A CHOCOLATE CAKE WITH SPRINKLES
Today rain and mist hold the scent of damp fallen leaves in the air.
Alt text says this week’s photo is a chocolate cake with sprinkles on the top. It is indeed. And to add to this description I would also say it is a birthday cake for my lovely wife. For this bake, I fine-tuned the recipe after making a cake for my debut poetry collection Magnifying Glass which had its fifth birthday last week. The book cake was delicious, but a little rustic looking after I piled on the buttercream and forked the number five on the top because I hadn’t really considered how I was going to finish it off! It was a good reason to enjoy cake, and it also gave me the perfect opportunity to enjoy the feelings of gratitude to have worked with Black Eyes Publishing UK to enable the book to have its place in the world.
I am also taking forward the lesson that it is useful to have an image of the end product in mind whether it’s cake or poetry so that the whole is not just delicious it is fully finished. When polishing poems I am pausing to remind myself the drafts are at the rustic stage until they do the whole job of saying what they want to say. For me sometimes the poem doesn’t know exactly what it is going to say until it has been written longer, other times it says it but it fizzles out instead of sparking. For a while I thought my trick was to look at the drafts as if they weren’t mine, but I found I was looking at them to assess whether they were a finished Sue Finch poem or still lingering in Sue Finch draft stage. I laughed at my feeling of indignation when I thought I was pretending they weren’t mine whilst I was editing. I definitely didn’t want them to not be mine; I wanted to be the author in a different stage of writing. I don’t think I have felt that switch quite so strongly before, so I am enjoying that and see it as a sign of having an extended patience and desire to craft my work.
The perfect poem almost happened in real time on one of my walks this week. Common features of this week’s walks have included the horse with the blue coat whinnying as I approach (but not when I talk to it or try to video it making the sound) acorns dropping from the oak trees, gusts of wind sending flurries of leaves from the branches. There was a moment on Saturday as I was pacing along when the horse whinnied just as the wind picked up and I watched a mini whirlpool of brown leaves drop through the air. If, at that exact moment, an acorn had detached and dropped onto my head I think that would have been a moment of pure poetry. I was slightly disappointed that it didn’t happen, but I will carry all of that as a wordless visual/sound poem in my head on my walks in the coming weeks.
Two years ago I featured my poem There’s a Doll Thumping in My Chest on this blog and I am going to include it here again now. I wasn’t sufficiently distanced from it when I first read it to open a set for a poetry reading, and I noticed feelings of nerves echo through my body when I put the words in the air. Now it stands for me as a poem framing something that I can gaze upon, and I like being able to view it like that. (I also like the fact that it came into being by chance because of my diction in a poetry workshop with Anna Saunders... I was reading out a line I had written about a minotaur and Matthew MC Smith misheard, ‘There’s a dull thumping in my chest’ and hence I was gifted a title for a new poem.)
THERE'S A DOLL THUMPING IN MY CHEST
I spend a long time soothing her to sleep.
And sometimes I feel I’m running out of options.
When she cries,
and trust me she cries easily,
her whole body heaves.
And even when I’m calming her
there’s that long hiccupping of recovery
still stealing my air.
I don’t know if it’s the thought of people
knowing she’s inside me
that scares me most,
or that she’s going to beat her fists so hard
she breaks right through my ribcage
while they’re watching.
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