Curiouser and curiouser…

A window in my heart opened a little yesterday, and I let London back in. Walking through the Soho streets, the people, squawking, talking, shouting and laughing, the scent of coffee and cigarettes and cabbage leaves in Berwick Street market, all wafted around me, smoke fingers poking me, playfully. I stopped in Foyle’s to look for poetry; I sat with my friend Louise outside Bar du Marche and watched the Hari Krishnas go jangling past, the street cleaner and his spinning wheels obliterating all chance for conversation, our steak and frites washed down with bottles of cold beer. I was back in my beloved city, back in wonderland.

Sitting in reception, waiting for my meeting, I looked up at the bookshelves displaying the latest titles from the agency’s clients. There was one book that made me smile, that made me hold up my hands inside my heart and say okay, maybe this is the right path. On the middle shelf, directly on my eye line, standing proud next to Zadie Smith’s rose-coloured cover, was Alison Lurie. The circle of coincidence was completed.

The meeting went well. Over the next two weeks I will embroider and burnish my six chapters then give them back into the safe hands of my agent, ready to be sent out to prospective publishers. The journey has really begun.

Spelling

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue and hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells

and I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either/or.
However.

I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war.
And in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.

Ancestress; the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.

A word after a word
after a word is power.

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow and the word
splits and doubles and speaks
the truth and the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky and the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

~ Margaret Atwood

For more poetic inspiration, go here.