By Maggie Rowe
Thistle Field Fence
A poetry collection
Compiled over fifty years of writing and editing, this is a collection of many of my unpublished poems as well as those previously published in magazines, chapbooks and anthologies.
I’ve lived in England, Wales and the USA, and I write about growing up in a large family on the chalk downs near Oxford, visiting grandparents in Ireland and London, raising three children and teaching in the United States, and trying to understand the world through the big subjects of homesickness, love, loss, joy and contemplation.
How can a mortal person know / what will be needed in a new place? We carry what we can, and we set down what we can. In this book I’m setting down what I can. Who knows what will happen / after the softening, the falling in?
Poems from Thistle Field Fence
Arriving, Dublin
A blunt needle piercing
thick grey felt,
our plane drops through cloud;
below, I see a whale
passing the mouth of the bay
and then what I might expect:
ships, blue and green,
heading for open water;
islands; crops;
the first houses.
Once I’m back in America
I must remember that
during my dark hours
dawn is already lighting
Dublin’s harbour,
and whales swim there
like knees moving under silk.
Resurrection
We approached the clean edge of the grave hole,
my sister and I.
Mary wound on the film of her new Bakelite Brownie,
lining up a sharp picture.
We shouldn’t have seen how naked he was,
the rusted arrowhead between his ribs.
He hadn’t just been left behind, slumped from a battle
but laid out feet to the east in a Christian burial.
An Anglo-Saxon warrior he was. We could see his teeth.
They took him up out of the ground to the Reading Museum.
He thought he was going to lie on the chalk under the earth
until Christ came.