When poems grow legs

Poetry can seem the Cinderella of literature. When travelling through London on public transport, I often see fellow travellers reading books. I always try to sneak a peak of the cover and, let me tell you, they are never reading poetry. A guest facilitator at one of my writing groups once asked us for our favourite plays. Some of us struggled to remember a single play we had seen, let alone a favourite one. I imagine the response may have been even worse if she had asked for our favourite poems.

When I started to write a few years ago, I started with poetry, mainly because it tends to be short. (I’m a lazy old fart.) Most of my poems were pretty forgettable. As my mother once told me, “Your poems aren’t the kind that anyone would ever memorise.” Once, however, I struck lucky and came up with a poem that started to breathe, grew a pair of legs, picked itself up from the dry page, packed its bag and went for a walk.

It's the one above. I had two main sources of inspiration: the teaching of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh; and the short story All at One Point by Italo Calvino. Although I always knew it was a poem that I could sincerely speak to anyone, even a complete stranger, I did have one individual at the forefront of my mind at the time of writing. I loved this person dearly, but we had become estranged, permanently as it turned out. Slowly, though, the fog of sadness surrounding the poem started to lift, giving way to a bright expansiveness. Now, when I revisit it, I think of family members, friends, even passersby on the street and I marvel at our connectedness.

The poem was first published by Freckle, a magazine dedicated to celebrating the people and landscapes of Northern Ireland and beyond. Well, the poem certainly travelled beyond Northern Ireland. A few months after publication, I received an email from a woman in Germany. She had somehow come across a copy of the magazine and wanted to use the poem in her wedding ceremony. I gladly gave permission.

But it wasn’t to be all sunshine and flowers. Entwined also walked down some dark paths. In 2016, Stevie Martin, a singer-songwriter who performed under the name Rainy Boy Sleep died tragically. He was only twenty-nine. I’d heard of him, but we had never met. I was contacted, out of the blue, by one of his friends. He thought that we must have known each other because a hand-written copy of Entwined had been found among his personal effects. My name was written at the bottom of the page, so Stevie’s friend had assumed that he had written the poem for me. I have no idea what the poem meant to Stevie. Hopefully, it gave him some comfort. If only it could have given him more.

In 2019, in response to a lengthy hospitalisation in a cardiac unit, I self-published a collection of poetry. I called it A heart sutra and my favourite daughter, Emma*, kindly provided beautiful illustrations. (The image, above, is an excerpt from the collection.) Since its publication, I have had another enquiry about using the poem in a wedding.

Perhaps you sometimes wonder why you bother to write. I know I do! But we are all entwined and I keep telling myself that our words, written and spoken, do matter. They’re one way in which we, and the cosmos, keep pouring.

*Emma is a creative whirlwind, working in illustration, ceramics, video and writing (and I’m not at all biased). Find out how amazing she is here.