The father drives a tractor. His son, a bobbing
buttercup on his knee. A cheerleading wife,
baby on hip. Look! I say
she’s living my life.
A half smile hangs,
only half seen by my companion. How
to view those old crossways. Some steps
are rupture: a snapped mantra, a broken
fall.
My heart hovers
to ease the knock. It whispers
but I have seen the dwarf willow,
its red-gloved catkins. And a fog-bow
once haloed my love all day
on a hill. I tumbled,
expecting rock,
face-down into three heathers:
ling, bell, the cross-leaved heath.
I tell the silence
between us: a field of spiders can
make a million star-strung cradles
of the dawn’s dew,
each one a future.
“The poem emerged from a real exchange, but after the initial expression of bemusement, it goes on its own imaginative journey through a landscape, making temporal shifts along the way. The ‘knock’ in the poem is not necessarily sorrow or regret at not taking a particular pathway, but the realisation (over and over again) of the facts of one’s life and how they might differ from earlier plans, hopes or expectations. The poem explores the requirement (real or imagined) – not to explain or justify those facts – but to be reconciled to them, and how that might, from time to time, prompt a spiritual or psychological adjustment in some way, or simply a (re)grounding in what is fulfilling and nourishing to us as individuals.”
Karen Hodgson Pryce is a poet and teacher living in the Cairngorms, Scotland. Her poetry has been widely published in magazines and anthologies including Mslexia, Lighthouse, Butcher’s Dog, Under the Radar and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She was placed in the Café Writers Open Poetry Competition 2019, judged by Zaffar Kunial and was shortlisted in the Mist & Mountain Poetry Prize, 2023 and the 12th Ó Bhéal Five Words International Poetry Competition. She won the Badenoch Poetry Prize in 2024.