Jenny Hockey

forgive us, gaston

it is all too easy to reach out for one more weed
on Sundays when the men gather at the pub
or bend to their bowls on the curve of the green,
easy to latch onto tasks we later inscribe in diaries,
not pausing to find our path among the leaves
of your book but believing every weed
must be plucked, that we must crawl upon the earth
oblivious to swifts — looping their threads of air,

fashioning trackless sculpture, forever undoing
their art as they wheel. May we lift up our eyes
to the swifts who flaunt the Poetics of Space,
soot-brown birds at roost on the wing.

Jenny Hockey is a Sheffield poet and retired anthropologist. In 2019 her collection, Going to bed with the moon was published by Oversteps Book. She also reviews regularly for Orbis poetry magazine and, with Carol Komaromy, has published a memoir (familyhistoryandwar.com).

Jenny wrote the following about her poem:

This was drafted in a workshop after a line from Donna Stonecipher, ‘it was all too easy to swim in the lake that summer’, https://hyperallergic.com/454125/donna-stonecipher-the- ruins-of-nostalgia-50-books/ (available towards the end of the article)

I chose Gaston Bachelard’s wonderful The Poetics of Space which, since the mid-nineties, I have hoped to read beyond the first chapter. Joanne Burns echoes this in a prose poem, ‘reading’: “she carried ‘the poetics of space’ round India for three months and it returned to her shelves undamaged at the completion of her journey”.

Finally, I’m using some of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems to help me slow down and escape the tyranny of the iambic pentameter.