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Lydia Metcalfe
When I Have Confused Death with Spring Because of Things That Have Happened in the Past
Soft cotton downs, skirts swirling, upland mist of penetrated pinks and blues, you swim before my worry-worn eyelids that are heavy with uncompromising love. I’m pinned down to rise again, ever upwards, ever freer, the kisses of spring, green low burning ventures and summer’s hot skunked guttural yelpings, are my minstrels as I am tossed and blown into another vestibule of daylight life-lit marvel…Where is the honeysuckle? Come to suckle me and rent me lifeless so an air of seasons warm and bright can fill my lungs with life again. A bleed of sunlight running upwards in my veins again, a wish of spring-light even in my soul again, until it dwindles on the burn and leaves me limping for a flight to take me ever upwards and end this trauma–spun existence. To dance again with childhood, its tufted fancies gifted to me like never ever ever ever before.
Nature Therapy As a Writing Exercise for My Mother
Hop skip, wild hope, right out that shimmy shaking house and down, so very down and out
and far away, towards the sea. Wild hope that fosters children, children, children who cloy
and whine against my breast. Children. On top of duvets, up and down the slides, these
children round the corners of my eyes that never close. I know wild hope you hold me by a
child weaving thread. The children you have torn from loins of wayward hope; they cloy
against my heart strings made from children, vibrate against my larynx that is filled with
children’s noise and song, tug and wrestle in my vacant chambers, a child’s dance that ducks
and turns, till everything is noise and song and scripture hollowed out by hope can walk away
on legs of alabaster and I am laughing and choking, laughing and choking, laughing and
choking in their love.
None the less the children’s sticky love is supple syrup on a threadbare heart. I eat it down
against the rumble of the beating heart that longs for children. Wild hope I must break loose
and run, wild hoping, run away in spring light flutters to laugh my soul against my rib cage
on the windswept duneing grass, washed clean for all and sundry at the subtle water’s
breaking edge. Big gulping lungs of salty hopeful child air have me in their palmed-out gusts
and I am all but washed away on this fresh regurgitation that is mother love.
Lydia Metcalfe is excited, after having finished her MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University, to have hopefully (fingers crossed) been offered the opportunity to study for a PhD. She is delighted by the idea that she may be able to get down to furthering her studies into Neurodivergent Poetry as radical politics. Also, in no time at all she will be enjoying the loan of a small child one day a week, who she plans to have many adventures with. She set up a Neurodivergent Counselling business because she believes passionately about helping people but found herself too sensitive to run it. She has succeeded in coaxing her jumble of spaghetti words into nice neat lines and managing to send them off several times and has been published in Flash, Errant and Gone Lawn. She lives in the green wonder-space that is the Yorkshire Dales and is thankful for it every day. Alongside her she has two sparkly eyed children she loves and loves and loves. She has a whole collection of conditions, being Autistic and Dyslexic, having Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue. When she can manage it, she runs the most relaxed singing group in the world, on the playing fields outside her house.
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