Beth Brooke

@bethbpoet.bsky.social

2253 Followers 1056 Following

Poet, Quaker, retired teacher, socialist, runner (just) , proud Omi . She/her

Two herring gull fledglings
Me holding a colander to watch the eclipse
Chris and Kate sing. Chris on guitar and Kate on banjo
Drought Comes To Langton Herring We sit in bleached fields, the sun has turned the ground into a smashed pot, terracotta pieces as far as the eye can see. Everything is desiccated; we are husks, brittle-skinned, a rub of the hands reduces us to dust. Weeks pass, some of us burn, dried by lack of rain, ignited by relentless light and pounding heat. In the far north, the ice melts. Soon we will drown.
Und so weiter At 6:38am you realise that you are properly awake and so you read the online newspaper until 7:38. 7:39am becomes Sudoku, the medium difficulty and the hard to take you up to 8am. Get up, have breakfast, make a list. Do the list; have a coffee at 11am. Read, do a bit of gardening until it’s lunch at 1pm. Go out for a walk at 2, except on Thursdays; cup of tea at 4pm. At 5pm turn on the radio:shout at the news; some days it’s just ridiculous. 5:45 prepare the evening meal. Eat. WatchTV. Retire to bed at 10. Read. Sleep. Wake up again. Und so weiter.
The Next Station Is… The voice tells me where I am going, where I am not. Tells what to do in the case of suspicious activity. What if I am the suspicious activity? We slow down. The voice reminds me to keep my baggage with me at all times; This is unnecessary; I always carry it, never leave it unattended. My baggage is full, full of promises betrayed, failed attempts at reconciliation, rolled up and crammed between the socks and running shoes; there are moments of hopelessness mixed in with my dirty underwear. Doors open. I am told to mind the gap between the train and the platform edge. This I know is the crux of everything. The gap is a chasm, sides sticky with the lubricant of a million wheels, choked by drifts of cast off skin: sloughed dead cells of all my other lives.
Marriage Portrait When my mother was a spider, she ate my father; liquefied his insides and gobbled them up. She hung his desiccated exoskeleton by a single silken thread to persuade the world he wasn’t dead, but resting. And so he dangled, twisted in the breeze. The sun made shadows of him which danced through the changing light of afternoon. Then autumn blew and carried him away.
I Begin The Business Of Remembering A white cockatoo. Though caged, it laughs, bobs along the branch, demands attention. The child in me remembers its laughter, the voice in which it speaks. Talk to me, I say to the bird, laugh me back to myself. On the branch the cockatoo speaks of light gathering into morning, of sunlight that throbs in the breast and bursts in glittering blooms above the sea. The bird has feathers so white, a beak and tongue so black. With the delicacy of a surgeon it takes a nut from my hand, peels off the shell, eats. We will always feed one another, it says.
Fledgling herring gulls making a mess of my kitchen roof!
My coffee mug, hand-crafted by Gloucester artisans. Full-bellied, I curl my hands around it; the outside glaze is shiny, smooth, the colour of a blue ocean, inside my mug is dark, rich as a java brew. You bought it for me years ago, have its twin. I use it every day, cradle its comforting warmth, hug it, imagine you doing the same with yours so many miles away.
Little waterfall pouring into a natural pool. Trees edge the waterfall
Vase The vase stands on the hall table, cracked, water seeps out in cool rivulets that trace a path down the glazed exterior of rich green, blue, cloud-swirl white. This is the only vase in the house but the flowers in the garden are so beautiful that each of us cuts a stem, fills the vase with blood-red peonies, irises the colour of midnight, roses like the blush of evening sun. Flowers in a cracked vase, a burst of reckless beauty.
We Dream Of Babylon Enter Babylon only by night, when the heat of the day seeps out of the walls to soften the evening. Wander its narrow streets by the flicker of torchlight, when the air is rich with scents of jasmine and rose. Stand in the courtyard; listen to the sound of water, to the flutter of moths' wings around the lamp. Then, when the evening azan sounds the call to prayer - to sleep - be comforted, knowing that the morning's inevitable journey is still a night away
TheTaste Of Summer In childhood I ride the hill, stand on the pedals, propel myself to the top, throw down the bike, and flop exultant under a peach-fat sun . It hangs ripe in an endless sky heavy with the scent of August. I reach up, plunge my hands wrist -deep into summer's flesh; gouge out the fruit, cram my mouth, eat until I am nectar-drunk with joy. In childhood, chin and fingers sticky with summer juice, I ride down the hill. Legs stretched out above the pedals, I shake with laughter. I am eight years old and I can eat the sun.
There’s a maize field on the right and a view down the hill to a thatched barn. There are trees on the far horizon
I Will Miss You Today the morning will be full of your absence. The hook where you used to hang your coat will glare at me "See? He's not here." Empty, it will insist I recall the touch and blueness of your winter second skin, the way it smelled of you; the way it echoed your shape. And for the rest of the day my heart will leap at the sight of every passing man in a navy blue overcoat who isn't you.
A posy of sweet peas in a jug. They are shades of purple, pink and red.
The Worms Will Come On grey feet, beautiful as a ginkgo leaf, the fledgling gull tries its worm dance on my kitchen roof. The black pearls of its pirate eyes focus on the mossy tiles of its urban cliff face. It seems hopeful, hopeful that on the kitchen roof and against all odds, the worms will come.
Saint Christopher Carries His Son Down The Dunes To Strandhill Beach My son, with his son clinging to his back, runs through the dune sand and the marram grass; They giddy slip, slide down to a soundtrack of whoops, laughter and mothers’ fearful shrieks to slow down, stop, slow down! Everyone’s cheeks flushed pink by the teasing of the wind. I watch them race: the rider, his horse; they gallop, neighing and snorting their fierce joy in the wheeling of gulls and the wild force of waves breaking white along the shoreline, the scudding clouds, moments of sunshine the pinch of the ordinary left behind. On the beach they begin their acquisition: pebbles small and large, seashells, grey driftwood which form the target and the ammunition for the game. They launch the wood and throw, fling the stones, the shells, wanting each one to go higher, further, deeper than the one before. I think of my other boy, far from us now. When he was our only, we brought him here, brought him to this roiling crash and foam. How he hurled himself into the blue-green ocean, made me cry out, heart wracked by a notion that he would cross this sea once he was grown.
Six weeks of drought Last night I dreamed of rain: gouts of it, bursting from ripe clouds and zinging down to earth. I dreamed the hiss and fizz of rain on pavements, swelling puddles, the aroma of wet Tarmac . Last night I dreamed of standing under the sky, head upturned, mouth open eager to receive the kiss of water, as though it were a baptism and I was born again.
A view of some of the tents at the festival. Blue sky and Chalke written Hollywood style just below the brow of the hill.
Heat Wave Five days of proper heat, the unEnglish kind and I find myself hallucinating France. On the edges of my field of vision there are old men, in town for the market, who sit at the pavement cafe, sipping pastis; there are delicious young Parisians in white linen shirts and crisp chinos; the longing rises in me. I think about steak frites on a brasserie terrace in Bordeaux, moules in La Rochelle, cheese from Rocamadour that melts in the mouth. In the garden of my imagination the lavender fields of Provence hum with the industry of bees and hummingbird hawk moths sip nectar from the pink geraniums. It will be Italy I hallucinate next, that beaker of the warm south. This is what happens after five days of proper heat, the unEnglish kind.
They Are About To Tell Me I Have Got The Job The men in charcoal suits deliberate while I wait to learn if I have got the job; some things apparently depend upon it. I look out of the window at the car park, the walkway, the obligatory patch of lawn around the cedar tree. It is a grey afternoon. On the playing field a noisy class is doing PE; the harbour is visible beyond, the sea choppy. There is a herring gull, ash-coloured wings, red dot on its yellow beak. Red for danger. It drums its feet in a rhythmic dance, hunting for worms. The worms come to the surface, misled into believing there is rain. The gull eats them. I am transfixed, do not hear the door open, a man in a charcoal suit call my name.
View of Poole harbour framed by trees. It’s sunny and there are lots of little sailing boats in the water
The photo shows a half empty coffee cup on a marble effect table but next to the cup is a copy of Hum by Helen Phillips. It’s really very very good!
Riot We make a ruin of ourselves, brick by hefted brick; hurl hate-filled hearts against the innocent glass of shop windows, rejoice in shattering. Fury displaces rationality, gathers in the throat like phlegm until we throw back our heads, open our mouths and spit. Every gobbet incites a flame, burns down the house in which we say we want to live.
My son is running on the sand. He wears a baseball cap and an orange waterproof. Jeans obviously! His own son is on his back,, enjoying the ride
Oh Oh the run in heavy rain and the warm bath after. Oh, the utter infectiousness of children’s laughter. Oh, A E Housman’s Shropshire lad, oh, the happy, oh, the sad. Oh, King Tutankhamen’s tomb, oh, Neil Armstrong on the moon. Oh, the joy of summer heat and the way my heart would skip a beat at the sight of you walking across the street. Oh, the good and oh, the bad, oh, what we did or didn’t have. Oh, the fact you were once mine; oh, the healing, down the line.
View from a helicopter of the Rockies. The peaks are jagged and snow capped. There’s a steep sided valley which is green and clearly has a river running through it. In the foreground of the photo there’s a partial view of my daughter in law.
Live-Streaming We have decided the only thing is to live-stream our own deaths, in colour with sound. We apologise if our camera work is shaky unprofessional lacking an independent commentary. We are just trying to share our murder with you, it is all we have left.
The sign reads Do not stand, sit, climb or lean on zoo fences. If you fall, animals could eat you and that might make them sick
Coral on the mountain Down from the cairn. In places the stones slipped us; sometimes we took our chances - ran, swift footed as could be, letting the momentum take us. Sometimes we stood, caught our breath, turned ourselves around and around, looked up, looked down to try and understand from where we had come. There under our aching feet we saw the coral in the mountain’s limestone core, shadows of a time three hundred million years ago when what we had worked so hard to climb was hidden deep beneath an equatorial sea.
Strandhill The marram grass ripples; it is the wind wolves slinking through and out into the dunes. There was a time when boats sailed from the bay, over the cold ocean to a new world. The ones who sailed were hungry but not for the adventure, bewildered to be leaving everything behind. Some must have stood on deck, watched as the mountain shrank and the song of the sky lark dissipated through the air. And all the while the ancient queen on the mountain top wept to see them go.
WB Yeats with a rather superior expression on his face and words all over his cape
A rook strutting
Marram grass in the foreground and fields beyond. In the background is the mountain. There are white clouds above it but the sky is a remarkable blue
The gravestone of the poet W B Yeats. It bears the inscription Cast a Cold eyes, On Life, on Death. Horseman pass by.
Long stretch of sandy beach and the sea. In the foreground is a grandpa with his little grandson
This is the entrance to a small harbour. There’s a small boathouse in the background and the wall in the foreground has beautiful sea pinks growing out of it. The sky is virtually cloudless
A little island connected to the shore by a stone causeway. Trees lean out and the sky is blue
A sandy bay with the ocean and waves. The sky is largely blue but with cloud over the mountains. Husband, son and grandson walk together
In The Dead Hour 4am. The dead hour. Time was I would find myself suddenly awake, would lie there in the dark and listen. There used to be owls somewhere nearby. In the churchyard probably; their calls were comforting. Sometimes, there were the staccato barks of foxes; I think they must have gone back across the water meadows into the woods; slim pickings in small rural towns these days. If only the wind would blow; that would, at least, be something.
Today there is a cease-fire The day offers itself- a gift - wrapped in translucent silk paler than a blackbird's egg; mine to open. Inside is the first hour of all the mornings there have ever been, sunrise that tingles with lemon-sharpness, paper silhouettes of trees against the apricot wash of a dawn horizon; there is the cry of jackdaws, the growl of pebbles on the shoreline; there is the silence that comes after the guns stop firing.
A Guide To Shakespeare’s Plays A Shakespearean comedy will feature cross -dressing, magic, and/or twins. There will be off-handed cruelty towards women and servants, at least two people will marry in Act V. There are no jokes. The history plays are about kings; they are the natural order of things, apparently. If a history play features a queen she will be a she-wolf who dies off stage in Act IV, or a virtuous woman who retires to a nunnery by the end of Act II. There will be a bad king who will fight and be killed, allowing a new king to take over. The new king will talk about courage, honour and sceptred isles. There is no irony. The tragedies are straightforward - everyone dies. Shakespeare wrote some difficult to categorise late plays. These generally take place on isles which are unsceptred. They feature foreigners, magic, people being cruel to servants and/or women in order to test themselves. In Act V some people will die. There are no jokes.
Victorian Civic Architecture Makes Its Apology I was built in an age of certainty made to celebrate the certainties of men, their judgement, their knowing best. I was built when people understood where they were placed in the order of things and did not consider where the money came from for the stone that made the Doric columns. Call me classical, call me gothic, call me civic, philanthropist. In the tungsten light of a cold evening I squat on the horizon of your journey home. Later, you will dream about me, my gaslit corridors, the conversations that took place in small rooms at the back, civic men deciding things among themselves; the basement where the bodies, perhaps, are buried.
Escape Velocity T-1 minute. Vibration within normal parameters. Launch. (the issue of physics in relation to the human body) G-force within normal parameters. No blackout. Full consciousness. T+ 2.5 clear the Von Karman line. The edge of space. Weightlessness. (we return to the free float of the womb umbilicals of technology) T+ 8. Orbit established. Cloud formation indicates storms below. T+90. One orbital cycle complete. Functioning within normal parameters. This is the right distance to achieve perspective (to function within normal parameters.)
The Northern Lights Fill The Skies Over Alberta The Aurora Borealis is having a moment media feeds of excited posts from people proclaiming they have been blessed to observe those luminous transparencies of green and purple silk rippling across the night sky I send you a text asking if you have seen this spectacle Not yet you say and hope they will be there again at bedtime And I think how the night for which you wait is already here for me I wake next day to an inbox full of your photographs The Northern Lights shot from the decking in your garden beauty illuminating a moment which for you is now but already yesterday for me Beauty hanging in your sky four thousand miles away
Anthony Gormley’s Field Of England Do you see us? See what we are? We stand, shoulder rubbing shoulder, fashioned by the pressing of a potter’s thumb in clay. Our eyes are shadows. Do you see us? Blink. Look away. Look back. What are we now? Shaped by the hand of the maker: one maker, one clay. There are boats greedy to tumble us into the sea. Shoulder clings to shoulder on the sandy beach, the shingle shore. Blink. Don’t look away.
I was more beautiful in life a sinuous, serpentine shape under the water The mud of the estuary the clear, cool gravel beds of rivers were my territory There were mussels and worms, crabs that hid themselves but I could find them and feast Now I am a piece of clumsy taxidermy, skin painted a uniform grey, gills an incongruous red, a museum piece, largely overlooked in favour of the dinosaurs whose timeline is also my own. I was caught in the river, hooked up and out, posed as a trophy. I wasn’t the last though, the last came later, after you had silted the sweet water, poisoned what remained.
My back garden. There’s a white painted garden seat in front of the wall and in between the little wooden shed and the pittosporum tree. You can see lots of bluebells
The Risen Christ Liverpool Anglican Cathedral 1993 In the work of our hands, we find God, in the shaping, the chiselling of marks upon a skin, a page, a body of wire and plaster. In the contemplation of light upon the surface of things, God waits for us, arms open, hands ready to hold. In stillness and silence, what we speak, what we leave unconfessed, God listens, accepts our brokenness. We offer ourselves to the business of creation; We offer up the love we hold for all things; We offer our seeing, our hearing, our doing, Lay down our work at last, look to come home. God stands at the door to welcome us.
Ad Inexplorata for Michael Collins, astronaut. Let us go, boldly, into the unknown. Let’s say we go one hundred thousand miles, far enough for everyone to gain perspective. From such a distance we can look back, see the blue and white marble which is the planet suspended in a ripe blackness of universe. The borders we guard so zealously will be invisible, our ghettos, our keep out, keep off zones dissolved in a deepness of blue and we will be able, for a moment at least, to understand what poets mean when they speak of beauty. Out there, we will know silence, the only reasonable response to the truth of where we have come from and our audacity in leaving.
She Dreams of Sweetness The woman stands at her kitchen counter chopping onions for the meal. She thinks about love and the quiet sound her knife makes as it slices. She thinks about onions, the tears they bring before the butter and the heat of the pan turns them sweet. The woman touches her chest, where she aches for the grandchildren who remain unborn. She imagines their tears, their sweetness. As the onions sizzle, she sings softly. It is a lullaby.
Siren Song Ice on the Bow River begins to bloom delicate clusters crystal on the surface of the water gather together become a soft compact light and opaque as lemon sorbet solidify slowly until the river becomes still seems to hold itself in a suspended animation soon after the days of clear skies after bone -splintering cold nights the river sings ice moaning popping and humming with the expansion and contraction of winter lungs the ice cajoles calls us hints we might walk upon it admire its transformation and all the while underneath the beauty that seeming stillness the Bow River slow sinuous continues to flow
My sons aged about 6 and 3. The younger is wearing a navy blue duffel coat and the older a red and black checked jacket. We were looking for interesting things on the beach of Lulworth Cove, Dorset.
The breeze settles in our cupped hands. We feel it as a heartbeat, a moment balanced between the in-breath and the out before it twists away rises up and out away from us brushes the leaves of aspens which sigh under its touch regretful that they are committed to branches not yet free to follow
A group of three statues by Elisabeth Frink. These bronzes commemorate prisoners of condolence. The long robed figure represents authority/judgement, the others are the ones condemned for their beliefs.
Image is a common sturgeon suspended from the ceiling of the natural history gallery in the Dorset Museum.