Here are the words... as time flows more may come along. Some poems, some stories, some essays.
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These first ones below are the ones we found shortly after beginning.
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Below them we will add more as they arrive or are told to us.
We watched them come for our grandmothers
And then they came for our mothers
We watched them come for our mothers
And then they came for us
We watched them come for us
And then they came for our daughters
We watched them come for our daughters
And then they came for our granddaughters
And so it always
Endlessly seems to go
But it is not how it started
Nor how we will let it finish
For a long time the cunning has run through the people of this place
It takes no note of age or looks or gender
It runs like a river through its chosen channels
But for a long old time the cunning women fell by the wayside
They never got spoken about
They got written out
Instead of being raised up on the pulpit for their
Inimitable conversations in the language of all things
They were dragged to assizes and necks snapped
Drying out in the wind like birds strung up
Hanging in preparation for roasting in a pie
Their colours fading with each passing moment after the vital spark had gone on
But it is not how it started
Nor how we will let it finish
They still talk of Cunning Murrel around these parts
But what of his mother
What of his grandmother
All the daughters of the line leading up to him
There is a place that they could all see
Just out of the corner of their eye
A place with a long lost name
That they could only tell with the curl at the very edge of a smile
And a tongue that slips between the gaps in the other words and letters…
Sometimes the path to get there got trapped in the corners of peoples houses and they had to take them off, else there would be no getting back to normal. Or put bottles under the thatch to trick the things that wended in through the tiny spaces between the reeds…
It seems to me a good place to hide away
This Otherland
Time works different there
All at once and not at all
You have to be careful
We watched them come for our grandmothers
And then they came for our mothers
We watched them come for our mothers
And then they came for us
We watched them come for us
And then they came for our daughters
We watched them come for our daughters
And then they came for our granddaughters
And so it always
Endlessly seems to go
But it is not how it started
Nor how we will let it finish
I remember my grandmother folding in half to tease the weeds
Up and out from the soil in their garden
Her ears so close to the ground
I wonder if she could hear the vegetables growing
She had been a mother to more than just her own children
Three generations nurtured under her wings
Needing to care for her siblings too
Even as she was only a child she was still the eldest
And then the gaggle of giggling grandchildren
There were always a few of us in her home
Running up and down the neat rows of strawberries and along
The cloisters of runner beans reaching happily up to the big sky
I remember the smell of nivea and a day spent in the garden
Mint bubbling its sweet green scent all round the house
As it dances in a pan with the potatoes
And all sitting round shelling broad beans or stringing those runners
I remember the glint in her eye and the soft kind rose of her cheeks
As she taught me the names of all of the flowers
And the birds we watched feeding from the window
Or smiled at me planting biscuit wrappers
In the flowerbeds
Hoping they would grow into a tree.
The willow cracks
The earth crumbles
The willow cracks and
The earth crumbles
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In the warp and weft
What gets trapped in between?
Whispers and sighs
The breath of a laugh
The last note of a song
The pregnant silence in a disagreement or the pause in the telling of a story
The aching sobs of grief that bubble up from the breaking or ending of things
The dust of everyone who has ever stayed here
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In the wattle and daub
All of that woven material married with the landscape to build this house
It erodes just as we do
But much slower
In the space between the fleeting life of humans
And the patient shrinking of the coastline as it is dissolved by the water
The deepening carving and insistent flow where the river runs through
The estuary mud
Smooth and rich and heavy
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Clay skin of Essex
Here with the bone knit of its skull exposed to the wading
Birds and nodding reeds
In the delicate scribbled trickles of the smallest channels
That run like tiny lost wild things
They got distracted for a moment and are now
Desperately trying to find their mother
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And where the river runs to meet her own mother
The ocean
Waits to meet the sky
Sometimes patiently and sometimes churning frothing and
Throwing up its heavy arms
In great curling waves of anger frustration excitement
Sending up sparkling droplets
Or conjuring salted mists to prove that
One day she will know how to float again up there with the sun on her back
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She remembers that once she knew how to fly
Covering ground in the space between air and the stars
Until she sees a place so beautiful
She rains down in tears
Hurrying to meet it
The willow cracks
The earth crumbles
The willow cracks and
The earth crumbles
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For now she softly holds the breeze on her skin
And it gets under the feathers of a turnstone
Who moments ago was lifting and folding the pebbles
That she had arranged with her tidal reach
Pieces of the planet worn smooth and round
Whispering secrets of what lies beneath
And the bird turns for home
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Passing on the way a crow
Who has skimmed over field and town
Rumbling train tracks and droning traffic thundering over the rough
Patchwork tarmac of the A12
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He carries balanced in his beak a reed from the top course
Of a thatch in the process of being replaced
Wrestled from the spar with stubborn intent under the noon day sun
While the thatcher descended the ladder
To hunt out the days sandwiches from the passenger seat
Of a mud splattered truck
The reed is woven into the nest of the crow and his broody mate
He is not the only helper and the remnant of roof
Keeps company with sticks of willow and long blades of grass
Later they will line the inside with soft things and cake the outside in earth
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But for now they work
Chattering loudly as they pass the materials in and out
Building a small home in a tree huddled on the edge of an old place
Grown Feral
The sound of their corvid excitements and negotiations
Bouncing of off the lichen crusted grain of an ancient standing stone
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Here at the edges of everything
We feel our own borders
And check to see where they meet
Where our bones might knit together
How our bodies might weave
Structures that hold some of the landscape
Leaving small pockets of space to keep hold of the immutable things
Catch our breath for a moment
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The willow cracks
The earth crumbles
The willow cracks and
The earth crumbles
