Jacqui Thewless

Last evening
sharp-snipping scissors cut my hair

and white cream squeezed from a nozzled
...

Love’s loss is
endless.
There will be no recovery
of the thing that is lost –
...

On your far journey,
with the sun at your back,
may you be always meeting
Kindness, Gentleness and Pardon,
...

...

I was twelve years old.

The one-man band from Duluth
with harmonica
...

i

before it recedes
a tide brings you the present
...

Brick by brick
we are building a future
with our own hands -
...

Pens are lifted
and there’s the click;
the shuffling of sheaves as we out-breathe
and then’s the intersection of an insistent bird’s trill;
...

in council houses
and manicured estates -
imagine whistles!
...

Rowen, my first child:
her first glimpse of me / her mum's
first hint of glory.
...

All week,
I’m waiting to go in
to that little, homely, stable-of-a-place
where nothing could be simpler than the grace of God.
...

Lying
caused this blight:
half-light
filtered through chiaroscuro
...

Thank God for Gaia’s winter refusal,
that she turns her back on the sun
and the expense of growth;
inside the deeps and darkness occupied
...

A book of poems
isn’t worth the price of petrol
for someone’s gas-guzzling battle
into work one day by car.
...

One day
another giant will come –
almost certainly a woman
with hindsight and a strong
...

They might be flowers
of mercy
or small emblems of
the sun's
...

Kindness and mercy
outlast the lesser virtues.

Something in the sap's
...

I never saw your dad -
hard, dark
at yon hot
Stirling foundry -
...

She wants to know
what is so special
about this beach –
been here a hundred times before
...

Not now, in August nights - as when
I walked wide sands alone,
where sea pulls shore,
and wished for him who’d paused with me
...