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Wendy Pratt
© James Thackeray
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the poet
Author, poet and editor Wendy Pratt lives and works on the North Yorkshire coast. She's written several volumes of poetry – her most recent collection being Blackbird Singing at Dusk – and her nature/landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake, was described by The Observer as ‘remarkable’. Wendy is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Spelt Magazine, which celebrates and validates the rural experience through poetry, creative non-fiction and poetry film.
the poems
Nan Hardwicke
Turns into a Hare
In memory of M
I will tell you how it was. I slipped
into the hare like a nude foot
into a glorious slipper. Pushing her bones
to one side to make room for my shape
so I could settle myself like a child within her.
In the dark I groped for her freedom, gently teasing
it apart to web across my palm.
Here is where the separation ends:
I tensed her legs with my arms, pushed my rhythm
down the stepping-stones of spine. An odd feeling this,
to hold another’s soul in the mouth like an egg;
the aching jaw around her delicate self. Her mind
was simple, full of open space and weather.
I warmed myself on her frantic pulse and felt the draw
of gorse and grass, the distant slate line
at the edge of the moor. The air span diamonds
out of sea fret to catch across my tawny coat
as I began to fold the earth beneath my feet
and fly across the heath, the heather.
Sometimes I Pretend
I am a Dog
When we are alone together
I allow myself to become pack.
We stop and I sit
and you move about the place
in silence. Sometimes we both
lie down with our sides against
the parched earth and let our eyes close.
When people are near, I act
as if I am also a person. Mostly
it is just us and the Wolds or
the chalk farm roads and wind turbines
and rocks and cloud shadows,
the fast pace of the sun over great distances.
You do not look at the view as I do
but you understand how to move within it.
When I was a child, I hid under the teacher’s desk
and would speak only in dog. I did not pretend
to be a dog. I was a dog. I willed myself to canine.
The family dog was my brother. I ate from his bowl,
slept in his bed. I long to be that animal again.
Sometimes I test myself to see how dog
I still am. I run my tongue along my canines
and feel for the movement of my ears.
I slouch my back, and pull my knees up
let my spine fall between my shoulder blades.
Sometimes I climb a fallen tree or a boulder
like that and it pleases me, and it pleases you
to see me down at your level. This is joy.
In these moments I feel as the earth must feel,
and I feel as the glacial till must feel and
what it might be to exist only in sensation.
Eleven
I want you to know
that we are happy.
I want you to know that we laugh.
That some days I think I have forgotten
what you look like.
That we sit on the patio
drinking wine and sometimes
we don’t think of you at all.
That I can’t imagine you
at the age you would be now.
I want you to know
that I keep your clothes
near our bed,
where I can see them.
That your photo is faded
and everyone in it looks dated,
except you.
I want you to know that sometimes
I live in the days of your death.
That sometimes I can smell
the bereavement suite, sometimes
the sound of the heart monitor wakes me
and the sound of the fan whirring
and the smell of toast on the ward
and the squeak of trolleys wheeling drugs
in the corridor and you in the Moses basket
is all there is.
I want you to know that on those days
it is difficult to let you go again.
I want you to know
that today isn’t one of those days,
I want you to know that today
I carry you up to the cemetery like
a goldfinch on my shoulder
and that you bob away in the air
and then back again, and that
it makes me happy
to imagine us this way.
Publishing credits
Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare:
Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare (Prole Books)
Sometimes I Pretend I am a Dog / Eleven:
Blackbird Singing at Dusk (Nine Arches Press)