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?

  WHISKY KISSES

 

 

    WHISKY KISSES

She was such a neat and tidy person,
Compact and sturdy.
Sensible.
Like a mature somebody.

Some days wearing all one colour,
All blue.  All yellow.
All green.  All red.
No beige.
And sometimes she went complex,
Wearing dots and stripes,
Zigzags and circles.
A rainbow of colour
Lighting up the concrete.

People coped with single colours,
With sequinned sunglasses,
With stripes and dots, circles and zigzags
But absolutely could not get on with
Puffball skirts and false eyelashes,
Lipstick slashes and whisky kisses.

This, they said resentfully,
Was a woman acting out of character.
No-one can put up with that for long,
A concrete turning into an abstract.

Act your age, they demanded.
She just laughed, knowing she was already acting it.
Refusing to be pinned down.
Refusing to be identified.

I am, she said,
A Kandinsky and a Constable.
Get used to it.
                                       ©2020 Gwen Grant

  LET THE NIGHT COME

 

    LET THE NIGHT COME

Erase the night,
For who is this that we hear calling?
Only the shadows of our dreams.

They cannot escape,
No freedom for them.
Nothing but starlight and long, dark pavements
They cannot walk upon,
Cannot run down, arms wide,
Faces alight with the memory
Of the half world they live in.

Shadows surely do not have a voice
To whisper words that stop us in our tracks.
Yet they haunt us.
Remain resistant to all that can be done
To chase them away.
To silence those memories of what is forever lost.

Do not forbid them, for when they want,
They turn us from sorrow and melancholy,
From terror and lost tears,
To remembrance  of a love and loveliness
We never want to forget.

Let the night come, then.
Let the shadows of our dreams walk among us,
Knowing they all belong to yesterday
And new days are yet to come.

                              © 2020 Gwen Grant

ELEMENTAL


ELEMENTAL

Close your eyes, dear darling.
Rest your head on earth’s bold shoulders.
Don’t cry.
Don’t turn away,
For this is our father and our mother.

What else comes before or after?
But the breaking of the dark,
The lighting of the candle
With the living flame of hope,
With the obstinate courage
Of the smallest flower
Growing in frozen earth,
Fierce and unyielding,
Flowering its tiny space
Among the rocks of a barren mountain.

Close your eyes, dear darling,
And gather all your strength.

                   © 2020 Gwen Grant

All material on this blog is copyright but if anyone wants to use part of it,
then please get in touch.   http://www.gwengrant.co.uk