Dreams of Bees

On Christmas Eve we stood in the kitchen listening to the bees. The bass-buzz of hive was accompanied by the falsetto whine of a cheese-filled fridge, and the percussion of cutlery in the sink.
“I was reading that bees have dreams,” said Katie, “what do you think they dream about?”
We guessed they dreamt of light and flight and flowers. It was impossible to know, but, in our imaginations, bees always dream of magic.

🐝 🐝 🐝

Scottish Vows

A poem for Burns’ Night – to be performed in a wavering English/Scottish accent.

Preamble

An English friend of mine has recently applied for honorary Scottish citizenship. He’s spent the past few weeks travelling a thousand miles around Scotland on foot, and tonight (if all’s gone to plan), he’ll be arriving at Edinburgh Castle for a special Burns Night citizenship ceremony in front of the Scottish Parliament and assorted Scottish dignitaries.
He’s sent me a copy of the speech he’s going to give, and I’m going to share it with you now.

Beet Poetry

Written for an evening of vegetable-themed stories and poetry in 2013. Since featured on the Cultivate Oxford and Kitchen Counter Culture blogs, and in the Undine Zine.

(Beet Poetry)

I saw the best veg of my germination destroyed by cooking:
carrots, beetroot, swedes; mashed with butter by angry chefs at dusk,
or grated and juiced by the illuminated machinery of kitchens
purple-headed onions burning in forgotten pans in neon-lit takeaways

The Pumpkin

A reimagining of an old story, written for a vegetable-themed event. To be performed while dressed as a pumpkin.

🎃
A pumpkin can dream, can’t he? Perhaps, I thought, I’ll be chosen. I’ve grown all summer – made myself big and round and beautifully orange for them. One day, they’ll pick me, bring me in, and carve me a face – cut some eyes and a smile, give me a way to show some expression. It’s not that I don’t have feelings, but I’ve not got any way to express them at the moment. Evolution was cruel to emotional pumpkins.

Flight

There are layers of sky – smaller and lower than stratosphere and mesosphere. There is the sphere of bees and wrens, extending no higher than my shoulder. Next the sphere of the songbirds, where blackbirds trill from the bare-branched apple-trees. Higher, kites and buzzards ride the spiraling thermals of the city, and above them, white gulls spin their airy circles. Higher still, with wings catching the sunlight, airliners score chalky lines in the skies between cities.

🐝

Bathwater

Written for the Lonely Stroud project

“You’ve used a striking image there,” said Andy, “that line at the beginning about Stroud being in the bottom of the valley, like the last bathwater around a plughole.”
“Like the cold grey dregs of old bathwater,” said Sandra, reading proudly from her single-folded, double-spaced sheet of 11pt-printed paper and smiling at the other students.
“But what I’d like to explore with it,” he continued, “and what we all need to be aware of, particularly with travel writing, is how we create a sense of tone. Can anyone offer any thoughts on that?”

Hamish th’ Sconsie Haggis

 

A poem for Burns Night.

Preamble:
We’ve heard Robert Burns’ Address to the Haggis. And there’s one line that particularly interests me – the one suggesting that the haggis pin “wad help to mend a mill in time o need”. I wondered how exactly would the pin be used? What ‘time of need’ creates a situation which can be remedied only with a haggis-pin?

Sparks

Fiction: female voice. This was written for the ‘Stories of Change‘ project, and adapted as part of this work by Vicky Long.

At the beginning, there were sparks. Not the metaphorical start-of-relationship sparks, but real sparks, vivid blue and bright as camera-flashes. I was catching the Tube with Archie, taking him back to meet his Mum at Heathrow. He was excited: the excitement of a railway-obsessed four-year-old who had spent the weekend in London repeatedly asking whether we could ‘go on the trains now’. Other kids would have been excited by the dinosaur-skeletons or the zoo-giraffes, but Archie was much more interested by turnstiles, escalators and maintenance-cupboards: the grubby innards of the commuter-transport network.

Beginning

— eye–line and water–line — eye–level and water–level — equal —
stream and bloodstream feel each other’s warmth and chill.

Beelines

When I moved to Oxford, I learnt my way around the suburbs – finding the shortcuts and snickets: the bramble-tangled paths, broken-fences, and the concrete culverts wide enough to walk along. Finding a new path felt like making a fold in the landscape – a bringing together of two corners, a reducing of distance, or a straightening of lines.