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Pam Thompson
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the poet
A Hawthornden Fellow in 2019, Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer. She's been widely published in magazines including Atrium, Butcher’s Dog, Finished Creatures, The Alchemy Spoon, The High Window, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The North, The Rialto, Magma and Mslexia. Pam is the author of three poetry pamphlets – Spin, Parting the Ghosts of Salt and Show Date and Time – as well as full collections The Japan Quiz and Strange Fashion. Her fourth pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends, won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize in 2023.
the poems
Shoes for Departure
After Marina Abramović
You are about to set off on your journey.
What will you need? Map and compass?
Or if you’re at sea – telescope,
sextant – to track angles between you
and the stars. Tonight Polaris is brighter.
You are no stranger to True North.
No one is awake to wave you off.
Suitable clothing is taken for granted –
the hood of your parka, fur-lined, detachable
or your blue raincoat, as light as the song
of itself, is groundsheet and sail,
folds into the size of your hand,
the hand which feels under the bed
for the shoes for departure, hands
which find shoes of pale carved amethyst.
Putting them on is like stepping inside
the Earth, and as you do, the room,
your city, the galaxies, spin away
and you are the fixed point,
each foot, re-making gravity,
hardly moving at all, travelling far away.
Reading my
mother's diaries
admiring again her sloping
handwriting. I have been trying to fill in the gaps in my memory. No
that’s a lie. I have been trying to bring her back, to unspool her words
and sentences until they loop themselves into her own true form.
Mum, where have you been? All evening I've watched for the blur
of your shape in the stained-glass panel of our front door. I have been
a watcher at the gate. What kind of mother would stay out for so long,
stay out this late? I have been reading my mother backwards, standing
on the slope of my own life, looking down to that squiggly, tangled
path. She is so far ahead, the sun’s bright, I’m shielding my eyes.
In Whitby
on a January morning
my heart climbs the 199 steps
turns, takes a breath, and for seconds
is terraces, the swelling North Sea,
Inside St. Mary’s Church, my heart
reads a notice,
Do not ask the staff where the grave
of Dracula is because there isn’t one
and my heart smiles,
moving very slowly between pews
looking for, but not finding,
a carved effigy of itself.
Instead, is an offering and a candle
that stays lit even in the day’s
sudden gusts which blow inside
and outside my heart in the abbey
where it settles at last,
in front of a statue of St Hild.
Publishing credits
Shoes for Departure: The High Window (Autumn 2023)
Reading my mother's diaries: Sub/Urban Legends
(Paper Swans Press) / winner in the Paper Swans
Pamphlet Prize 2023
In Whitby: Mary Evans Picture Library