#loiswilliams

Amongst the exhibits of the Wisbech and Fenland Museum, Lois Williams read a series of poems she wrote during the three weeks.

She also produced a risograph poster stack of her poems which were installed in St Peter and St Paul Wisbech and available to take away.

  This poem responds to my learning about parishioners who hid fragments of medieval stained glass during the iconoclasm that gripped East Anglia and the Fens during the 16th and 17th Centuries.

I was moved by the idea that an image could be powerful enough to be destroyed, and then powerful in another way to the rescuer of its fragments.  It made me think differently about risk and salvage as actions connecting humans and objects.  Some of the rescued glass later worked its way into restored windows during the Victorian era, and sometimes in ways that created mysterious anatomies and landscapes—a face made of other faces, for example.

          Keeping the Glass

    Imagine the sound—ricochet of shattered glass

clatter of shards, of saints atomised

  Picture the iconoclast’s hand—the exact moment

the window splits the brick’s flightpath,

  the brick a little warm from being held          

then cooling in the hurl

  Perhaps the wrecking was done at night        

the glass dark, its many eyes unmet

  each image, symbol smashed and catalogued,

an archive of disposals

  Imagine the windows gone, air rushing in

in a great levelling of atmospheres

  And afterwards, after the spectacle,

going there under the cover of an errand

  to look for faces in the grit, to gather

fragments of depicted miracles

                and pocket them away to britches, chimneys,

jars of horsegrease, blanket hems, the larder’s

  lump of lard, anywhere unlikely—

Think of the hidden medieval glass,

  colourful and rare as an insect

in an unmapped landscape

  Imagine its resonance, a small chipped secret

clanging in the vacant chancel of a faith

  Imagine being that sure our uncertainties matter—

that you pass the glass along over centuries,

  keeping it for a safe time, not knowing

Part 2: The Wash, further out...

Russell's duck eggs, Saturday market

John's cheese dish (Royal Albert crown china), Wisbech auction

The river workers know the way to home

is always changing  though it seems the same:

same Nene, same Wash, same marshland flocked with gulls,

same lighthouse twins at Sutton Bridge and seals

cat-napping at the muddy edge where sea

and river bodge a way of talking free

of hesitation—salt/fresh fluencies

of water meeting water. Here, beneath

a sky enough for painters, cormorants,

the RAF, the spin of windfarms and

the suddenness of squalls and shooting stars

the boatmen watch the current, check the draught,

adjust for deviations, compass swing,

and make for deeper water knowing

      it still comes down to instinct—when to leap

the pilot boat and meet the other ship’s

long ladder rope, and when to rudder-nudge

into the basin, right place/right time, judge

the narrows and outwit the river’s wit

with horsesense borrowed from white horses out

at sea among the family of buoys

whose names speak loyalty—Mac, Big Tom, Eye—

eternally.  If what becomes of us

in leaving is we’re loved or missed enough

to stick around as words, as these men were,

then languages, like tides, return us where

we can be useful, humanly alive

grilled courgette on toast from Coffee & Square

Poem For A Best Meal

  My best meal of the day arrives on toast,

familiar as breakfast: an egg poached

exactly soft, reminding me that most

best things in life are unassuming, lost

on us until we notice how they taste

of some old happiness: sun, sky, first

requited kiss, a journey travelled just

to know what’s there—like this café, a seat

and tea, a chunk of almond cake, a plate

of gardengrown tomatoes, grilled courgette

sliced thick as tractor wheels, enough to set

me up for days, this homemade handmade feast.

If meals could talk, this meal would sing a flight

of notes as clear as early mornings, bright