When this newsletter arrives in your inbox, I will be in France on holiday with my family. I’m writing this in advance and I hope you’ll forgive the brevity.
These past few weeks poems have been spilling out of the air around me. I’ve drafted about eight poems in ten days. I just can’t seem to get them down quick enough.
This makes me think of the American poet Ruth Stone who tells how, when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields when she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from across the landscape, like a thunderous train of air that would come barrelling down on her. She knew that she had only one thing to do at this point and that was to, in her words run like hell. So she would run like hell to the house getting chased by the poem trying to find a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that she could grab the poem and pin it down on the page. In the moments when she nearly missed it, when she grabbed the pencil just as the poem was going through her then she would reach out with her other hand and catch it by its tail and pull it back into her body, transcribing the poem backwards!
Ruth Stone’s story was retold by Elizabeth Gilbert in her TED talk Your Elusive Creative Genius. You can listen here.
I do not really think of myself as being like Ruth Stone. It’s just that when I read poems, when I take workshops, when I begin to immerse myself in poetry, I begin to think in poems. Sometimes it’s hard to switch off.
The poems that have chased me are now down in first draft but they really need to be put away to rest until they become entirely unknown to me and I can begin to edit them anew.
At the risk of sharing work that is incomplete that is very much in a first draft form I offer you one of my blossom poems, Blossom Prescription, in its first incarnation. (In Liz Berry’s Blossom workshop we were invited to prescribe blossom for someone we knew or had known ) and if I’ve convinced you of the value of workshops with Liz Berry then why not join me in signing up for : Green Without Limit
"the garden of love is green without limit..." (Rumi)
In the long days of midsummer, join Liz Berry for a workshop inspired by the colour green. From lush tree canopies to precious glass beads and Emerald cities, you'll read and write and daydream. Playful, generative and suitable for poets of all stages. Sign up HERE
Without further ado - here is my Blossom prescription
Blossom Prescription - what I wish for you
I wish you blossom, apple, plum, black
cherry, stone fruit the cream of the milk
we once drank the blush on the peach
of your youth. Not rue for remembrance
but the tenderness of blossom, a flounced
sleeve, outstretched arms lacing the breeze
the dance of spring's snow sifting the air like
moonlight, summer's leaf and the world alive
I wish you the impossible blueness of sky,
wine, a table set beneath the trees, petals in
the long grass pillowing your feet I wish you
peace where you lie, the confetti of blossom
anointing a bride, I wish you the loveliness of
remembered love.I wish you blossom in the dusk.
As always thanks for reading
Avril x
Beautiful imagery! We’ve just arrived in France too- bonnes vacances 🥰
Avril, I think about that story of Ruth so often and yet I had forgotten which poet it was! I tried to find it recently and no iteration of googling poems and the wind turned up what I was looking for! Thank you for bringing it back into my attention.