.png)
Kerry Darbishire
back
next
the poet
Living in the English Lake District and writing most days, Kerry Darbishire is inspired by her wild surroundings. Her poems have won – and been placed in – many competitions, and her work has appeared widely in anthologies and magazines. Kerry's three poetry collections are A Lift of Wings, Distance Sweet on my Tongue and Jardiniѐre. There are also her pamphlets A Window of Passing Light, Glory Days (in collaboration with Kelly Davis) and River Talk.
the poems
River Talk
After Raymond Carver
I’d slip across mossy rocks
to catch your intonations
clear as glass splintering morning air,
accents you taught me
before the scent of pine lifted
from your tongue, before blackbirds
and traffic spilled over the bridge.
Come autumn you’d growl open-mouthed
through the woods towards me
louder than a stream, faster than a beck,
bold as a heron, I’d wait on the brim.
Sometimes a rush of hungry dippers
murmured through marigold edges
like angels, but I didn’t need saving.
I learned to measure the highs
and lows of your voice even in winter
when your lips barely moved,
and you held me like a mother
in a perfume of breathy lullabies
sinking deep into my pillow
and I clung as if I was your child
to every word you whispered,
like fog shifting from your skin.
All night I’d lie awake
listening to the sound the water made
until I was fluent.
Jardinière
When I lift the lid, I let go the ghosts
of kings and queens tombed in their paper-dry
beds – buds and petals still clothed in the palest dawn,
bonfire-grey, evening-sky-pink, thunder-cloud-yellow,
honesty’s sheen like rainstorms that often sent us back
inside with the smell of drenched earth in our hair.
When I lift the lid, I could turn a field into a garden,
work all day, become Vita Sackville-West or
Gertrude Jekyll using her painterly approach to colour.
Season after planted season I grew, cut and gathered
aquiligea, rosa rugosa, alchemilla, poppies, larkspur;
honoured their brief blooms in vases until
they threw themselves down like confetti.
When I lift the lid, forty summers rise and wake
from slumber: lapsang souchong and cake, birdsong,
afternoons fading in deck chairs, slow-scented evenings
folded in the wings of moths; my daughter’s tenth birthday,
the spring she broke her arm, the autumn she left home
and my mother fell ill. It is a thing to leave your soil.
When I go I’ll take my garden with me.
Song of the Fell
When you say fellside
a woodpecker drums spring
into the ghyll, curlews turn their tune
inland on salt clouds scudding west
to east fast as a fox crossing high slopes
where runnels of earth slip from lairs
and whins begin to yellow the air.
When you say fellside
an evening in summer swims out
of my children’s eyes as they race
to the beck where lizards soak up warmth
from boulders, foxgloves guard sheep trods,
firm as stone, where reeds lean in like old friends
and distance spreads a blue cloth.
When you say fellside
owls haunt low light, the first frost
snaps at hedges of hazel and thorn, snow
steals boundaries without a second thought
from high intakes at rest, hollow nests, berries
shrivel and all evidence of life before
is squirrelled under white.
When you say fellside
celandines must be opening, a half-moon floating
in a lake-blue sky lifting sun, swallows
and flights of geese over Whinfell;
our bright steps climbing a new path to find
water-mint, frog spawn, primroses
waiting for rain.
Publishing credits
River Talk: Flights (Issue Five)
Jardiniere: Jardiniere (The Hedgehog Poetry Press)
Song of the Fell: Finished Creatures (Issue 5, 'Surface')