Category: Poetry

January Morning

Stumbling out of darkness
I come into the morning
carrying my grief and fears
like a demon on my back.

The gulls call me
to open my door,
and breathe in the air
of my shabby garden,
looking beyond,
where they criss-cross the sky
telling their stories.

The trees tremble
with anticipation
as the wind comes grumbling
from over the sea.

A magpie screeches,
a siren whines,
through sea-soaked city air,
and behind me,
my coffee pot hisses a promise.

Another morning,
and spring will come.

Linda Rushby 29 January 2021

The Invisible Woman

The other day I switched on my old faulty laptop looking for two poems I remember writing but couldn’t find anywhere. I didn’t find either of them, but I did find this one, which I don’t remember writing, though I can make a fair guess at which cafe is referred to in it.

It will be a happy day when I can return there. And I now have a nice new lightweight, fully functioning laptop (not so new – I’ve had it for a year, but not had much opportunity to take it out in that time).

The Invisible Woman

I am invisible.
I creep into the cafe and hide in the corner
scoping out the tables near the wall sockets.
Because my laptop powerpack is buggered
since I knocked my coffee over it
and I have to remember which keys don’t work.

The upper shift and return are the worst,
I always forget about them.
But otherwise it works okay,
just a bit slow at times,
like me
for the same reasons:
too much coffee and getting old.

The words that churn around my head
don’t always make it down my arms
and out through my fingers.
Who cares? I’m sure
they’re no great loss to literature.
And when I settle down in here and open up
what then?
What comes will come.
If you never start, you never reach the place
where the journey settles into rhythm.
You never catch the flow.
but it’s so much easier,
not to start.

So I come here,
and leave the house, the cats,
the dirty pots, the dusty furniture, the grubby floors,
escape them all, evade responsibility.
Displacement, of myself and of my thoughts.
Here I will coax the words out.
Any words will do,
the words I lost, the words I chased
to the bottom of a cup of coffee
and then what?

I probably should order another
but who cares, when I’m invisible?

Linda Rushby, Wednesday, 13 September 2017

NaPoWriMo

April is NaPoWriMo, short for National Poetry Writing Month – though these days, like NaNoWriMo, it’s an international event.

It was started in 2003 by American poet Maureen Thorson, who decided to write a poem a day and post them on her blog. Since then, poets from all over the world have taken up the challenge, and poems spring up every April faster than daffodils in Wordsworth’s garden at Grasmere.

To find out more, you can visit the NaPoWriMo website. But to join in, all you need to do is write a poem and post it somewhere – on a blog, on Facebook, wherever the fancy takes you.

Share it with the world, get out there, and support your fellow poets by reading their contributions.

You can read my contribution here.