A POCKETFUL OF TYRE VALVE COVER THINGS
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Alt Text says this week’s photo is a group of black plastic caps on a wood surface. I say it is a set of new thingummyjigs to cover the tyre pressure valves. I have decided to use these to replace the mismatched ones I have seen too many times in the last ten days. I was also short of a full set having forgotten they were in my pocket and scattered them in the dark at a service station whilst needing to check my tyre pressures for the 9th time in 10 days! I can recommend Corley services as having a pressure machine that works if you need one. I won’t bore you with a list of the places I have stopped with out of order machines!
This morning the birds are particularly tuneful in their dawn chorus and seem to have sung in the scent of the cow fields. I am reminded of a family holiday when I was very young where eating cereal with the freshest cow’s milk on was a brand new treat. I can picture the cockerel logo with its bright green and red revealed at the bottom of the bowl at the end of the eating, and the distinct yellow tinge to the thicker than usual milk. I remember too missing the birth of a calf because I was bored waiting for it to happen and went to lie on my bed. I saw it licked to standing and finding its first steadiness later on.
I am currently assisting with editing the next Sidhe Press anthology. The theme for this one is Grief and the submissions have come from a wide range of angles. All poems carry the poet’s unique view, but here there is something specifically tender about the words that are set down for us to read. Taking that first read of someone’s writing is a privilege and a joy, and editing always has me eager to see the poems that are sent in for consideration. Having said that there is a need to take things slowly and give each poem its own space in time.
There is a wonderful tingle when certain lines from a poem continue to echo in my head after reading, and I love that feeling of resonance. There are also always poems that are very good in their own right but don’t fit the arc of the anthology as it forms. These have to be let go, but I know they will find their actual home somewhere else. I had heard this from editors before and having experienced it myself I can see more clearly now what they were referring to. Parts have to fit the whole so that the poems weave themselves into the whole journey of the book and make that arc. Some poems talk to each other along the way.
Every time I have had a reading or editing role it helps me to look at my own writing in a slightly different way. This enables me to be more and more willing to cut and rearrange. It also helps me to be able to view a poem as if it is not mine and read it afresh in a different way from when it is forming on the page. That said I will be editing some poems that have flown back to me this week including the ones that tried their luck at the National Poetry Competition, and I look forward to sending them out again to see if they find their homes after a new viewing and the subsequent trim and tidy. This will be a nice distraction from checking my tyre pressures and willing the light not to keep displaying itself on motorway journeys that would feel much nicer without that strange orange symbol.
Here's a poem I wrote after watching a cow on the way to work one morning:
A COW’S BOAST
Look how my breath adds sway to these leaves,
watch it plume in puffs in early morning air.
See how I lick things,
curl this thick muscle.
I can tame the drip that hangs from my nose;
the ‘o’s of my nostrils soft and warm
before the rasp of tongue on fence splinters.
Crows settle on my back. I let them ride
a gentle swayed rhythm above the mud.
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