The One Tree
(from Again Behold the Stars, Cinnamon Press 2023)


How she misses the company of chestnut woods
leaves arched       above her head
like cockerels’ fancy tail-feathers     
prickling shells       to hurl at teasing brothers 


Chestnut rafters steady the house
buckets take on curves     in Nonno’s workshop         
chestnut broth           soothes her throat in dreams
chestnut bread      haunts her tongue


She visits the one tree in the barren orto 
fungus swells in the underbark       where beetles gnaw
intricate galleries        inside, the tree endures 


Fallen leaves rug the winter woods 
crushed underfoot        smell sweetly brown
carry chestnut amicizia       through February.




Scalandrino  

Wishbone-curved, it hangs
between forks and hoes in the lean-to.  

He made it from the split trunk
of a chestnut sapling, not for the farm  

but the small field near the house
where the children splashed in a trough,  

hot July afternoons. Made it slender,
carved the top like a prow, to slide  

into the crook between two boughs,
each rung narrower than the last  

as he ascended through curled leaves,
wasps, breaks of sky. He'd straddle the frame,  

fill a basket to the brim; cherries
for the sour-sweet jam they liked  

more than anything. These days, it's rare
he'll venture to the orchard. One son's  

a bank clerk, one's in California. Hard
to come by now, these scalandrini; might  

be worth a bit, if anyone remembered
the shack overgrown with vines,  

the ladder, bone-dry, silvering
in the dark among the onion-wreaths.


Scalandrino won the McClellan Poetry Prize in 2014




The Hospital at Night 

Scrawled charts, sheets
reefed in tight; this trolley-bed 
wants to sail away down the ward, 
out beyond the lighthouse

where nurses shelter mugs
of cocoa, fancy biscuits. One bay 
is lit up inside its floral tent,
a pleasure-cruiser.

Shadow dancers loom and fade, 
too distant to distinguish
the music, chink of glasses, 
words murmured above the moan

of waves. I patrol the channel 
between dreamers, fog-horners 
battened under blankets, or rocking 
on the surface, tiny torch lights 

trained on open pages, the flotilla
of the unsleeping. I lean one hand
on my wheeled rig, its bag of piss,
its trailing tubes, and haul up alongside.

The Hospital at Night was shortlisted for the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2010  



X-ray vision

There's a fracture known as the Open Book
often seen in these cases. Here, an angle
of bone I call the Swallow. Deep in shadowy fields,
the outline of something we almost recognise
and long to name: coat-hanger? Leaping dolphin? 
Look, where mist obscures the columns,
the boy with a broken wing is waiting
for our help, though he's by no means sure
that help is what he needs. That swoop
under the sun, pure joy, even the wrench
of falling must have seemed fated. Burnished.
But we've no time for all that, goose pinions
fixed with wax. Another story starts. Show me again 
your landmarks. Fetch the scalpel. Where do we begin?

X-Ray Vision was shortlisted for the Troubadour International Poetry prize 2012 

     

Marias

Baby Maria long-awaited, garlanded in lace, enthroned and bawling
in a wide black pram. 

Maria, our Virgin of Humility gowned in blue settled on the ground with baby Jesus
in a car park full of angels.

Maria in the corner shop, cutting ham into pink petals in the slicer.

Maria Lady of Succour
who saved the town from invasion.

Wild Maria of the torrent who lives on her own.

Terra cotta Maria in a niche
above the iron-work shop;
her calm, cracked smile runnelled with rain.

Crazy Maria, zucchini buds in her hair.

Silent Maria in the shadows
of her shrine; offerings of dried grass, cross-bow arrows, a jar
of wood anemones, a football scarf.

Scabby Maria sent home
for fighting in the playground.

Miraculous Maria of the Snowballs in August.

Easter Maria in a back room
at the Comune, waiting for the electrician to mend her fairy-light halo.

Maria named in a poster
on the wall by Sant' Egidio, departed this life last week, loved and missed by her family, 
a photo from the 1980s framed in black. 

Marias won first prize in the Battered Moons poetry competition 2013


Notwithstanding

Notwithstanding was highly commended in the Rialto/RSPB poetry competition 2013