Pennine Poets
Pauline Kirk
Mabel Ferrett says:
Born in Birmingham, Pauline moved to York in 2002, via Australia, Essex, Berkshire and Leeds. As a performance poet, she has appeared at venues throughout the country, and broadcast on Radio Leeds. In 1996 she received a 'New Beginnings Award' from Yorkshire Arts to give up her 'day job' as a Senior Officer with Leeds Social Services. Herself a member of Pennine Poets, she now works as an editor and writer, and leads creative writing groups.
Selected Poems
Urban FoxesHis shadow crosses
the street, a Pictish invader
colonising daylight.
Grown old and unwise,
he trots between council estate
and curry shop, bold as the rats
whose runs he follows.
A rust-red silhouette,
he scents Ma Harris’ tea.
Sitting in his unlicensed taxi,
Ted, Ed, Fred (whatever name
he is today), watches him pass.
He has his own cunning -
knowing the rat runs between
supermarket and station -
respects cunning in others,
is wise to the lad
who vaporises past his window.
Ratfaced Nick, still barely fifteen,
sensing he is watched,
pulls his cap back over hair
as red as any fox, and melts
into privet hedge.
Five minutes later, an alarm wails,
ignored. By then, Ted and Nick
are no where, and the fox
crosses an empty street.
© Pauline Kirk
(to be released on a CD , 'Tales of the Fox' for National Poetry Day)
Walking to Snailbeach
My past walked lanes like these,
Through fern and celandine
Seeking work. Small and blackened men,
They mined the coal from pit to pit,
Following change as a fly follows meat.
I am at home here.
Yet the images are strange, negative.
Along these hills a leaden white has hardened
Since Roman times; set into furnaces and roofs,
Ruins bleaching in fields barren of grass.
Here men shovelled stone
Or burrowed under a paradise of flower,
Ghost-white, destroying as they went.
Why do I know this place?
Some memory not my own calls me:
Ghosts of ancestors passing through.
I am not myself alone, but many,
A continuum, a rusting chain.
My links were forged between coal and cars
Among Black Country voices. Sweating women
Hammered my iron in backyard shops
(Brick bicycle sheds now); my beginnings are broken.
I have my legends of course,
Stories told me by ancient aunts
Knitting time in endless scarfs.
Greatgreatgrandmama
Bathed her husband in bread and milk
(His skin was stubborn to heal, burnt crisp
in a flashback.) Their son swam flooded stalls
And died. Somebody's cousin, brilliant with a piano,
Tried a career playing to the Movie Halls
The year Talkies came out.
I come from a long line of failures
But they changed a nation,
Walked from the Middle Ages into now,
Carrying a whole society.
In this silent place, amongst the spoil heaps
And columbine, my ghosts may stand with dignity.
Waiting my arrival, they watch,
White against white.
© Pauline Kirk
The Night Café: Vincent Van Gogh, 1888
Drinkers slump in corners, harsh lights
dazzle above a monstrous table;
a man in white watches.
Bilious yellow - the nausea of night
caught in swirling strokes ...
The image is familiar.
Reduced to postcard respectability,
it lurks on gallery shelves, coffee tables,
examination rooms, yet still it shocks.
Biographies give time and circumstance
but do not prepare for such casual,
commonplace despair. The floor escapes
its frame, sliding towards us. A clock
is fixed forever at twelve fifteen a.m.
Most of us have passed a night here,
though in other cities, other times.
Even in faded print, Vincent's nightmare
touches ours. Stare, and dimensions blur,
until we, too, plunge towards that gaping,
curtained, room beyond.
© Pauline Kirk
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