Woodcock

I'm very pleased to have won First Prize in the 2018 Keats' Steps Poetry Competition held by Teignmouth Poetry Festival with this little piece 'Woodcock'.

Warm in my father's palms, the woodcock lay
soft, its short neck lolling, head tilted down,
long beak scribing out a grave on the ground.

The cryptic bars and patchwork of freckles:
perfection, save for where the shot had ripped
aside the fine curtain of its plumage.

Pluck downwards so as not to tear the skin
(not up against the grain like tougher fowl)
then draw, clean and truss the little game-bird.

From the top edge of the wing you can pull
the pretty pin feather for a hat band -
though artists like them for detail painting.

Later I went out walking in the scrublands
hoping I would hear a Woodcock whirr up
from the bushes to paint its own detail

across the Winter sunset and perhaps
its haphazard zig-zagging flight would say
It's not over, I'm still here, it's okay.

March 2018 : News!

I’m delighted to announce that Green Bottle Press will be publishing a full collection from me in July 2018. Title still to be decided. If you want to know when it comes out and how to get a copy come and find me on Facebook or Twitter (@marcomando ).

In other news: I’m looking forward to kicking off the Teignmouth Poetry Festival on the 15th March performing a poetry and music show with my brother Andrew playing hammer and Appalachian dulcimers as The Woodward Brothers

On April 26th I’ll be reading at Ocean Gallery in the Royal William yard in Devonport, then jumping onto a boat to sail around Plymouth harbour (reading poetry to a captive audience - well, unless they’re really good swimmers) as we voyage round to the Barbican to continue with a further reading in the B-Bar at the Barbican theatre.
Further details here: http://www.b-bar.co.uk/2018/02/thursday-26th-april-forked.html?m=1

The Woodward Brothers are also performing on the poetry stage at Glas-Denbury Festival in the green fields of Devon (7th July);

....and have just been booked again for Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall (26/27/28/29 July) following last year's successful if rather wet shows!
It’s a tricky thing to get right, the music and poetry combination, but we're getting some lovely feedback so it seems to be working pretty well...

The Strange Death Of Jenny Joseph

Happy to have this ekphrastic response poem for an image by Daniel Frost
published in Visual Verse 2/2018.

Snipe

Another from my sequence of poems loosely related to waterfowl.
Published at Ink Sweat and Tears 11/17



Her wet eyes were green as fenland water.
The twelfth day of August and she could hide
alongside you in her crypsis of hair
until it seemed that you might step on her -
then she'd be gone in a clatter of pans,
a flap of arms, a fluster of car keys.

I recall her whisper though, even now,
when she told me in her own thesaurus
how rain falls, how leaves fall, how there must be
a reckoning and some great final count.
Poor at consolation I took to maths
and numbered all the ways I made her cry.

Herons and Bitterns

I’m pleased to have had these two waterfowl poems up on Caught By The River recently.
Each from a forthcoming book - although two different books! Watch this space...


Herons

Grey as the watery dawn,
wet with the guts of frogs,
the blood of moorhen chicks,

Ardea Cineriae:
ghosts upon the foreshore,
patient for fish and history.

Separate and sentinel,
misplaced milestones, attendants
to the helicoidal flow

which undermines the river bank
(a sliding snake that slowly
eats the water meadow).

Their perfumed legs
are nectar to minnows
who crowd to be speared,

their beaks - the impalers
of stooping falcons.
Crepuscular anglers,

delicate and granite,
timid but constant,
observers and recorders.

Under their plumage
their hollow bones
are etched with runes

- the unreadable toll
of the seasons' cycle,
the pool of the river.



The Bittern

The cows stand dying in the field
sharp hip and shoulder blades revealed.
Who knows from where their sickness comes?
The Drekavac; the Mire-Drum.

Booming from the lonely reed bed
this ghost of the unbaptised dead
looks up toward the rising sun:
the Drekavac; the Mire-Drum.

Some say he drops his dreadful beak
into the marsh before he speaks
to make the stinking fenny ground
an amplifier for his sound.

Bog-Bumper: shy in tan and dun,
the Drekavac; the Mire-Drum.


http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?s=marc+woodward

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Calf Eye / Caught by the River

 

 

 

Calf Eye

A crowd of gawkers stood around to watch
a digger lift the dead calf from the beach.

A Devon Red, its beaten hide sand-caked,
twisted legs flung out, looking like it might

have dugs its way up from some darker place
to die, satisfied, in ozone and light.

The driver heel-screwed his cigarette,
climbed in the cab and turned toward the calf.

One clouded eye stared up, pointing blindly
at the canvas sky. A polished pebble,

quartz and slate embedded in a slab
of sand and hair. An eye that once looked

through a thin fence without understanding.
The digger chuntered in. We turned aside.

                           -8-

Delighted to have my poem Calf Eye picked up by Caught By The River for their excellent and inspiring site  www.caughtbytheriver.net

Thanks to The Clearing/Little Toller where it was originally published earlier this year (see post below)

The Kilners

In April three poems were published at The Clearing. Here's one - follow the link to their beautiful site for the others...

https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/poetry/new-poems-marc-woodward/



The Kilners

Two men ignited the bones of the past
one Monday, late in the year’s dark corner.

Boats weighed anchor off the Ness on Tuesday,
awaiting high tide and a hold of lime.

By Wednesday combustion was well progressed,
with a caustic stench and skin-peeling heat.

In Thursday’s moonlight the smoke ascended
like the twisted spire of Ermington church.

On Friday the pall-bearer night wore no gloves;
it shattered wherever it laid its pale hand.

Only the blistering lime kiln was spared
and the two men who slept close to its wall

flanking their deadly charge. During the night
the young burner rolled into the fire.

Whether the boy was choked by toxic smoke
or wooed the heat too closely none could say,

but he burned with insufficient fuss
to rouse the slumbering quarryman.

Saturday the kiln was cooling, ticking down
to Sunday when his riddlings could be raked.






.

Autumn Leaves - music!

Well, there's always music when you've had enough words...

https://youtu.be/URxh20xmSSg

Beeches

Before he fucked off for good with his tart,
his wife dug in a thin row of saplings
along the paddock edge to slice the wind.
Driving past this November afternoon
I saw their leaves shiver orange and gold
against a low dissolution of cloud.
Beeches. Slow growing and platinum barked:
sentinels lancing the uncaring air.

Others might have planted ash for the fire;
or a timber crop, spruce perhaps or fir?
Fruit trees? Apples, plums, pears: all could grow there.
Instead, she bunched her hair and planted beech,
that tall, proud and pretty tree which despite
the winter frost still wears its golden leaves.




Published 12/6/17 at Clear Poetry
https://clearpoetry.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/marc-woodward-three-poems-3/

News

I'm delighted to have had work popping up in a variety of places recently including Acumen, Clear Poetry, Popshot Magazine, The Clearing,  Prole and in anthologies from Picaroon (Troubadour) and OWF Press (Poetry about Pubs) - my thanks to all the editors.

I'm now looking forward to performing some music and poetry at Moreton Music Day and Port Eliot Festival over the next few weeks where I'll be joined by my brother Andrew on hammered dulcimer. Should be a lot of fun - come and say hello.

Check out their websites for further details set times etc - or follow my Facebook page www.facebook.com/marcwoodwardmandolin

Beyond Broadwoodwidger

Let us suppose your car packs up
out here. Beyond Broadwoodwidger,
St Giles On The Heath, Virginstow.
It is night - a justice of darkness
that lives on these shapeless acres.
You walk the twisted lane a mile
then, seeing lights, you cut across.
Fields, hedges, a dark shadowed copse.
Fields, gates, the woodland edge.

What do you feel?
You feel the brief breath of an owl;
silence after the fox's cough.
What do you hear?
You hear the weight of condensation
on a vast ocean of bending blades.
A hundred rabbits knew your sound
through the earth, long before the air
announced your voice or waved your scent.

Here there is nothing to save you.
If you lie down now, this wet ditch
may be your decomposing place.
Who will find you? Only strangers.
Still the dark world will keep moving,
eating, weatherbound, star stared.
Out here, in the twitch of spiders,
the fright of jays, the quick knee-jerk
of a cricket's ear -  a moment
considered, passing, forgotten.
The only trace: a disturbance
in the scent blown down from the wood;
an imprint on the retina
of a cow's large soft eye, fading.



Originally published in Otter New Devon Poetry  C.1989
and included in A Fright Of Jays published by Maquette Press 2015

The Green Shall Inherit

Put the sky behind you and clamber down
from the wind harried ridge to the deep coombe.

The air becomes still, the trees exhausting.
June the third and these plants would consume you

if such was their nature. Turn and turn back:
the weeds sprout even while you look away.

Drop to the bridle track, shrink to the beads
of dew, cuckoo spit froth, blackberry spike,

stick, splinter and mould. Ant, aphid, woodlouse,
and all the catastrophic underworld

are attending to their chores, chopping up
flags of leaves; new buds bulging in their spoil.

Careless, instinctual, organic - they're all
just a plague away from taking over.

Now shrink smaller still, down to the crazy
ommatidia of a beetle's eye,

gaze through a foliage kaleidoscope
- observatory to a mushroom sky.



First published in Popshot Magazine no. 17 Summer 2017