Give me your Hand Stephanie Green Expand Inspired by: Dance Touch finger tip to finger tip,thumbs, index to index,tall man to tall man,ring to ring, pinkie to pinkie. Take this invisible giftin the cradle of your handsshield it, as it flickers in the draftof all our cold, dreich days. Here is a word without vowel or consonant.It is a language you have never heard beforebut understand immediately.We will never be the same again.
The Brass Band Contest (for the Renfrew Burgh Band) Mary Thomson Expand With a tug of the jackets and shuffling of chairs and adjustments to stands that are perfectly placed, the baton is raised with a stretch and a flick and like greyhounds in traps they are off up and running, for the prize of perfection, for them, just this once! Pony-tailed blondes and greybeards with paunches,lawyers and labourers, clerks and accountants, mothers and carers, workers and students,all shapes and sizes, when braided and cuffedthey’re only the sound they make with their band. Muted trombones wail like trains on the prairies, feverish cornets, warm flügel and horns rise above huge silver basses booming like liners. They whisper like mist when it says pianissimo, blast triple sforzando for storming finales! The applause is for how they arrived here today from scout huts and band halls on nights after work. With stars as a backdrop on stage in the town hallthe glint and the shine of colourful stage lights make dazzling reflections on their moment of fame. When it’s over they judge – so how did they all do? The shame of split notes and poor entries forgotten they head to the bar where they all let their hair down. Not caring for prizes and medals or cups, just that their own brilliant band will march on for ever.
My Time Kirsten MacQuarrie Expand My time is not my own,dandelions draw me on.Floating petalsbreezing free,I am the guardian of the garden. Wife and worker,daughter, carer,dog walker and dish washer MUM! I care for each one,cultivate.Tend,grow you upgive you sunshine. But once a full moon comes this Break within the clouds.A gap in tidesmy space in time. The wave starts whispering cautious courage.I clasp the penand I begin.
At The Heart Anna Dickie Expand It’s Tuesday morning and women’s voices,in three-part harmony, sing out Smokey Robinson,'I don’t like you, but I love you' – while outsidein the yard toddlers send up an insistentdecant scat. In the hall an amalgam of creamedbutter, sugar and sifted flour wafts. Upstairs needles pirouette, like dancersin Morag Alexander’s class, pullingsilks through linen in back stitch, split stitch,stem stitch, French knots. On other days,at other hours, threads of French and Germanslip from practiced tongues, and lips are pursed and shaped to give a visual voice to thosefor whom the world has turned its volumedown. It’s here we come when our livessuffer an infarction, an arrhythmia, a block.It’s here we come to pick up the rhythmsagain, to pick out a beat on practice pad, to fall safely on a crash mat, to dance again,to reel. It’s here kinship finds support,it’s here that kindness and careare more than abstract, it’s here they are“doing words”. It’s here, in this centre, thisOld Victorian school, with its boys doors & girls doors,that a community finds its heart.
Stitch in Time Maxine Rose Munro Expand I slip between the tick and tock.With needle stab and drag of threadI build silent silken cocoon. Artfulsleight of hand and, stitch on stitch,my fingers birth newness, joiningwhere before was Not. In the gapsof in-breath and out I move with nothought, empty of all but the now.And when the time comes and mythread must be cut, I do so quick,sharp, strong. Deft, natural in thisplace like no other I move freedfrom gravity’s depressions, I flyfor a time. And that is enough.
Line Dancing with Dolly Parton Andrew Keay Expand What a way to make aliving for the swap from synthetics to denim beaten soft with country music squashed into a dance line. Overtly patterned shirts blur with under-seasoned personalities as we sway, stamp, grapevine through our hour, allowing it to drive us crazy if we let it. All taking precious post-pay-packet moments, no, casting a lifeline from labour, crediting ourselves with that rare, precious honour: joy. Respiring deeply, perspiring neatly. Step two three four shuffling majestically heeled cowboy boots across a glossy varnished town hall floor. Now on borrowed time, our finite helium souls inflated once more, we resume our verse, stumble to the kitchen, reminding ourselves of our allocated fun. Lives toppedup to their measured limit, we wish, for nothing more than that one hour per week.
Pottering Max Scratchmann Expand They called it pottering,Or sometimesHis hobby. Or sometimes just plainDabbling. Something that whiled away his lonely hours, You know,Now that the wife had passed on. That’s what they said.Though no-one,NO-ONE,Could begin to understand his passion or his pain,As he sat with album and tweezersAnd the stories of a thousand livesSpread out before himIn inch by inch rectangles of perforated paper,Legends engraved in cancellation ink,The living DNA of lives gone by preservedLike flies in cloudy-clear amberOn yellowed gummed-backed strips,Albums caressed by the hands of the long dead,Their copperplate script an elegyTo lost loves and broken hearts, Tiny haikus of love,Shards of pink envelopes marking the passing of years,Philatelist arias more poignant than any Puccini score And twice as as heartbreaking,All archived in the dusty albumsLovingly stored in the all-embracing library of his shedWhere you can always find himPottering.
Whittle David Linklater Expand Edges of teapots and fruit dishes made presentable. I mothered bluebirds from lifeless liquid. From cast moulds cream necks stemmed, a wing, two eyes, clay skeletons firing in the kiln. Many would fold, cleft beaks, bubbles in the spine, children I buried with the wastage. Some lived to be glazed in a frost-blue coat. I fettle, work words. Shaving, replacing, whittling away at the bone, back-bent. I peel the bark of tree stumps, thread smoke through the needle eye. Picking wild oats with dirt tracks on my palms I weed the changes in me, out. The moth floating dead in the glass like a star, a golden cross when the sun comes. Some lines leap, some die, lungs full of ink. But here I place the bluebird, a solitary tack on a cork board, and its wings flutter a little between blinks. It whispers will you remember me tomorrow? I ask the same of my flock of broken loves, blueprints stained with coffee and dust. These are the measurements, incisions. These are beginnings and ends, stacked lines, trimmings of trying.
The Doctor prescribed Hula Hooping Lynn Valentine Expand I am a one-woman Corryvreckan three thousand turns until I break. Bruises rise with each rotation, sweat surges like a tide in flood. This circle suits me like a lover’s touch, a wedding ring. Each swing a hammer down on sadness, each loop a lengthening of the light.