Just a big thank you to everyone who stopped in to have a read of my work this year. After having a little break from creative writing, and definitely from the weekly criticism sessions at university, it means so much that you had a look, liked, shared….
Hope you have a lovely break and maybe get some time to do some writing. I am of course still copywriting (see beckydeans.co.uk for more on that one).
Best wishes
Becky
It was an icy morning. Cold hung on everything
You gave me tea and toast, but that was all
When I stepped into the cold, you asked if I had a scraper
Then hid round the back of the double-glazed door as I worked to clear the car
Were you watching me leave or checking I’d gone?
(c) Becky Deans 2014
The Taking
We knew the soldiers were coming
Hid in our beds, no one to protect us
Goods on the shelf waiting to be stolen
Before, that day, we had lessons
Cursed algebra, embraced Shakespeare
Explored China, played tag outside
Fell out, made up, ate lunch together
Made apple pie, but not custard
Remembered the gender of French nouns
Now we are herded, our worth in flesh
We learn knots we can’t untie
How to stay still and hope they do not come
We wait to be rescued, damsels
In distress, hair out for climbers
Life asleep in the stomach of a wolf
Here’s a poem that I wrote between my BA and my MA, but with a new edit. I had taken the references to the miner’s strike out. I bought the print from an antiques shop on Derby Road, Heanor, when I was a teenager.
You Crazy Cats
For Louis Wain.
The cats, in uniform shades of black
march to work in single file
carrying ink black news for daily views
and a bowler hat.
Cast in similar size and shape
they zigzag their way through similar streets
that span the circumference of the earth.
It is a procession of sorts, they mourn
the passing of our lives. Some smile, some frown
look up, look down, but none will wear a crown.
No underground hells shelter them.
Each cat has lost its voice: their last fight
lost eight lives and all mines.
So the cats file past in sombre black
waiting to be turned back.
Twelve weeks to stop the diggers
We are but Common people.
You can see the furrows in our brows.
We only want to protect what is ours
And has been ours for centuries.
We only want to revel in what we love.
We hate change, of course we hate change
Oh how we hate the passing of the seasons.
It makes us cold.
They try to silence us
But they haven’t cut our tongues.
We threaten revolution
With every breath. We
bang drums. We
can even change our diction.
And when they threaten, we roar.
Poem (c) Rebecca Deans. Top picture (c) Rebecca Deans. Picture below (c) Friends of Codnor Common. www.codnorcommon.co.ukwww.twitter.com/codnorcommon
OK. So I just looked for my poem about my grandma and I have found loads of poetry that no one has ever read. Lots. And I’m not sure any of it is going to see the light of day either, though I will be stealing the ideas. But here it is. I remember this being corrected by a ‘writer’. That confused me. I think it’s just about right as it is now.
Slip Stitch
The wrong generation knits furiously
not thinking with the click, click, click
of the knitting needle, the T.V. to talk to.
Knit one purl one was her future.
She learnt it by rote in rows of disciplined
Latin lessons, poem drills.
She still remembers the ‘Tyger’ and the ‘Daffodils’
burning brighter than last week. She likes
the noise of someone else’s voice
to drown out the sparrows and the car-pass-chants
the perpetual rustle of the seasons, whirling round
her still saved pool. These walls burst easily.
She knows this house by heart, carrying each brick
to the table to be layed, mixing the porridge
cement to sustain this patina of smoke stained age.
She sweeps the dust of a loved one from a sepia print
taken two thousand miles fifty years two shifts away.
Now everything takes a yellow hue in her hands
Paler than paper, clicking by rote, following
the pattern she found in a second hand magazine
with baby blue tears. A jumper to keep her in heat
with bobbles and cables. A veritable city
of slipped stitches and fiddly finger work.
She knits, looks at her programme,
shouts right answers to the finger clicking crowd,
Ribs and sits, sews and wins Countdown.
She’s good at working in time.
So here we have a picture of Dora, with the two girls she had before the war. Her husband, Joseph, died at the age of 42 of lung cancer and rheumatoid arthritis leaving his wife and eight children in Clay Cross. There was no social security then. You survived or died.
Through the generosity of teachers, the eldest daughter was able to train to be a nurse. My grandma ended up working in a mill in Belper, a long commute she told me about often, and then was one of the first to be made redundant, even though they rated her cutting out skills. First in, first out. We don’t think that mill is still there in Belper. She then went into service, which again she survived, though it was touch and go with some of the men. I like to think she was mean with a hot poker.
But seriously, being a servant was a hard life. Up so early to light those fires, and she was still a child.
This is the bit where I go onto my computer to find my poem about her and get distracted. This is the bit where I lapse into prose. And maybe not now. I have realised I don’t even know when Dora was born, somehow, all the family history records I have scavenged don’t include Dora and Joseph. I have so much more to do.
I’m trying to forget the fear, the mud, the stench of bodies
Blown away from themselves. The barbed wire scratching at my soul.
Shuffling towards death, one by one in dirty uniforms
Those hollowed out eyes reflecting back from my boots aren’t mine.
Others may drop plastic poppies on stone crosses and listen to the bugler
Strain at the high notes, and do nothing.
I want new explosions, new hungers, new challenges.
The dream in my head: not being dead.
This was written in a workshop with Emma Pass at Clay Cross – our last session. It had been brewing for a while, though I’m not sure I yet have all my facts. ‘Remember’ was our warm-up word and we came up with some excellent pieces. You could take the word out, but I’m not sure I’m going to! It’s a creative response to my earlier post on her sayings, which may come from the trenches. ‘You never know your luck until you’re shot at’ is my favourite.
Remember the time when your husband died of cancer
And you weren’t a war widow? Remember
When you fed your eight children and you
Lived on tea and air. Remember the day
Your husband’s family turned you away, and your
Family turned you away, and even the Salvation Army
Turned you away? Remember the tap, tap, tapping
Of mending other people’s shoes, when yours were paper thin,
Almost tripping you up; putting up their paper
While yours was falling off the walls.
Remember instead the song lifting your spirit
In the chapel in a new place in a new time.
In your sixties – now that was when you were in your prime.
(c) Becky Deans 2014
Having being involved in many battles to save out green lungs, I totally embrace what is said at the end of this speech. Well said that man. And I do feel you have done marvels with NT properties. My son and I have had real fun in the last five years.
beckydeans 