Rebecca Gethin lives on Dartmoor. Sometimes she is a creative writing tutor, sometimes a gardener and other times she runs a market stall. Her poems have been published over the years in a variety of magazines. Her poetry collections are: River is the Plural of Rain (Oversteps Books, 2009); A Handful of Water (Cinnamon Press, 2013). Her first novel, Liar Dice, won the Cinnamon Press Novel Award in 2010 and her second novel, What the horses heard, is to be published by Cinnamon in May, 2014. Her website is www.rebeccagethin.wordpress.com
Zitherixon Man*
The talisman of the clay men
shuckering back and forth
down in the deep pits,
cutting clay from clay, their hands
and faces slathered with slip.
Their words seep into mud
form microscopic crystals,
settle out in sediments, get shaped
and kneaded into stories.
But this one has another language –
carved from solid oak
his neck long enough to crane
out of the mire, his legs short enough
to wade out of the marshes
whose fluids kept his character:
the rings of the pagan winters
that once shook the oak
are imprinted in his heart wood,
his face and torso finely cracked
his maleness intact.
* Written in response to a figure at the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter. It’s an oaken effigy found 25 feet below ground in one of the ball clay pits called Zitherixon in 1867. It had been placed against a blackened oak tree stump. It is 34 cm tall and has been carbon dated to at least 426 BC.
This poem was selected for the ExLibris Publications’ first anthology, Making History. http://exeterpoetryfestival.wordpress.com/category/exlibris-press/
Fogou*
The smell of cold invades you in the tunnel
with a disc of weak light
at either end and darker and colder still
is the circular core where, growing in the crevices
is a luminous moss that gives no light.
A human burrow
the womb of the village?
A wind instrument of the earth
tuned to weathers and airs that pass through
and overhead? At midsummer I’ve heard
the sun’s rays burst
from one end to the other but
at dusk I feel impelled to run right through
finding the dark outside
isn’t as dark as the dark inside –
a place to find the slow silence of its history
hear it not replying to any of my questions…
maybe because what matters here
is what hasn’t yet happened.
A fogou is an underground passage found in some Iron Age settlements in Cornwall. Its purpose is unknown but considerable effort went into their construction so they must have been considered important.
This was published in The Broadsheet, Oct 2013
Liar Dice published by Cinnamon Press, 2011.
www.cinnamonpress.com/liar-dice/
During the first night I spent with the partisans the sound of the river flowing over rocks seemed to have followed me up the steep slope. At first, I
thought I was hearing the rustle of my own fear shifting through my body. Later, the constant whispering gave me a handhold to grasp whenever I woke from fitful sleep that night. The suffocating air seemed to press down on us like an invisible roof. It reeked of sweaty clothes and perspiring bodies seldom washed, of mildewy straw and rotting sacks. I felt my life was ruined, that all my hopes seemed ended. I imagined my mother alone at home, wondering if she should lock the front door or leave it open for me, as sleepless as me —worrying about my father wherever he was, and my brother wherever he was.
I went over how it was that I had arrived here and how I could have avoided it. My thoughts were dragged back to another sleepless night, six years before, when the world was teetering on a brink while ordinary people kept their eyes on the ground, living day by day. We assumed we were entitled to hope
and that we could plan our futures as we liked. That particular evening in 1938—the one I think of as the start of everything—seemed perfectly ordinary. I remember the details of what happened, even before the Blackshirts arrived to take my father away.
Zitherixon Man*
The talisman of the clay men
shuckering back and forth
down in the deep pits,
cutting clay from clay, their hands
and faces slathered with slip.
Their words seep into mud
form microscopic crystals,
settle out in sediments, get shaped
and kneaded into stories.
But this one has another language –
carved from solid oak
his neck long enough to crane
out of the mire, his legs short enough
to wade out of the marshes
whose fluids kept his character:
the rings of the pagan winters
that once shook the oak
are imprinted in his heart wood,
his face and torso finely cracked
his maleness intact.
* Written in response to a figure at the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter. It’s an oaken effigy found 25 feet below ground in one of the ball clay pits called Zitherixon in 1867. It had been placed against a blackened oak tree stump. It is 34 cm tall and has been carbon dated to at least 426 BC.
This poem was selected for the ExLibris Publications’ first anthology, Making History. http://exeterpoetryfestival.wordpress.com/category/exlibris-press/
Fogou*
The smell of cold invades you in the tunnel
with a disc of weak light
at either end and darker and colder still
is the circular core where, growing in the crevices
is a luminous moss that gives no light.
A human burrow
the womb of the village?
A wind instrument of the earth
tuned to weathers and airs that pass through
and overhead? At midsummer I’ve heard
the sun’s rays burst
from one end to the other but
at dusk I feel impelled to run right through
finding the dark outside
isn’t as dark as the dark inside –
a place to find the slow silence of its history
hear it not replying to any of my questions…
maybe because what matters here
is what hasn’t yet happened.
A fogou is an underground passage found in some Iron Age settlements in Cornwall. Its purpose is unknown but considerable effort went into their construction so they must have been considered important.
This was published in The Broadsheet, Oct 2013
Liar Dice published by Cinnamon Press, 2011.
www.cinnamonpress.com/liar-dice/
During the first night I spent with the partisans the sound of the river flowing over rocks seemed to have followed me up the steep slope. At first, I
thought I was hearing the rustle of my own fear shifting through my body. Later, the constant whispering gave me a handhold to grasp whenever I woke from fitful sleep that night. The suffocating air seemed to press down on us like an invisible roof. It reeked of sweaty clothes and perspiring bodies seldom washed, of mildewy straw and rotting sacks. I felt my life was ruined, that all my hopes seemed ended. I imagined my mother alone at home, wondering if she should lock the front door or leave it open for me, as sleepless as me —worrying about my father wherever he was, and my brother wherever he was.
I went over how it was that I had arrived here and how I could have avoided it. My thoughts were dragged back to another sleepless night, six years before, when the world was teetering on a brink while ordinary people kept their eyes on the ground, living day by day. We assumed we were entitled to hope
and that we could plan our futures as we liked. That particular evening in 1938—the one I think of as the start of everything—seemed perfectly ordinary. I remember the details of what happened, even before the Blackshirts arrived to take my father away.