Lynne Rees

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Poem: January

on December 29, 2019

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new year poem

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Poem ~ Never

Never For Mam, 1st December 1932 ~ 25th March 2021 Grief keeps changing its shape – a weight like a kilo bag of sugar compressing my lungs, sometimes a water smoothed stone that fits perfectly in the palm of my hand. Yesterday the heaviest of winter coats that refused to keep out the chill. Today, I woke and heard birdsong through the early morning mist and remembered the last words you wrote the month before you died – It’s good to be positive and looking ahead, Lynne . So here I am running the lanes looking for all the things I would have shared with you: the planting of young laurels along the hedgerow on St Vincent’s Lane, the way the moss has grown sparsely on one side of the stone bridge but thickly on the other, and how someone has laid a plank across the stream to cross from bank to bank. I think I understand now that grief remains with us. And I never had to say, Do...

Reflection ~ On being the next in line to die

The Last Uncle The last uncle is pushing off in his funeral skiff (the usual black limo) having locked the doors behind him on a whole generation. And look, we are the elders now with our torn scraps of history, alone on the mapless shore of this raw new century. Linda Pastan From her collection, The Last Uncle, W. W. Norton & Company (2003) My last two uncles died a couple of months apart, at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. At one of their funerals a cousin expressed the same idea that Linda Pastan so eloquently describes in the second stanza of her poem: we are the older generation now. The idea of being next in line 'to die' does not bother me. I am deeply grateful for all of my own 'torn scraps of history' and I do not feel alone on any shore. I don't know what lies ahead and I have no need to imagine what it might be. Not beleiving in any kind of afterlife, or second chance, is a comfort rather than the source of any fear. Having survived to be...

Poems about and for ordinary people ~ Before

My current project of delving into the history of my hometown, through exploring the lives of 'ordinary' people buried in the church and graveyards there, generally favours the medium of prose to the tell extended family stories. But sometimes what I want to say fits into the shape and concentration that poetry offers - a measured and gradual revelation, down the page, of image and emotion. When I first started writing poetry it was 'all about me'! I was totally unaware of the idea of needing to craft my experiences and language choices so they spoke to a (much!) wider audience. In 1992 I attended my first ever residential writing course at Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre of Wales, in Llanystumdwy on the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales. The course was called 'Poetry in Mountains' - and, true to the description, we were encouraged to write poems and climb mountains, including a couple of sessions of rock-climbing. And if that wasn't enough to make me...

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