Lenni
 
She had no truck with softies –
you swam the river. Or not.

And, if not, endured
her silent scorn.

You went to the forest,
for bilberries. Or not.
 
Mosquitoes? Pah!
Lenni had no time for them.

Nor they for her – but you,
that was different.

When your bitten ankle
swelled and swelled

Lenni lathered it
with lead-water, didn’t care

if lead were poisonous
or not.

She brought you
to the deepest, coldest lake

and when you wouldn’t jump
she pushed you in.

Ah, Lenni, Lenni,
carving the cold lake water

with her long, strong arms,
marching to the forest

baskets swinging from her hands –
You coming? No? Pah!

And Pah! again.

 

Gill lives in Devon; member of the Totnes Company of Poets; Hawthornden Fellow; winner of the 2015 Michael Marks Award for “The First Telling” Happenstance Press.

Heart

It’s back there somewhere
along the miles I’ve walked.

Maybe someone’s picked it up
and is trying to make it work

or has taken it apart to see
if there’s anything useful inside.

It must be like leather now from rain and sun –
not much use to anyone.

I’ve got used to its absence;
life, as they said it would, went on.

All that heart ever held was you.
And once I thought that everything.

 

Gill left Chester and moved to Devon where she’s now a member of The Company Of Poets (Totnes) . She was winner of the 2015 Michael Marks Award for “The First Telling” (Happenstance Press).

Tobacco Harvest, North Carolina

All afternoon we laboured bunching leaves.
Black ooze glued our fingers to our thighs
each time we wiped our hands off on our jeans.

‘Tobacco cu’in’ sheds’, the foreman flung
the barn-doors open to a brimstone stink
of bunches hung in twos, like pairs of lungs.

The bright greens slowly grieve their way to rust.
‘Killin’ sheds’ I muttered to myself,
examining my hands – thick tar and dust.

 

Gill McEvoy has  2 full collections from Cinnamon Press: ‘Rise’, 2013, and ‘The Plucking Shed’, 2010; 3 pamphlets from Happenstance Press: ‘Uncertain Days’, 2006, ‘A Sampler’, 2008, and ‘The First Telling’ 2014. -This latter won the Michael Marks Award 2015. Gill was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012.

In Red and White 
 
You could helter-skelter down their columns on a rug or tray,
pretend they’re giant sticks of rock in red and white –

slice thought their middles and you’d surely find
the names of places where they stand:
Strumble, Needles, Bardsey, Portland Bill.

In the wind you’d hear the thin bewildered sighs
of long-forgotten keepers drifting round
the eerie robot systems that transmit the beams;

men amazed that no-one has to trim or light the lamps.

 

Previously published in Agenda, Vol 50, Nos 1-2.

Gill McEvoy has  2 full collections from Cinnamon Press: ‘Rise’, 2013, and ‘The Plucking Shed’, 2010; 3 pamphlets from Happenstance Press: ‘Uncertain Days’, 2006, ‘A Sampler’, 2008, and ‘The First Telling’ 2014. -This latter won the Michael Marks Award 2015. Gill was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012.