It’s December 1st 💫
and this is my new book ’Fresh Start: A Shepherd’s Calendar’. It takes you through a year, through the months, through the seasons accompanied by John Clare’s quotes.
Fresh Start is available now from Rose at: rosecook108@gmail.com
(or from: info@greyhenpress.com) at £4 plus p&p
This is a fascinating book, one to turn to all the year round.
Crowning Party
This year the weather changed with rain
and cold in the North, hints of autumn.
When our children were small, we always held a party
when August began. Each wore a crown.
The barley fields wave theirs in a golden sea.
Farmers will begin to gather the grain.
My mother took us bilberrying up on the moors.
A whole wild day scrambling through heather.
Special sandwiches and pop.
photograph and poem Rose Cook
poem from Sightings available http://www.greyhenpress.com
Li-Young Lee – 1957-
She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.
I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.
But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.
Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.
photograph Rose Cook
When John O’Donnell
And when this ends we will emerge, shyly
and then all at once, dazed, longhaired as we embrace
loved ones the shadow spared, and weep for those
it gathered in its shroud. A kind of rapture, this longed-for
laying on of hands, high cries as we nuzzle, leaning in
to kiss, and whisper that now things will be different,
although a time will come when we’ll forget
the curve’s approaching wave, the hiss and sigh
of ventilators, the crowded, makeshift morgues;
a time when we may even miss the old-world
arm’s-length courtesy, small kindnesses left on doorsteps,
the drifting, idle days, and nights when we flung open
all the windows to arias in the darkness, our voices
reaching out, holding each other till this passes.
photo Rose Cook
Rose Cook 