HAPPY NATIONAL POETRY DAY!

For this year’s National Poetry Day, I was commissioned by BBC Local Radio to write a poem as part of the #FreeTheWord project. The project took 12 regional words chosen by listeners, and asked 12 poets to write a poem based on their region’s word. I was the poet from Cumbria, and my word was ‘twining’ (moaning / complaining etc).

You can watch the poem here:

–

Ode to Twining

The week summer slammed the door so hard the valley
rumbled from its leaving, you couldn’t move for moaning.

Not fat complaints dropping powerless from lips,
or torrents gossiping and coarse – up here,
our words are leaner, tighter… Here we twine,

unwinding our moans like wool
festooned between us. When the weather
rocked the windows and swept away the bins,
we twined till twining became
entwining, till we had twilled ourselves
in the warp and weft of our words –

the way we were that other winter, when water
rose through the town and the roads were a maze,
when the rain was a blank wall
wetting our backs and the wind was a wild thing,

when our words unravelled and all we could do was follow them
like string – till together our twinings wound thicker,
were rope, and we bound ourselves together like love
as the floodwater billowed and swept –
and we stood fast in our twining and we waited, and we won.