Tuesday

We had our local Humber-Ouse-Tweed Lapidus (http://www.lapidus.org.uk/) meeting on Saturday. This time a small (but select) group and this time in Durham. We happily spent time being inspired by the cathedral precincts and then shared our work, sparking off discussions which ranged from performance poetry to what is 'acceptable' to write about in poetry to the 'I' in poetry. What a pleasurable time and what a tonic at the end of a couple of challenging weeks.

I re-visited the chapel where I got married, St Mary-the-Less (why the Less? Who was the More?) and discovered a memorial to two 17th century women.

This is by no means a finished 'piece', however it catches the moment:

Wood absorbs.

Stone is cold,
gritty, gouged,
cold stone.
Hollowed out
and cold
is stone
of sand
from seabeds long parched
or sunk deeper into rifts.
Mouths gape
in stone
gouged from sand,
crumbling into crystals
once more.
Dorothy and Frances Carnaby
scored into
fossil strewn plaque,
a memory of deaths
centuries old encrusted with
sea creatures
buried a millennium
commemorated
where love, young and vital, blazed.

Wood absorbs the sun's heat
warming my shoulders and my elbow.