Poems

Written in collaboration with the paintings in A nest of trying:

We can never go back	2024
by Haddon Fennell Grimes 

Pink, gowned in scented glory 
    drips into the belly of winter’s last night. 
It falls like the push in a mother’s womb 
    as she births another body 
         gasping 
    for a soft, dewy breath 
    of morning light. 

You’ve been there, 
    to that place. 

The dark thicket 
    whose exhale sprouts roses 
    in the springtime. 
She likes when we leave the porch light on; 
    yellow glows warm on her 
         entanglements. 

This night is a quiet one, 
    between the traffic 
    and the insects 
    and in the silences between tears 
some new magic swarms us 
         like an eye 
    riveted by a waking horizon. 
    Shards of sunlight strewn 
    across the leaves 
and trees 
    sink deep into soil where 
    shrouded bodies lay buried 
    beneath rubble 
and glass debris. 

Yes, even the old kitchen window 
    knows that in its ruin 
    we might find ourselves as we are: 
    fragile,     fleeting 

and fiercely alive.
 
 

Written in response to paintings from Light and Space:

Night Drips, Night Breathes      2023
(Ekphrasis on Sarah Fordyce’s 2023 painting of the same name)
by Nichola Tatyana

reptilian nocturne, replete with chlorophyll
exhales her inkept darkness

her deep-sea scales bejewel the underworld night,
thickets intersnaking, encrusted mid-slither;
an un-gravitied Medusa, a Morphean seducer

her primaeval allure pulls
into communing blackness,
the interlacing heart of mycorrhizae and camphenes

inhaling, I drift forth, wide-eye-blind and bodiless


Green Gaze       2023
(Ekphrasis on Sarah Fordyce’s 2022 painting of the same name)
by Nichola Tatyana

a thousand upright eyes
brewing swampy elven light
veil the sun-flared glade

earth’s unflaming flows, melding
branch and memory, blood and birth

look well, look well, and long
and her eyes may ease
blink
and let us in

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