The Jade Mountain

My favourite museum exhibit anywhere I have ever been reside at the Oriental Museum in Durham. It is an intricately carved jade mountain. I keep having to back there to see it again. If I could own one piece from any museum on earth it would be this.

May and June: The Bridge Between

It's June already and in many ways it feels like we should get a refund on the first half of this year.  We've been short-changed. Living has been interrupted. But I am reminded this year in particular of May and June -- not the months, but two sisters I never knew. They were born either side of midnight on May 31st and June 1st 1940 and so would have been 80 today but they died in infancy as, two years later, did another sister Eleanor. They never had a life but of course they were never forgotten and so on behalf of my other sisters, Annabelle, Margaret, Esme and Christine and the broader family, I remember them today by reading this poem for you The Bridge Between, on Facebook and posting it here too.  

The Bridge Between

On days of foxgloves we were taken a walk
to the wee stone bridge that united
the twin town-lands of Dunclug and Kirkinriola.

One foot in each parish
astride its gentle hump
within sight of the churchyard

their names would fall
like droplets in the family floe.
May and June

the twins who'd bridged those months
and spanned the 15 years between
pre and post war siblings,

shadow-sisters sleeping
in eternal double summertime
whose only bridge to us was DNA

never forgot by those who remembered
their brief days

before our lives began.

I wondered often but durstn't ask

were we replacement
or continuation?

That little bridge

is in a the folk museum now.

Dismantled, rebuilt stone by stone

it lost its place in time and space

and stands unnamed
in all but memory.

(published in Gyroscope Review 2017)

I have had 66 years on this good Earth. We have life every day. Let's treasure it.

                                                        My parents 1950-something