So it’s the first Bank Holiday of the month.  Most of the weekend I have been either wandering on the heath, cooking cake or soup for guests, or making things in the studio. Oh, and I wrote two Bluebeard poems.  What with the constant sunshine and with Martin and I both at home, it’s been pretty ideal really.  I hear rain is on the horizon tomorrow, and if the weather forecast is to be believed, the temperature will drop ten degrees.  TEN degrees?  And it’s Tuesday and normal  life will resume until….Friday, thanks to Kate and Wills.

It is unlikely I will even watch the ceremony, but here is a poem from my forthcoming collection which may or may not be called My Grandmother and Mrs Crow.  It’s about when Charles and Diana were married, me having Chicken Pox, and what with the spots and everything, being forbidden to go the street party.  I was eleven years old, and gutted, as this poem may suggest.

Quarantine

I am shut in my bedroom
in a pale lemon bridesmaid dress
on the afternoon of the royal wedding.

Skin blotched with calamine,
I am an invisible listener
as the world makes trifle.

Since the start of my quarantine,
I have been training magpies
to do my bidding

but they all flew away
when they heard the silver band
tuning up at the end of the road.

So I have gathered my coterie
round an up-turned milk-crate
for a celebration tea of plasticine cakes.

It is a while since we dined together
and strictly between us,
their table manners aren’t as they were.

But outside now, my magpies have come
to their senses, and gather over the heads
of the street-party.

One for sorrow, two for mirth,
Three for a wedding, four for a birth,
Five for silver, six for gold,
Seven for a secret not to be told.