayed like bright sweets on a string long frayed. 

Treasures discarded and washed back up again, long hidden beneath the grey, muddy sand, suddenly illuminated in the light of the morning, as you offer them up in your wet, muddy hands.

Joan Bailey