5 April 2013

Poem 5 - What News Have I to Tell?



What News Have I to Tell?

Today a jackdaw's fallen down the chimney.
I hear it scuffling and flailing in the soot.
     So is winter nearly gone?

Each year brings them to our rooftop
quarrelling as they drop their twigs
to make their chancy nests.
.
And one will fall. Trapped
in the bricked-up void, chack for a
wretched day or two, then die. Or –

maybe –  tumble flukily into the grate,
to sudden frantic freedom, to the bright
confusion of windows..

And I think of you, your six months in the dark.
Are there birds there? You keep so silent on it all.
    Come home soon.

With all my love to you, my dear Persephone.

Mum xx


Sally Douglas


The prompt for this one came from The Practice of Poetry, by Robin Behn and Chace Twichell (HarperCollins, 1992). The exercise was simply to write a poem in the form of a letter. I started it with a bit of news that I recently posted on my younger daughter's Facebook page, and part way through I realised who the speaker might be. I don't think the reader needs to know anything about Greek mythology to understand the poem, though. That's what makes those archetypal figures so great to use in writing- they're everyone and everywhere. At the last minute, just before posting this, I decided to hold back the classical reference  until the end of the poem so the reader would enter the space without any preconceptions, and the poem is not pinned down. In that way, hopefully, the identities of the characters add a layer rather than be all that the poem is - and the reader has some part in deciding how far this adds meaning.

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