Author: gwengrant

Growing older and having survived cancer at 40, a long time ago, certainly focuses the mind on the future and I was very aware of this when I wrote the poem FUTURE TENSE. I've always loved writing and still remember the excitement of the first longer piece of work I did. It was very experimental and I was certain it wouldn't get published. It probably wouldn't have but one of the small magazines, who did such great work for new writers, took that piece and many others. But that wasn't all they did. With infinite kindness, they often pointed out where I could improve my writing. My first book was a picture book, MATTHEW AND HIS MAGIC KITE, but after that, I started wanting to capture the humour and interest of where I lived, so PRIVATE-KEEP OUT came next followed by KNOCK AND WAIT and ONE WAY ONLY. They're not biographies because all I wanted to do was to catch the spirit of those times. It would be good if everyone wrote an account of their lives so their times are not lost. So many valuable histories unwritten and unread. When I was a girl, I loved the American writer, BETTY MACDONALD, with her very funny accounts of her family and her life in the 1940's. But NORMAN MAILER's, 'THE NAKED AND THE DEAD' spun me up to the stars when I stumbled across it in the subscription library I belonged to at fifteen. ERNEST HEMINGWAY's 'CHRISTMAS IN PARIS 1923', was so sublime and beautiful it was like a torch for writers and the Toronto Star Weekly must have published it with joy in their hearts. I wonder if there still is a Toronto Star Weekly?

THE SCENT OF CLOVES

This was my father’s garden, too many years ago to count and yet,
the memory of it is as sharp as if I had seen it yesterday.  My father
loved carnations.  Carnations and chrysanthemums, the great,
shaggy headed, curled-over petalled flowers, which were almost
glints of architecture in amongst the more gentle flowers.

      THE SCENT OF CLOVES

The garden was full of carnations
Standing in elegant rows like delicate soldiers,
Or curling up together
In friendly circles,
Their silvery green leaves
Supporting each other.

That spicy sharpness of cloves,
That remembered scent of carnations
Filled the air,
Making me dream of other lives
Lived by fabulous people,
Which, one day, I would discover for myself.

But I never did.
For my own life elbowed those dreams
Out of the way
And gave me carnations.

                                ©2019 Gwen Grant

LOST VOICES

                 LOST VOICES

These old, cold meeting rooms and deserted chapels are derelict now.
Hiding behind weeds and raw, self-set trees,
Just waiting for someone to come along and buy them.
Turn them into flats or offices.
Not nearly as much fun as a gaggle of people
Singing those great old hymns and songs
That solaced and supported whole generations.
Those dauntless songs and psalmodies that made the white opaque lampshades,
Wide and lovely as floating tents, tremble and sway on the wings of melody.
Now, a lullaby, now a trumpet call of men marching to destruction
Or to share in the lonely and terrible deaths of others.

Here is the tiny kitchen, with the battered aluminium kettle
Rattling against the rusted taps,
Waiting to fill the giant teapots for throats dry after all that singing.

There is the strip of linoleum, torn and dirty on the worn out floor
Still showing its faint brown pattern. 
A skirt of torn cotton hanging from a broken wire
No longer hides the clean cups and saucers
In the deep wooden cupboard, nor protects the plates, big and small,
Stamped with the name of this once much-loved place.
All gone, except a broken fragment of pot with a few faint words remaining.

Standing amongst the cobwebs, the torn pages of old music
Almost playing themselves in the dusty silence,
I hum an old remembered song of such power and beauty,
All the lost dead and all the forgotten living
Ring out their strong and lovely voices in joyful chorus.
Sharing this last remembrance before it is gone for ever.

                                                    ©2019 Gwen Grant

FUTURE TENSE

     FUTURE TENSE

The old girl lay sleepless in her bed,
Eyes staring through the dark,
Fretting at a future she couldn’t see,
Worrying at the hours and days and weeks
That lay before her.
Sleepless, she sighed again and again
‘If only I knew what the future will bring.’
Until the future, hiding behind the door,
Listening keenly, stepped in.

Picking up two particularly heavy days,
It smacked them round her head.
‘That’s one thing,’ it said.

 Then selecting an especially lovely
String of hours,
Gently laid them round her neck.
‘And that’s another,’ it said.
‘Now, before I go, is there anything else
You want to know?’

 ‘No,’ the old girl whispered, shaking her head,
Turning quick and over in her bed.
‘If it’s alright with you,
I’ll look at the stars instead.’

 ‘Good thinking,’ the future said.

                        © 2017 Gwen Grant

TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT

Sometimes, we see the reality of relationships
and sometimes, we don’t.

TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT

If, carefully,
I made a blue Chinese junk
And put it at your feet
Very tenderly.
Would you take it into your hands
And keep it safe.
Or would you breathe upon it a small wind
To make it float away from you.

Or would you,
Very gently,
Maroon it on a waterlily
And let it rot.

      ©2017 Gwen Grant