Month: December 2024

NIGHT WORK

It’s a very cold night and the wind is picking up strength, sweeping over the fields with
teeth of ice. So this is the time to wish everyone HAPPY NEW YEAR and may the coming
months bring peace and hope for all.

NIGHT WORK

A bitter night of frost,
Of frozen snow and ice so thin
It came in on the wind.
Sharp as knives, cutting uncovered faces,
Splitting flesh on poor cold fingers,
Promising a day of misery
With beauty in its pocket.

Down the long perishing road,
Houses huddled tight together,
Looking for warmth.
Brick walls cold as stone.
Frost rimed windows and doors tight closed.
Tall chimneys carrying the tiny warmth
Of dying fires into the freezing dark.

Into this cold silence,
Whispered words, poems and half-remembered prayers
Drift like wisps of smoke.
Dreams and reality
Bringing another world to this world.

Bringing hope
For as long as those
Who do the night work,
Work on.

©2021 Gwen Grant

HOPE IN TRAINING

I was cheered by the sight of rhododendrons full of tight buds, reminding me that, although
it’s still a long way away, Spring will come, the buds will open and their glorious flowers
shine out. Warmth and colour be in the world again.

HOPE IN TRAINING

Those tight little buds are waiting
For next Spring.

There’s no sign of hurry,
No hint of impatience.

In fact, just looking at them
Reveals an alternative world

To the one we live in.

©2021 Gwen Grant

LOVELY WINTER

This poem accompanied one of the paintings that went on exhibition at Southwell Minster, where  I wrote a poem for each painting.   It was so lovely to see them in that beautiful setting.  The area they were in was a shadowed place with  the cool grey stones and tall columns making it seem eternal.   Here we are approaching Christmas, which is itself full of mystery, wonder and eternity.

LOVELY WINTER

Bitter winter, I exult in you.
You are my gift, my shroud, my winding sheet,
My creative death,
Pausing me in a frozen still-life
So that other life can break in,
Changing still-life to full life.

Lovely, lovely winter,
With all your subtle colour,
Your peerless blues and high violets flushing
the snow,
Your avalanche of lemon light and tender light
Whose sight
Makes me shake and shiver,
Shaking loose the hidden smoulder
Of scarlet tipped berries burning through darkness.
Those bonfires of memory reminding us
Of the steady scintillation of our hearts.
How I love your cold breath
Blowing me always into a new passion.

Blow, winter winds!
Blow your bitter chills until the sky dances,
The sea rages
And all the plump little mermaids
Leap to the surface of the holy water.
Mermaids who laugh at the scunning ships,
At the flag-sailed ships of myth and story,
Bringing us cargoes of dreams and coral and lost sea-horses,
All touched with glory.

Look! Look!
Look at the beauty of winter.
Look at the white peacocks flirting with the frosty hoar.
Look at the dark clouds racing darkly over the water
Towards the great-beaked swan
Who pecks gold from the tight-skeined air.

                                                            ©2019 Gwen Grant

An Oxford Book of Christmas Stories


My story BROWN BABY is in here
along with all the other fabulous
Christmas stories.

Denis Pepper Editor
CHRISTMAS STORIES
Oxford University Press 1986


FALLING STARS

When I was a girl, I was sent away to Kent, to a kind of hospital
school to make me better.  I was only there a year yet that year has given
me memories for a lifetime, good and bad.  The Kentish woods helped me
settle because they formed a link to my much loved woods of home. 

    FALLING STARS

I walked the spine of morning
Whilst the birds slept.
Their little feathered bodies
Absorbing the melody of leaves,
The quiet breathing of grass,
Waking to the delicate sounds of light changing,
Their tiny anthems gathering strength
Enough to fill the woods with song.
Drowning these cool Kentish pathways
With joy and praise.

Where, last night, a falling star
Tumbled through the trembling leaves
Shoring up this world’s quiet beauty.

I saw it fall.
The little wren and the robin at my shoulder,
The nightingale singing into the morning light.
Our eyes clinging to the long radiance
Of Jupiter and Mars shining briefly
Onto that star ridden path.

Setting that quiet Kentish wood ablaze
With the glory of falling stars,
Of little birds singing.

                                 © 2020 Gwen Grant

PRIVATE KEEP OUT!  by Gwen Grant
published by Penguin Vintage  Children’s Classics
available in paperback and as ebook