By ELAINE RANDELL.

◊

On finding your copy of The Observers Book of Geology 1960

for Barry MacSweeney

Falling
open at Fools Gold
the stone that would create sparks when struck against.
Struck against, railed against but
it’s still tender, sore,
The heart in flames again seeing
Seeing your name on the frontispiece
with all that hope in the margins
knowing now
how it would unravel, pan out.
Still the margins carry the weight.
How still are the margins against which we shuffle.

France, 1989

i
At the hospital, Hotel Dieu, Hautfaut
the small strips of faded cloth – patterned in parts,
flowers, dots, carefully sewn, hemmed in hope, mark
the lives of mothers without choice,
in despair.

Outside
you skip, say that your tooth has fallen out,
we wrap it carefully.

ii
In the Church of Baudefois D’Ans
the priest lines the village children on
slim fine wooden benches, wears his beret
and Monoprix shoes. Tells them,
Jésus avec l’amour dans son cœur,
his small feet crossed at the ankles.

Outside
you ask why
I didn’t stop the seesaw from hurting you.

Hôtel Dieu had a vocation to “care for poor people.” The hotel / hospital / church has a
small wooden “tower,” a cupboard with a revolving door to make it possible for poor parents to abandon their children into the care of the religious order under the cover of anonymity.
The alternative was to leave the babies to perish on the mountains.

Between 1790 and 1847 the revolving door was used 1,947 times. Parents were asked to affix
a little cloth ribbon to the infant’s clothes so that, if they had second thoughts within the first
24 hours after the abandonment, they could identify and reclaim their child and bring
another part of the fabric with them. These coloured strips were also attached to the baby’s
entry in the town’s records. There is no evidence of how many of the babies were reunited
with their families. It is also not known how many arrived too late to reclaim their babies or
lost the tiny piece of fabric.

◊

Five English Spring Poems

for Lee Harwood, 29th March 1984

1. At first the skies are so clear
you would be forgiven thinking
“summer oh summer.”
bird dart make bids
Picking up all manner of downy silks
to line sweet beds. Pushing through
Breaking voluptuous phallic buds.
Surprise!

O Lupus you have
Stolen the purse
From the rabbits
Quick ear.

Dark these woods at night clamour with
hooting pheasants, fox wails, waiting
soft muscle to tear open.
Look it is here, inside
the poem
all of this,
all of this,
the cat sniffs at the blade of grass
then
walks on.
Navy blue evening skies sink down behind the
tall English oak trees.

2. In the barn
young lambs
orphaned by morning
bleat out.

Looking out, smelling for milk, bleat out
nuzzling against rock, bleat out
while others suckle freely never leaving nor left.
Watercress streams under sparkling bridges.
Nothing relieves the ache of being left.

3. Thin wrists of primrose
startle the mist.
Trumpet daffodils battered by 48 hours of rain.
All the geese huddle and grumble they just hiss at the wind.

4. Metallic black Starling
Sturnes Vulgaris) The glossy purple glints
dip in and out
brown tail feathers
body of white wing feathers
roosting in the old English Oak again.
Untidy nests, grass, wool, moss, wood shavings from our door.

Listening for worms
The sharp little heads
Tilt forward
Then sideways again.

5. The wheat is three inches high.
St Luke’s little summer has come and gone
it is wrought of a sunlight far too light to come from just sun alone.
Can it be that which the woods are tangling with,
along with the Ivy?
Or is it the necklet of tiny stars above us as the wood smoke
curls up in tongues?
The heart is a repetitious dancer

whose feet trip and blunder
despite all this practise.
Yet still we sit together while sweet wallflowers are budding in the garden
all of it so young and alone.

♦

ELAINE RANDELL was born in 1951 in south London. She has lived in Romney Marsh for many years now, keeping Soay sheep, chickens and English Setter dogs on a small holding and a large historic garden with her husband, Ian Rose, and their three daughters. She started Amazing Grace poetry magazine and subsequently Secret Books, publishing over many years work by James Kirkup, Jeremy Reed, Jeff Nuttall, Nicholas Moore, Michael Horovitz, Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher, Tony Lopez, Paul Matthews, and Barry MacSweeney – to the last of whom she was married from 1973-1979. Her first publication, Song of Hesperus, appeared in 1972 and fourteen other books have come out since. The three texts published here are drawn from the Uncollected Poems section of Collected Poems & Prose (Shearsman Books, 2024).