Tuesday Poem: Four Poets to a Cottage

Walk in on them, four poets eating scones, plates

on their laps, caught like teapots in a cupboard. That

room, once the music room, once a bedroom

for spinster sisters, built in a time of family bibles,

angular blue glass bottles, brick chimneys. 

The room now: bar heater, laptop, plate

of softening butter, poets of some standing,

sitting at odd angles, collar bone, ankle bone, 

swallowing cooling tea in gulps, eyes shifting

to the blocked fireplace, the unprepossessing ceiling,

not letting on a feeling that the air is constricted, that

they are the wrong size doll for this doll’s house,

that the chimney creaks, could well be falling, that

in a cavity in the ceiling, a child’s clothes were found.

                                                                        Mary McCallum

It's the AGM of the Randell Cottage Friends Committee tonight at 7 pm at the cottage: 14 St Mary Street Thorndon, all welcome. After a brief meeting, we'll have drinks to celebrate the first 10 years of the writer residency. All welcome. 

I am the Chair of the Friends Committee as well as being a Trustee, so I will be there with bells on. The Randell Cottage Writers Trust is a writers residency in the 1867 Randell Cottage in Thorndon, and I wrote this poem when Kirsty Gunn was living there - an expat NZer who'd come home. She invited some fellow poets to tea and scones and they came. 

Btw, Kirsty has just published a new novel Big Music with Faber. Thrilling. If you're in London, the launch is at James Daunt's on Holland Park Avenue from 6 pm, Wednesday July 4. Here's a video about the book. 

It's Tuesday - so check out a fabulous CHEESE poem on the Tuesday Poem hub (click the Tuesday Poem quill in my sidebar) or go HERE, and then check out the cheesy and non-cheesy poems in the sidebar there. Definitely worth a look.