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Valerie
McKinley
Featured Poet
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Valerie
McKinley
A
Featured Poet from Poetry
Now Magazine
I was born in Leicestershire in 1943. I live very happily with the kindest man I've ever met and who has become the love of my life, my second husband Mac. We live in the pretty village of
Allington, which is situated in the lovely vale of Belvoir on the Lincolnshire/ Leicestershire border.
I could go into great detail about how poor I was as a child, living within a large family in post-war Britain, and how I spent months of my adolescence in a sanatorium fighting TB, thereby missing great chunks of my education. That would be boring, so I won't.
My poetry is inspirational and instinctive. I've never really had a creative writing lesson in my life. I write because it feels right and because I love it.
I would have loved to have met and got to know Sir John
Betjeman, he is my hero. Every time I look at his picture above my desk he makes me smile!
Lately my health has been poor and I recently lost my beloved elder brother, along with the father of my two lovely girls. With them it seemed I had lost the ability to write. Each time I tried, the words on the page seemed very trite and pointless. I really thought I had nothing left to say and I became very depressed. It was a fellow poet who snapped me out of it. Talking on the telephone one day, he made me realise that there were people living in this world today far worse off than I and that my life was a bowl of cherries by comparison. So at his suggestion I decided to turn my negative feelings into positive ones, by writing about all my troubles, real and imagined. And hey, it worked! So, to Mick Nash, I say a great big thank you.
Writer's
Block
Like a dried up river bed
I am parched.
My heart is cracked,
my soul is scorched.
Thoughts shrivel, refuse to take shape
fail to form.
Ideas abort
my brain fogs.
Uninspired.
I am lost.
This
Man
For Mac
This dear man I married late in my life
This proud human being who was alone,
This man who thought his heart was carved in stone
Then found it flesh when he made me his wife.
This man whose lot had been so hard to bare
This noble human soul in torment grown,
This dearest man who simply had not known
That there was more to life than sheer despair.
He was my saviour too, this man so good,
He made my living worth the while again,
He reinvented my world, made me sane
He made me want to love him, and I could.
We were meant to meet and make each other whole
Were meant to love each other, heart and soul.
The
End
He's dead! Departed,
he's gone...
Though in my mind's eyes I see him when he was still strong
when he was young, vital, unimpaired,
when he loved his children
when he still cared.
When he liked the way I looked,
when he ate everything I cooked.
When life was still inviting;
when loving him was still exciting...
Until he began to put on a show
and turned into someone
I didn't know...
It's over, he's gone...
Post
Writer's Block
I feel unencumbered, so free, at last!
My life my own, to enjoy to the full.
All my cares, my woes, belong in the past
I feel unencumbered, so free at last.
My doubts, my shadows, aside have been cast
My future, so bright that I feel its pull.
I feel unencumbered, so free at last
My life? My own to enjoy to the full!
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