Poetry and Creative Writing for All

Elizabeth Davies

I was born in Africa, and spent my childhood on an African farm. I can remember really looking at trees and animals from an early age, and would get into trouble at school drawing horses on my exercise books! We left Zimbabwe in 1984 to pursue my husband’s career as a rehabilitation consultant, and have lived in many colourful countries. I have always managed to paint and write my impressions.

I write articles for my ladies’ group newsletters, and send descriptive emails of my life in Manila to friends and family. When a friend told me about the Forward Press website it opened a whole new world for me. I found I could really tap into experiences and express them in poetry. I hadn’t written a poem for ages until you got me going. It is much more satisfying than prose.

This first poem was inspired by a Zimbabwean water colour of jacaranda trees which hangs over my piano, and my memories of my home country far away.

Here are a few of my poems. Liz Davies  5,Lancaster St., Hillsborough, Alabang, Metro Manila Philippines

The Flower Exile

She lives in exile on a lush green island,
An island that’s always leafy, always wet;
Where new leaves push out the old,
And great fleshy flowers of orange and red
Rest on beds, on cumulous clouds of green,
Of viridian, emerald, and forest green,
Of green striped and spotted and splashed
With gold and cream, as if a profligate god
Had whirled and danced, and thrown gobbets
And streaks of tinted liquid with his eyes closed,
Laughing wildly against the sun.
But she will always yearn for the spare baked spaces
Of the high plateau of Africa, where, after a harsh dry spell
The weather turns, and against the gray lace of bare branch
A faint stirring comes. Among the eddies of dust
Small pale bells push through the ends of drooping wood,
And suddenly, along the street there comes
A heavenly cloud of lilac, hiding branches, shimmering
And multiplying in fallen reflections on the ground.
The people stop and stare, their eyes grateful for this change,
This outpouring of beauty in a dry land, and she measures her exile
In jacaranda seasons.

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The Delight of Donkeys

You half-see them, these pale worn creatures
Behind the newsman and crowds in war zones,
Trudging through swirling dust and debris,
Scourged and derided, burdened and thin,
Heads hanging heavy, eyes closed, ears half-mast,
Knock-kneed, stumbling blind on bombed roads
On tip-toe hooves.
But one morning on the beach at Blackpool,
A clear windswept morning, sand smooth as glass,
And delighted donkeys galloping away, away,
Bouncing off their shining shore reflections,
The winds of Paradise gusting between their ears.
The donkey lady thrusts a sheaf of reins at me.
“Hold them”, she shouts in comic desperation,
And bundles down the beach after her donkeys.
And there am I, dwarfed by these enormous beasts,
Hardly kin to those tiny newsreel asses, heads up
And eyes bright, trumpeting encouragement
At escapee brothers, rumps on quivering springs,
Their tall tufted ears towering over my head,
Their nostrils billowing like velvet bellows,
And breath coming in smoky bursts; thick furred chests
Broad and strong as warhorses, their noble cousins,
And I am glad to have seen the delight of donkeys.

The title comes from a phrase in the Old Testament, where Jehovah warns his Israelites to stick together or their Promised Land would be left to ‘weeds and the delight of donkeys’.

I also stole a phrase from G.K Chesterton’s wonderful poem about donkeys- ‘scourged and derided’. I hope that he would be flattered.

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Tropical Rain

Tropical rain is a wondrous thing;
So vast, so overwhelming across the land.
In sunshine it varnishes great leaves,
Shoots off the drainpipe ends,
Spangles the ferns, jogs leaves gently
Under strumming drops. The rice, the grass bow down
To its insistent beat. It soothes
The great dun beasts; the buffalo
Lie slick and tranquil, eyes closed in bliss,
Their curved horns resting heavy
Along their slanting shoulders.
Small shining boys leap rejoicing
And spray shoots, like silver spurs,
From their jumping jack heels.
The blessed rain, it fills the terraced fields
In mirrored sheets, it races down sloping paths,
Leaps over rocks, swirls in pools,
Benign and playful in the sun. But in the dark
It marches in serried, menacing ranks,
With its ally the wind, so great it has been named,
Circling the glimmering, battered houses.
The unseen armies drum and push on bamboo and thatch,
Long grey fingers searching out weakness,
Gripping, shaking the rafters, strong shoulder
Under the eaves, warning the huddled listeners
That The Rain is Master of All.

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Typhoon Trees

These great trees have stood along the avenues for years,
Looking down on passers-by, shading their walks.
From their long branches hang pearly shell globes
That glow over the Christmastide. In Spring
Their spreading summits are scattered
With pink and white flower bursts
That catch the sun. In country towns
Their strong arms hold platforms safe, to cradle lovers;
Their lace leaves curtain them in a shifting shade,
A pretty green room amid a crowded world.

But when the violent storms come round,
And rage and rip at all living things,
These lovely lovely beings creak and groan,
And their limbs are rent to the ground,
Leaving long jagged scars of red down their flanks.
The rasping sound hurts, tears at my bones,
As if I had breaking limbs, cracking joints,
Arms hanging useless and dead by my side.
But if you look closely you’ll see
That after just a week the scars have healed,
The fallen limbs sprout green, and even fallen
They revive and continue, lying leisurely
On their sides, arms turning up to the sun.

These last two poems were written after the strong typhoons that battered The Philippines this season.

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The Streets of London

Jolting along gently on the 777 bus to The Tate
I stared out through smeared windows
Onto a rain-blurred grey landscape,
Fell into a trance, and before I knew it
The concrete canyons fell away and…
Lavender grew and blew on Lavender Hill,
The Seven Sisters laughed and strode the street
Like colossi, shouting all into submission.
‘Twas then that I knew that I would love you
Till The Elephant romps again on castle walls,
And The Angel Islington
Stretched his wings and flew.

When I first came to London I just loved the mythological quality of some of the station names, and this was the result of that first encounter.

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The Dolphin-Me

On land I am ponderous, slow,
The elephant-me.
Flesh sags, hangs pendulous
Like melting wax.
Gravity claws, catlike, at horizontal ledges,
And drags at me, weighs me down.
But in a silver morning sea
I shed my weighty bonds;
I bound and swerve,
Glide and curve,
Skin shines brown and smooth
Through hissing lacy foam;
The dolphin-me,
Buoyant, joyous, invisible, alive
In the surging, pulsing sea.

I wrote this playing in the sea off Bali.

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And here are some haikus.

Mauritian Christmas

We had no Christmas tree
This year, but southern stars
In the tamarin.

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The Haiku Writer

She sits alone, fingers twitching,
Counting careful syllables
Once more…

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Beach Bums

The sunset fades to dark,
And we sift cool sand
At the edge of the world.

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Submission Guidelines: Poems of no more than 30 lines in length each will be considered.