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?

GOOD FRIDAY

This is a day that always has an echo in my heart. I’ve published
this poem before but my memories of Good Friday are so
vivid and loved, the Chapels, the people, the singing, the glorious
words that relate its sombre story always there to hold me, seem
eternally new.

GOOD FRIDAY 

So now it begins with the sun striking through the tall windows,
Onto the old brown pews and onto the pulpit,
Onto the slender Cross where the weight of this weeping world
Is carried on helpless shoulders,
Onto the crown of thorns blazing in the shadows,
Burning the darkness with its crimson glory.

This is not a gentle day, yet gentleness persists in breaking through,
For the soaring arc of the wide blue banner
Painted on the far wall of the Chapel,
Painted high above the polished table where blue scented grasses
Quiver in a silver goblet, unquestioning and faithful,
Presents to us those golden words painted on that lovely blue arc,
Words that insist ‘GOD IS LOVE’
Which gently insist it is this we must always remember.

The singing is bright now, pausing, darkening, lifting, soaring,
Until a sudden startling descant adds its own touch of glory
To all tough and tender hearts caught in a flesh
Ever subject to death and to corruption, yet ever open to joy.
These singers of sacred songs seek the strength of God as they sing
And in those three plain words, GOD IS LOVE, find it.

Then the crisp cold air smelling faintly of lavender
Drifts like a prayer into the silence and the silence is profound
As silence always is when God is listening.
And God is always listening.
And love is always sending its quiet hope out into the world.

                                                                    © 2018 GWEN GRANT.

THAT OLD DINOSAUR BIRD

The birds are very busy just now and they zip past our windows on their ever hasty
way  but every now and again, one of these lovely creatures lands at the bottom of
our garden and we get to see the heron in all its archaic wonder and grace.   They are so
totally beautiful that, as we used to say, their utter loveliness completely
knocks your socks off.

                    THAT OLD DINOSAUR BIRD 

That old dinosaur bird came galumphing down the river
Like an aeroplane on its last legs,
Whose engine is bumping and jumping
Through the twilit air. 

Not the most graceful bird,
But incredibly beautiful in a Picasso’ish kind of way,
And Picasso would be thrilled to paint him
If he had his time again,
And make of that heron
A rapturously lovely, joyful,
Sort of dazzling cubist display. 

Uh oh, there he goes again!
Crashing down so close to the water
He could dip his long archaic beak
Into the river and spear a fish.
Or seize that crouching ginger cat watching him
And flip it into the trees for the fun of it. 

‘SPLASH’ he goes, and the whole river shudders,
Other birds whistle and shake their heads,
‘Dinosaur bird,’ you can almost hear them say,
‘When are you ever going to learn to land
In a proper, elegant, bird-of-flight’ish sort of way?’
But that bony bird doesn’t care.
He just flaps away.

                                                           ©  2018 GWEN GRANT 

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

CHILDREN WALKING

When I was ten and very poorly, I was sent to a kind of hospital school three
hundred miles away from my home to get better.  I felt so lost, unhappy and
alone, I ran away on a night thick with snow, determined to get back home.
I’d read all the stories of children on their own – Hansel and Gretel, Snow
White, the children in the Bible constantly on the move and they consoled
me.  But here we are, decades later, and like the children in the stories I
told myself all those years ago, they are still being pursued by the inhumanly
vicious.   When will it end?

   CHILDREN WALKING

That night, in wicked December,
When the moon shone
Through the dark tops of trees
Onto the sparkling snow.
The sea rolling over the silent sand,
The water so cold and slow
Even Neptune was frozen,
Frightened by the frost hardened foam. 

That was the night she began
The three hundred mile walk home.
Sure it would take no time at all. 

She was sick of the great old house
In dark shadow behind her,
With its white beds, white walls
And fierce purple uniforms.
She wanted to sleep in her own bed,
With the candle on the window sill,
Unlit, but ready for any emergency.
A bad dream.  The eerie sound
Of a bogeyman almost upon her. 

As she walked, she remembered
All the stories she had heard
Of children walking.
Walking back to their own home,
Looking for a new one.
Some together.   Some like her, alone.
Walking through flame and fire and snow,
Through desolation. 

She didn’t get home that night,
Neither did they.
Even Neptune almost didn’t make it.
But they remember,
Those children walking alongside each other,
That night in wicked December. 

And still they walk,
Told in new stories of new suffering,
New desolation,
Of new bogeymen now upon them,
Told in the old story of the breakdown of love.  

                                © 2020 Gwen Grant

HERON FLYING HOME

There has been a little flurry of herons going down to the river lately. 
If we are lucky, they seem to take a short cut  across
the sky, curving across the emptiness as if it’s a road already
marked out, then dropping down through the trees into the river.
They’re all magicians these lovely creatures that illuminate our
lives for when they appear, heron, rabbit, pheasant, fox,  whatever
presence they inhabit,  immediately they capture our full attention
 and send us on our way full of joy and hope and love .

HERON FLYING HOME

There they all are, one after the other,
Herons going home.
Black shapes against a fading sky,
Beautiful and prehistoric,
None of them looking
At the shadowed trees below them.

Until one crashes the dark branches
To land in moon touched mud
At the side of the silent river.
Looking a bit like a witch

On a wicked broomstick,
Scratchy twigs sweeping
All the little creatures
Out of its imperious way.

Now the trees in the heronry
Are heavy with sleeping birds,
Each quietly contained,
All wrapped up in themselves.

The first stars pricking the sky,
The long dark fish in the water
Flashing a sudden brief silver,
Sharp eyes promising
To eat them in the morning.

Whilst, we, made of earth and sky,
Fold into the stars. 
Fold into the trees.
And, at the last,
Fold into the heron.

                                   © 2020 Gwen Grant

RESURRECTION

Good to be back at my desk after a fragmented time of worn out viruses – I was
certainly worn out, anyway. Today, I’m feeling a lot better and looking forward
to quieter days and summer. Stay well!

RESURRECTION

We all have our own Gethsemane
When times are against us,
When, faultless and perfect,
Darkness no longer has an airy lightness
But falls upon us
With the full weight of sorrow.

From Gethsemane there comes always
That long walk to the crucifixion of hope,
That slow procession into loneliness,
That sombre step into a darkness where love
Becomes nothing but an old and lovely dream.

Yet that dark garden flames
With the resurrection of a living hope,
Throwing light into the darkness,
Bringing peace to the desolate,
Making all love new,
Its eternal promise forever redeeming,
That where love is,
Time no longer has any meaning.

© 2015 Gwen Grant