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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.
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