Well, here I am grasping the bullet, biting the bull by the horns and posting a poem. I had originally posted six, but then someone reminded me that if I want to publish them in magazines blogging could be considered publication and make them ineligible. So that leaves me with this one, which has already been published.
Never mind that I’m not a real poet; I’m unashamedly sending one of my efforts out into the blogosphere. Before I do, can I just put in a plug for some of my friends who are real poets: Rebecca Gethin, Aki Schilz, Lucy Sixsmith, Hazel Hammond and last but not least Daisy Behagg, who has just won the Bridport poetry prize. We’ll be hearing more of Daisy, who is working on her first collection.
Anyway, here is the poem. (Incidentally, does anyone know how to do away with the extra line spaces? Answer: go into Text view and do it from there.)
Memento [Published in The Broadsheet, October 2013]
Opening a drawer I find in an old purse
a plait of hair once part of me,
child’s hair, healthy and clean as silk
spun in a fairy-tale, the copper threads
still tied with a red bow. Now it will not release
its time-firmed shape, its edge still ragged
where it was first cut off.
Handling its soft thickness now
I feel the loss. I soon learned to leave
parts of myself behind: this has survived
to meet me again and show
how time cheats. Who I was then,
each filament plaited fast
and set now for always, meets who I am
across the gap this shining cable denies.
Islanded from the past I cling to it
as if it held an anchor.
.
The Belated Writer 
Do you want me to say what you already know? Where have you sent these?
Oh, and don’t give any more away.
Does blogging really count as publishing?
Apart from the one that’s been published, only a couple of competitions. Tim Liardet suggested I should try and publish some but I haven’t got round to it yet – too busy with the novel.
Hi, these poems are fantastic….. You should be sending them out. but if you publish them on a blog some editors might consider that published and so I suggest you remove those that haven’t been pub’d yet!!!!
To remove the spaces between lines you need to go into the HTML …. It’s a tab on the right of the page when you are creating your post. you can switch between HTML and the view but its on the HTML that you can remove the line.
I can’t see any tab for following you by the way.
Thank you. I didn’t realise blogging counted as publishing! Thanks too for the technical advice.
Thanks for the mention, and for sharing the poems with us!
My favourite at the moment is ‘Light as Leaf on Lind’… _absolutely_ beautiful.
I haven’t worked out yet how to de-double-space poems on WordPress, and it has always been a nightmare trying to persuade it to keep my stanza breaks fixed, so I honour your courage in taking on the ‘poems on wordpress’ challenge!
Now to re-read…
Thank you. Do you know if the phrase is from Piers Plowman? See Rebecca Gethin’s comment for how to de-double-space. I haven’t tried it yet!
It does sound very Piers Plowman to me, but I couldn’t say…
Sorry I’ve had to remove most of them. I can email them to you, if you want.
Maybe I should refuse to read them until they appear in published form, in the hope of helping to motivate the sending-out process. On the other hand, a private delivery of poems to my inbox would be very nice. Up to you… and thank you 🙂
Oh, and about Jay’s Grave. Isn’t there something about how there are always flowers and no-one knows who brings them? Or am I thinking of some other grave somewhere?
Yes, I think so. When I’ve been there, there have always been flowers.
Just wondered if the mystery about where they come from might be worth incorporating 🙂
Links – go into editing this post. Highlight the words you want the link attached to. Then the 10th box along the format row (just past the right side alignment) will become active and looks like a chain link. Click on that. Dialogue box will open asking for http address. Just copy and paste link into appropriate box i.e. follow their instructions. It’s easy when you know how… knowing how is the difficult part! If you have any queries, you know how to contact me… Best Wishes, Rosie
On your last blog post, I wrote a comment. ‘You are a poet, Susan,’ I wrote and the deleted it. I thought I was being too bossy. Now I am going to be very bossy indeed. Tim L does not say what he said lightly. You need to, as this attached (rather silly) Bukowski poem says, ‘submit your poems to the magazines.’ Don’t be a Mandred!
http://allpoetry.com/poem/8509265-I-Cant-Stay-In-The-Same-Room-With-That-Woman-For-Five-Minutes-by-Charles_Bukowski