The Eclipse

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The Eclipse  by Jan Jones

The eclipse came when I was ten,
 one of the big girls in my small school.
We went out into the playground to watch,
all with dark cardboard celluloid glasses for protection.
Early summer, it must have been, because I wore a blue-checked dress
and the navy blue cardigan my mother had knitted.

When the darkness came, it was shocking
All senses gone except for touch
A little girl cried
I felt for her hand and pulled her close,
my other hand gripping my cardigan,
amazed to feel the texture of the stitches against my fingers,
magnified by the darkness,
feeling the difference between the front and the buttonhole band,
rubbing my thumb over the blue buttons that I’d helped take off last year’s cardi,
ready to transfer to this one.

The sun came back and with it warmth and the sound of the birds
and people laughed in relief and perhaps a little foolishness
and I looked at my friends, shivering in their smooth, desirable, shop-bought cardigans
with no texture or memories to anchor them to the world
and knew I would never envy anyone their clothes or possessions again.

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Red Warning

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red warning by Jan Jones

the walls of the house are warm
the bedroom smells of hot ironed sheets
outside, baked air stirs in a slow waltz

but this is England
my house is made of old, cold stone
the last time I ironed sheets was 1974

grief lies like a blanket
the earth in the garden is shrinking
stones and bulbs stranded on the surface

and I wonder
is this what the end of days is like?

the walls of the house are warm

 

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Ice Trees

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 Ice Trees by Jan Jones

Faint tracery of ice trees against the sky
like a ghost memory of how life used to be
before all this
before all the all this

Sunlight thaws the fairytale
brings winter-stark reality
another day of doing the next thing
then the next
then the next
then the next

Yet still sometimes when I look up
I see the feathery traces etched on my mind
cobweb-tenacious
wanting to whisper of hope

 

 

Crunching Acorns

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Crunching Acorns 

by Jan Jones

Crunching acorns underfoot
Too early because the year is broken

Conversing with myself
Because my head is a wide country I can go

Humming songs I listened to long ago
When I thought I was broken, but wasn't

Reading old books
From unbroken times

And hoping
Hoping

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SaveSave

New Normal

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New normal by Jan Jones

New times, we invent
new conventions to frame our
interactions

Unthinkable before, now it is
friendly to be the one to
cross the road first
preserve distance
call out a cheery greeting
as we pass

Politeness has become our social currency
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V E Day poem

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V E Day 2020
by Jan Jones

Today I woke early to order flour
sorted out spare plants for a friend
walked up the road for potting compost
and my aunt's paper
I watered
dug a row of vegetable garden because there's
no one else to do it
I tied red, white & blue ribbons and sang on the doorstep
I cried for all the happy stories
I cried for all the loss

I feel very alone
and very connected

Thank you V E Day 75
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From Poppies to Flames

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Tower of London poppies ~ August 2014

From Poppies to Flames by Jan Jones
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Watching the lighting of the Tower moat
I remember four years ago
The first thin stream of poppies
The silence as a thousand strangers stood in the still air
Gripping hands
Aching
Grieving
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Packing the poppies ~ Nov 2014

I was there again on the last day
I saw them dismantled
Packed away until you would
never know there had been a sea of blood

Four years ago. Four years.

In those four years I have lost irreplaceable friends
and so many icons. My history flickering out
Life diminished

A century ago
How many more never returned
Between the thin red line and the torches
Countless lives altered fast and forever

So much waste
And so much waste still
Make it stop

Peace

Not pieces
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Tower of London torches ~ November 2018

Archer

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Archer: Oct 2003-Oct 2018

For Archer   by   Jan Jones

I thought I had run out of grief
I was wrong
It seems there is always one more heartstring to wrench
Always enough space for one more wound

You were the best of cats, Archer
Sleep now
And then run with your brother forever



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Archer in his favourite place

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Archer kitten in 2003

Archer in the sun

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Archer and Merlin in 2011

Poems as character snapshots

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Poems are helpful for all sorts of things, from celebration to closure. I also use them to capture moments, to capture feelings and sometimes, to capture characters.

This is one I wrote a long, long time ago. Every time I read it, I can conjure her up. And every time, I understand her a little more.

Cutting Chips  by  Jan Jones


She cuts chips the long way
One slice at a time
Thanked me with remote eyes
when I told her how it could be done faster
but said there was more to life than speed

She fills whole afternoons shopping
Looking for things not to buy, reasons not to buy them
Changes her clothes several times a day
as an excuse to move from one room to another

She inhabits the kitchen distantly whilst we crack beers,
Eat dinner at peak acceleration, rattle through the washing up
Sits alone in the lounge in the evenings
with a CD and a glass of sherry on a drinks mat.
He always hated rings.

We ask, does she want to come out with us tonight?
She smiles and shakes her head
She’s going to watch television
There’s a programme later on about making ravioli

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David Bowie

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Roundhouse 1970
by Jan Jones

You set me ablaze

In a whirling, patchouli crowd
You ignited me

Fourteen
Square as new soap on the outside
Unformed within
The first touch of your music
Filled me with life
Moulded me
Made me yours
Made me myself

Dizzy in the darkness
Starbursts inside my head

Cool lips
Eyes that saw through to the soul

Boogie on, David
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Long hot summer

The temperature over the last couple of days reminds me of 1976, when the summer just went on and on. This was me then...

Promenade Summer by Jan Jones

That summer
When boys came up to my room to sit on my bed and
Gulp cold orange straight from the box
When coruscating music ran around the vaulted stone gallery
And seeped into my Indian cotton skirt as I sat cross-legged
Or lay full length on the wide empty floor to listen
When the heat in the park hit ninety and my stifling
Third-floor bedsit was visited by lads whose grants had run out
Or whose girls had got better degrees than they had
And who loved me because I was there and it was the thing to do
That summer

That summer
When I would refill my fridge daily with two quarts of orange
And a four-pack of lager
When I’d go to bed at two and wake every morning at six
When I was high on London and patched its tatters
Into a flame and russet headband
When I shed my skin eagerly and quickly and thought I had nothing left to learn

I went alone once to listen. Queued alone
Without my girlfriends to tell me which music I would enjoy
Paid twenty pence extra and slipped with guilty pleasure
Into a promenade large with sharing
Immediate with excitement
I rode a boy out of the hall
Made love to him in the park and lost him
Glad really to be alone
That summer
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World Poetry Day 2015

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A poem for World Poetry Day, because time itself might be infinite, but ours really isn't.

Hope you enjoy.

Keeper  by  Jan Jones

Spinning quietly through the country
Sunlit lanes when we least expect them
Stopping for a time-slipped hour to
wander a ruined mill and picture the
men and boys all now gone

And I think, one day we too will be gone
and panic stirs in me and I bin the
diary and the calendar
and I disconnect my computer
and I turn off my phone
and I reclaim this one day for us
just us

To keep in my memory

Just because

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Mildy Disturbing...

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On a day when the 31st October hit an astonishing 20 degrees Centigrade here in East Anglia, I bring you this poem...

A Light Fright Night by Jan Jones

It was a balmy All Hallows Eve
When the spirits began to appear
Peering warily round in the sunshine
As if they shouldn’t be here.

The ghost looked askance at her shift
All grey and tattery lace
“I don’t feel decent,” she muttered
And soaped herself in the mill race.

The skeleton scrubbed at his mildew
The zombies sunbathed and crumbled
The golems warmed up nicely
“Why go out?” the witches grumbled.

Ghouls floated like bunting
Across the pub garden
Banshees swigged cider
And lazily gargled. (*gargoyled?*)

The spectre inspector
Gave up in despair
As the vampires took afternoon tea
In their lair.

And the tricks were all treats
And the treaters serene
That unreasonable
Unseasonable
Warm Hallowe’en.
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Silent Testimony

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Yesterday, I went to the Tower of London to see the ceramic poppies instillation commemorating the fallen in World War One. It is most profoundly moving. Go if you can.

Silent Testimony   by Jan Jones

Poppies pour quietly from an open window
Each a broken body on a broken field far from home
In a while, the Last Post will sound
But for now this is beautiful, and tragic.
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Two minute challenge

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Okay, here's a two minute challenge for you. Take a photo NOW of what you are doing, of what you see right now, then write a poem to go with it direct to screen.

[You can take another minute for edits. Did I ever tell you how POLEAXED I was when I realised I could edit my own poetry? Before that it was just as the ink fell out of my pen.]

So, here's mine...

Hidden by Jan Jones

Only an echo left
of the afternoon's warmth
as I water

Cool English summer brushes my skin...
thin polite white wine perhaps
or genteel rosé
(neither of which has ever done anything for me)

But the colours

Oh, the colours

The colours of my planting are alive
Blazing in this well-bred air

and speak of deep Chilean fire
and sundrenched Californian excess

and I am reassured - looking at them - that there is more to me
then anyone here can tell
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Low Tide

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It's a slow, sleepy bank holiday today, so here is a slow, sleepy poem. Enjoy...

  

Low Tide by Jan Jones

River flats, mud flats,
Curving haze-shimmer all along the horizon
Slender silver loops of creek
Otherworld solitary
Impassable

Boats leaning on the river banks
Making slow, crazy-angled love,
mattress half on bunk, half up wall
distant trees feathering the hatch space
endless sky through dangle-curtained windows.

Late afternoon eddy of water
pushing in from the sea
covering the shining mud
sliding the world inexorably upright
returning us to civilisation

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On being a jobbing writer

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It isn't easy being a writer. Not my sort of writer, anyway. Without contracts or security, but still with an aching need to write, to entertain, to tell stories that readers want to read.

On with the motley by Jan Jones

Doing makework
Hopping from project to project
My whole life spent in the remaindered aisle
eyes darting from shelf to shelf for the
bargain-of-the-moment

Motley, always motley

A scrap of beauty here
A half-elegant phrase there
Buried in the rush for a temporary high
I long for a year’s space
To cloak myself in a world of my own fashioning
To explore leisurely
Spending a day finding just the right word
Knowing my characters down to the base of the iceberg
Security

But the car needs petrol
The children need MP3 players
So it’s on with the motley and smile
And pare the ease of sleep to the bone.

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Thinking back

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So, in between peeling potatoes and watching last night's Led Zeppelin concert on television, I wrote this poem...






Wishing by Jan Jones

Listening to Led Zep
And wishing I was that girl again
And thinking of decisions taken
Or not taken

And wishing

Watching them grown up
Golden
Head of an irascible angel
And feeling the weight of the years
(but still fancying them, even now)

Old rockers...
Are just like me

And now they have experience in their voices
and richness in their movements
and a thousand different paths
and a thousand different lives
flash before me

And though I would never, never unwant my children...

I’m still thinking

And wishing

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Remembering...

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Flanders meets the High Street
by Jan Jones
 
Standing in Waitrose at eleven o’clock
All life suddenly suspended
 
A woman reaching for cereal
An old man gripping his wire basket
Me with my trolley as
Thousands of cheerful, too fast soldiers
March before my eyes in jerky shades of grey
 
PALs
Joining up together
Fighting together
Dying together
A village wiped out. A community blasted.
So wrong.
 
The cashiers sit down
People move
 
Two minutes of life, gone in the blink of an eye.
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summer song

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Summer has reappeared and taken me by surprise. After a wonderful Romantic Novelists' Association Conference - of which more anon, since I have no photos of my own and will have to borrow from my pals, I have a poem for you...


SUMMER SONG by Jan Jones

Warm breeze on my skin
watering the garden in the last slow light
of evening

a dog barks
a child cries
the stallion in the field tempts the mares
still watching long-legged, awkwardly adolescent foals

and I am slow
and warm
and stupid from working through the haze of the day
half in my created world
half in summers long past
when I was invincible and laughing and willing
and the stallions came whistling

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