Fay Roberts Poetry: December 2021

Thursday 9 December 2021

Amber

You take my flesh in hand and start to score.
You press with gentle force to mark a seam.
You know the path, you’ve traced its route before:
this armour guards a softness, lush as dreams.

This task takes patience, time, and outright skill;
first layer gone and now the harder part:
a thin, tight membrane keeps you from your fill,
so lift the bitter, taste my sweeter heart.

The air sings, tartly, beckoning your tongue;
and busy fingers blush, juice running free.
Impediments are done, the feast’s begun;
my core surrendered, you devouring me.

The fresh scent lingers, memories kept real;
ripe flesh is worth the challenge of the peel.

This sonnet was written as part of #NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) 2017. It's one of my traditions to try to write a #sonnet every April. This has since shifted as, 2019, I often write 7 sonnets every February, as part of the #28SonnetsLater challenge. You can see previous attempts of mine during NaPoWriMo on my dedicated blog. And this sketch is another colour piece! I'm clearly enjoying the challenge. Usually later in the process than with black-and-white sketches, it must be said...

A mildy impressionistic digital drawing of a small orange sitting on a plain surface, utilising highly saturated colours. The peel on the front half of the orange has been peeled down to lie in three curving flaps; the rest of the peel remains around the orange, including a kind of cap of peel. The central segment of the orange has been pulled away to reveal the dark, hollow interior of the fruit, while the rest of the segments remain in place. A few drops of moisture cling to the top of the orange and within the open section. If one were a suggestible person, one might view the pointed, upright oval space with something firm yet juicy just drawing back from penetrating it in a rather sensual light. As it is, this merely an orange. Of course.

Ceci est seulement une orange

Thursday 2 December 2021

Sentinel

The sky shifts over the
skirling hills,
the wilful wind sinks,
and my shadow
slips to drink.

You have discovered me
again, and my vows are
renewed –
memories echo in me
as you carry me home.

I am the beckoning,
tectonic,
pinning spirits
to now, from then
to ever.

Not for me the gorsedd –
eisteddwch,
tawelwch yn canu;
listen and remember
under the bell of sunset.

I hide, unmoving shape-shifter,
one note in
the song of ever,
sipping from the sky
until you come again.

Sentinel is about the standing stone in the Brecon Beacons (a national park of rolling hills in South Wales) called Maen Llia. It’s said that the stone sometimes goes wandering down to the nearby river to drink at sunset... This piece was originally a commission for an elderly Welsh gentleman who came by our Poetry To Go stall at RHS Wisley’s Arts Festival and wanted a poem for this feature, describing in achingly evocative detail how the stone appears as if from nowhere when you walk the Beacons. The piece appears in the Nature/ The Sea section of Spectral next year.

a mildly impressionistic, full colour, digital drawing of a pink stone menhir - a rock roughly hewn into a teardrop shape - set against a rolling hillside. The stone is covered in lichen (white, yellow, and reddish-brown) and green moss, stained and cracked in various places. It is seated in a shallow depression, on top of a tiny mound. The grass in the depression is rather short, and there is longer standing grass encircling the dip. The stone casts a strong shadow behind itself, to the left of the viewer, and there is a strange, purplish pool at the foot of the stone's mound. The hill behind the stone shows a variety of dips and tracks as the ground undulates up to a pale, greyish-blue sky.

Another foray into colour. Not easy, this one, but I’m glad I persevered! I was particularly taken with how the paths and scars on the hill are echoed on the menhir at this angle.
Source image from Wikipedia: Photograph by Immanuel Giel