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Elizabeth is interested in the problems of identity, the relationship between the human and the environment, the individual and the community, the present and the past. She tends to write poetry about nature, language, tradition and nationality.

I Said

Round and glowing,
curved, I said, and glowing,
sharp and sweet and bitter and hot,
and gold as guineas and sunlight,
and burning, I said, globed and burning
and piercing, pungent, all those words,
and sweet, and fresh, and dripping,
look, and taste, and smell.
All the words I said.
I meant oranges.

This poem was published in NorthwordsNow in 2007.

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Walking on Water

The trick is to keep moving,
face forward, never look down.
The jelly swell beneath your feet
melts under your gaze, and small fish
silver against the glittering sand
flit from your sudden gravity.

The trick is not to look inwards;
Don’t watch yourself doing it.
It’s important to look away
to where stone houses on the cliff
draw closer, and the white waves
play chap and run on the sand’s door.

The trick is to put your faith
in willing hands stretched out to you,
in those others who take for granted
the paradox and adventure
of walking unsupported
solid on the crest of the sea.

This poem has appeared several times, most recently in One Leaf, One Link (2008), the anthology of the One leaf, One Link project organised by the Perth and Kinross branch of Plusperth, a Scotland-based group led by people who have used mental health services.

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Orpheus Married

Sunlit Orpheus in the honeyed orchard
tuning the harp, trying out new lyrics,
watches her reading under the ympe tree.
She is his inspiration. She takes him
out beyond the utmost reach of humdrum
to nightmare palaces, cliffs of light.
He loves the bones of her, the angles where
another woman might have curves and softness,
bruise-dark eyes, blue veins under thin skin.
Her voice has rough edges. It shows the grain
where life has marked her. She is the key
to vision. What he has been looking for.

He domesticates her. Now she smiles sometimes,
puts on flesh. Her clothes are sometimes pretty.
He is devastated. Vigour from the root
has overwhelmed the grafted magic.
His Eurydice has become a stranger.
This housewife in his bed is not his wife.

This is the first in a sequence of poems called Eurydice Rising which deals with the Orpheus myth as it appears in the western traditions in England Brittany and Shetland as well as the more familiar Classical versions.


Website and content © Elizabeth M Rimmer 2008
No work to be replicated without prior permission