After many years, the poetry has hit the pavement. I’ve been working on a Covid memorial project called Remembering Together, a co-creation with members of Lung Ha Theatre Co and The Maple Group, and users of the space at Wardie Bay, Edinburgh. Getting away from it all but having somewhere to come back to, searching for something whole, feeling like everything is at a distance, trying to put two and two together, or make sense of it all, and feeling like grief isn’t so much an event as a daily, woven, way-forward…..the memorial has culminated in an art trail at Wardie Bay – ten artworks intended to invite you into your present moment…including this snippet of poetry, (“quietly foraging for something whole….”) in the pavement at the entrance to Wardie beach. The poem is split apart, read both ways, with 2metres between each line…The present moment became an antidote to loss in the work we were doing to share stories, memories, lockdown days….

Stewart Ennis and I have been working with new Scots and those for whom English is a second language through the Glasgow Life artist-in-residency, hosted by Cranhill Dev Trust in Glasgow’s centre East. We have been working on the theme of Time- all of it online- and this is a collection of process scribbles and shots Stewart has put together while we work on making the notebook to return to participants. What would you say if Time were in the room with you? how does time feel to you today? how does Time move? and is there any such thing anyway right now ….

Thanks to the Scottish Book Trust, Kathryn Welch has been able to place my poetry road signs in her community garden and people make their own

from the title of my current play, Though This Be Madness and the poem, ‘Cusp’:

Cusp

see one or two wash up on Kooljaman at dusk

dune pale

bewildered

renting the shore

clutching a terry-towelling corner

whisked hair bent toward mercury sand

tracing the tail end of a neep tide

quietly foraging for something whole

in tide-chipped curls of home

trawling for perfection

to nestle in a palm

free from panic

depressing

tyres to force

a way through

a forgiving

sand, deeply

resilient

Land Cruiser parked hushed and inappropriate

we dig our heels into a photograph

squint to etch this dusk into memory

peeling layers of rust, ochre, and bone dust

from an unlikely blue – blinking beauty in the face

stumbling, grateful, captivated

Last year for the Scottish Mental Health and Arts Festival, I wrote and performed Though This Be Madness….a play that toys with an attempt to tell you a story through the frame of sleep-deprived motherhood.

ie.

“Once upon a time…

I don’t have time”

There’s poetry in it. Which is why I feel justified posting it here, but I keep wondering what I should blog this post for, when the site was started as a response to working within the queue community in particular. Things have widened up since, and the poems work their way into performances, films, plays, the skin on my coffee and my to-do-list…

off topic.

Though This Be Madness is more like a collection of tales, snippets of nap-time story told in a fractured format, whilst a recovering mum is attempting to soothe her wee one that won’t sleep lying down..on a bounce ball. It is a story about sisterhood. And as is true of the idea of writing about the Titanic while you’re on it, (you just have gargle salt and sing out, soaked), performing it keeps re-surfacing as I bob along the early years of parenting. Most recently, Glasgow’s The Platform, and I think I know where it will turn up next. The piece toys with the ridiculous notion of Staying On the Ball….I get to deflate mine at the end.