Pests
Bill has been killing moles,
their fine-sieved hillocks
have spoiled the smooth of his field.
Two corpses embellish a gate.
Molecatchers hung them on strings, a queen
once made fur wraps of them.
Their hands are marvellous, the manicured nails
the soft pink palms.
This pair have been skewered on posts
which once were purposefully alive.
They should be lying unblemished and quiet
in the soft earth of their making.
Ann Pilling 2024
This poem appears in "In Flight" published by Mudfog Press. For details click here.
Nights
How was your night?
Not bad, but I woke up twice
with a pain in my leg
and I had to walk round.
Did you dream?
Vaguely, I can’t remember now.
Do you dream in colour
or in black and white?
In sepia. Anything coloured
is muted, so are the noises.
People open their mouths
but no sound comes out.
Like The Scream?
Exactly like The Scream.
Do you dream a lot?
Most nights.
But I know I’m dreaming.
What makes you so sure?
Because I rarely dream of happiness
there is always confusion.
What I see seems real enough
I can recognise Oxford and London,
but things are in the wrong place,
half the colleges missing.
The Thames is flowing through Trafalgar Square
and I can’t find our house and they are waiting
for me to come and feed my baby
but I am too old, I have no milk.
Beyond the conscious mind
there must be a sense
that all should be well, that all manner of thing should be well.
Why else, when we dream, do we suffer?
Ann Pilling 2024
This poem appears in "In Flight" published by Mudfog Press. For details click here.
The rose I planted
The rose I planted has become pink stars
pricked out on a green sky
of leaves whose tree I cannot identify.
Pigeons mound the roof
like melting snow,
watchful of feeders and the birds below.
Pests all of them, but one I loved
milk white, its wing
barred like piano keys, miraculous mating.
Now, in the gale, petals fall like pink snow
and my piano dove lies on the grass
cat-killed, no head, wings spread. It is endless
the rose and the dove
with its piano wings,
this passing of beautiful things.
Ann Pilling 2024
This poem appears in "In Flight" published by Mudfog Press. For details click here.
Exit
At funerals the weather can be heartless
like today, when the royal man
was rolled slowly out on his green truck,
big sun, sky immaculate as the gravel.
Primary colours , everything polished,
the boots and the bugles, the mourners
crisp as black paper cut-outs and the Queen
tiny under a wide hat.
Tight-tailored to reveal nothing
she sits apart, not wearing
her automatic smile
when the cameras point at her face.
‘Was the Queen crying’? I remember that
from childhood, how the newspapers
would peck at her, and peck,
like birds grubbing for worms.
Someone has died. Another clod of earth
has been washed away by the sea
making the island smaller. Switch off now,
let the bell toll.
Ann Pilling 2020
This poem appears in "Ways of Speech" published by Shoestring Press. For details click here.
The Gather
( Slow TV )
July in Cumbria and they are bringing
five hundred Herdwicks off the fells
to the home farm, for shearing.
It’s a wide valley. The lower slopes,
a bright, almost chemical green,
slant down in symmetrical pleats towards the Esk.
This same bright green drapes a white boulder
which suddenly starts to move. ‘Star, Fetch on!’
Andrew stabs with his horned stick as the sheep climbs higher.
Five men, one girl, and twenty dogs
fan out over a waste of stony acres
Scafell and Scafell Pike, Esk Pike, Broad End.
As the mist burns off they look up,
the fell heaps over them, like a granite wave
rearing skywards before crashing down.
The camera glides silently. On ancient trods
everything narrows to a single line, the dogs
sleek after stragglers like rats.
In these plague times we need places to go in our minds.
Kate sits in a bluebell graveyard, Val
breathes in the sea, at Harwich and Hythe.
I go walking in Eskdale with Andrew
in the big silence, which feels
like one long, sweet note of music.
Ann Pilling 2020
This poem appears "Ways of Speech" published by Shoestring Press. For details click here.
Non Microwaveable
Where did I leave my tea? This house is too big,
I know that, now I am having to clean it.
In these plague times Helen can’t come
so it’s me for the bucket and mop.
What do people miss most?
Being hugged? Bagging their last Munro?
I most miss Helen. Singing that hymn
has not, so far, made drudgery divine.
Three rooms done and still no tea.
People think more about death these days
and about the hereafter.
Might heaven be the place
where all my missing mugs of tea are?
Acres of time and we’re wasting it
Though some practise ‘thisness’,
focus for hours on the unique properties
of a kitchen chair. Others sniff flowers.
I am making a list of curious facts.
1 ‘The duration of this lockdown
is non-microwaveable. Like the mourning process
it cannot be hurried along.’
2 ‘Welsh-speak for microwave is ‘popty-ping’.
Ann Pilling 2020
This poem appears in "Ways of Speech" published by Shoestring Press. For details click here.
To a Tortoiseshell Cat
In these plague times I’d rather be you.
You too have your routine
but if something skews it
you simply move on to the next thing.
You chirrup when I raise the kitchen blinds,
pick delicately at your bowl
then from a window sill
observe the birdlife and inspect the weather.
If fine you might slip out and roll on the grass
all orange-gold and snowy leggings,
if cold you might watch TV
your green eyes fixed on the flashing mortality graphs.
I envy you not being enslaved by oughts,
that you don’t know about death,
apart from the puzzle of a mouse you are batting about
which freezes suddenly and won’t play ball any more.
Ann Pilling 2020
This poem appears in "Ways of Speech" published by Shoestring Press. For details click here.
I write in March 2020. Being over 70 and with a health problem relating to my immune system, I am in ‘lockdown’ like millions of others, all over the world. The weekend papers are full of reading lists, books suggested to pass the time. I am interested that so many of them are about survival in a time of pestilence ( for example, La Peste by Albert Camus). My inclination is to carry on celebrating life. Here is a very recent poem about the loss of a much loved tree, which celebrates its life ( and death).
Weeping Ash
It died quietly in the night. If there were death throes
the gale swallowed them; and it fell with care
sideways on to a holly tree which soon bounced back,
we can see the hills now and we have more light.
I will miss all of it, its witchy branches, its long hair,
its stubborn refusal to leaf until spring
had all but passed into summer. Only then
did its long black fingernails unfurl to green.
The logs, stacked up in chequered rows against a wall,
will last several winters. Ash burns well.
In the dark months we can pull up close,
warm our hands at its flame
as those we have loved warm
us when we remember them.
Ann Pilling 2020
This poem appears in "Ways of Speech" published by Shoestring Press. For details click here.
It is May, the most beautiful of all months. Up here in the Yorkshire Dales it comes late, nevertheless
'Nothing is so beautiful as Spring
When weeds in wheels shoot long and lovely and lush' ( G M Hopkins)
The woods are full of wild garlic. Here is a poem about my seeing it spill out on to a forgotten road:
Spillage
Wild garlic once
poured down a cart track and under a gate
and on to a lane till wheels stopped it.
A slew of white flowers. From high up
like sheep being herded through a gap
lower down like fields of coral.
When the old bridge broke
traffic was siphoned on to the highway
no one came here again.
Grass grew in the middle
seeds swelled, became bulbs, over years
the spread went mad.
It only needed time. This May
bees blunder roly-poly through the blossoms, woods
are sheeted blue. An entire lane
lies deep in the fallen snow of the garlic.
Ann Pilling, 2018
On Sunday this last week, 11th November 2018, acts of remembrance marking the centenary of the ending of World War 1, in which millions of soldiers and civilians died, or were wounded, took place all over the world. In my remote market town in Upper Wensleydale we too remembered the dead.
Remembrance
The silence is too short
it cracks before setting
while the church tower reels from its punch of eleven strokes
and birds fly out of crevices, arrowing
over the fields then drift about like burning scrap.
A band plays ‘Valiant Hearts’, six black-robed clergy form
a line of hunched-up crows
and a child steps forward cumbered with poppies
for her boy father ; the mother holds back
like Niobe, all tears. In the crowd a face cracks
then another, and another, and another.
Spaniel
She can run here, there are no sheep
and the enclosure walls are sound
only the dead lie round
Iveson, Metcalfe, Iveson again.
She circles graves and barks
town dogs bark back, her magpie coat is brash
against the tawny grass
the duns of lichened slab and urn.
Under one stone, farmer and soldier son
face east to boned-out hills
where only silence fills
the shape of words not spoken by the dead.
The son tipped bodies into pits who’d once
heaped bales, the father offered comfort but could not
be heard; they both forgot
the ways of speech, died old here and were loved.
Downwind a shot breaks birds from cover
she hares off, yelps for joy
and comes back panting, then
lies down beside the farmer and his boy,
Iveson, Metcalfe, Iveson again.
Ann Pilling, 2018
Today’s Paper
(June 17 th 2017)
Inside, two pages mirror one another.
Was this clever
or was it pasted up without thinking?
On the left a charred facade, a fretwork
of long black oblongs, on the right
a lattice of photos, some blanks.
It is too soon, too cashing-in,
to write about the fire so here I sit
in a London park with pigeons round my feet.
Someone said once, avoid big themes
don’t do the Holocaust, but if you must
pluck from the Alps of hair
a single ribbon on a child’s pigtail.
Money keeps pouring in, nappies and blankets,
No more donations please, we have no storage,
it will all rot when it rains, but everyone prays
in their own way. I sit here on scorched grass
with pigeons round my feet, not writing about the fire.
Ann Pilling, June 2017
That dent in your pillow is the book
that slipped from my fingers when I fell asleep;
you were in the next room, coughing your way through the small hours.
I am tidier on my own with my clock and my radio
my nightly pills, and I have all the bed;
if the cat comes I can sleep at a diagonal
feel it curl up behind my knees, picture its perfect oval.
I’d like a tail of my own to wrap round me,
thread under my forepaws, end at an ear.
Those in utero scans of babies show perfect enclosures
of frog-like shadows slowly firming up
to exit as homo sapiens. I’m practising going inwards.
But you can’t practise for someone you love dying.
I’m glad I’m awake, my dreams last night
were too filled with people crying
and it’s good that today is not bright,
that the house shakes under the wind.
I can practise curling up while rain bashes the glass
and the sea rules off the horizon with a steel blade.
Ann Pilling, May 2015, Spittal. Commended in the Bridport Poetry Competition 2016.
The grave clothes
flow over him like water , after nine years
his colours drained away,
he is a fine-boned boat
alone on a shore.
His tomb
lies uneasily with the rest , its high gloss
jars with the flaking Tudor faces.
His mother smoothed the folds so sheer
his body shows through.
First a death mask,
face oiled, nostrils strawed, then plaster
smoothed on the Botticelli lips;
when peeled away, she started shaping
her parfait, gentil knight.
I run my fingers
down the flowings of his shroud
trace the lines of his feet, crossed like a crusader’s,
and I kiss his face.
It is no colder
than others I have kissed, less shocking;
and the body is perfect, no one has carved their name.
In the glow of evening it is flesh coloured,
making death easier.
Ann Pilling, October 2015. Commended in the Teignmouth Poetry Competition 2017.
(at a time of the breaking of nations)
Surfers in black skins
wait in the waves like dolmens
a soft tide creams the sand.
These pure white pebbles could,
in a full moon, light a path for babes
out of the murderous wood.
Here is the sea,
somewhere is land. Our journeys
are many, and various.
A child sends paper boats
across a pool. My car
gets ferried home on a flat belt of water.
At Calais a boy
black-skinned like the surfers
stands by his tent, its blazon
‘London, my dream’.
Ann Pilling, June 2016. Prizewinner in Torbay Poetry Competition 2016.
The new birds glitter
crusted with gold and silver beads
sprayed over wings and breast
and fight for fat-filled shells and wrest
pickings from thrush and finch
and claim the battleground
inch by cantankerous inch.
The first years strut in rosy leggings,
bead patterns soften as they grow
to a full starling finish, sheeny purple
and green like oil on water; unimaginable
that these will ever get tired or old,
take on the full, dull black
of priestliness, or widowhood.
Ann Pilling, May 2013. Prizewinner in Torbay Poetry Competition 2015.
They have done the state some service
and they know it suckled my boys, pleasured my man,
now they have to go under the knife.
I’m being good to them I’ve bought
fine cottons pricked with little flowers
I bathe them in sweet oils and I no longer
sit like a hunchback cramming them from sight.
Why in my fat-girl days did I wear bags
to hide their succulent roundness? Why did I
mound them with cushions on our old settee?
In water they float out like lily pads
nippled with dark pink buds as this old river
creeps silently to its weir. Sad I’ve denied them, sad
how love, released, runs wild when it is too late.
Ann Pilling. Yorkshire Prize, Smith/Doorstep 2016.