Jacqui Thewless

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

Last evening
sharp-snipping scissors cut my hair

and white cream squeezed from a nozzled
...

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 -
...

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

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!
...

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
...

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.
...

Every year in winter I forget what spring is like. Here in Pembroke, and throughout the county, the first harbinger is a white froth of Blackthorn blossom – before the first greening of trees. Yet white is cool; a chaste colour. Later, when the first young green leaves in the hedgerows peep, a sense of warmth to come is quickened and our spirits lift.
At home, I feed the garden birds until the end of March. It is a rare treat to catch a glimpse of the wren.

buoyant winter bird
...

...

The whole year’s answered

prayers in these quiet leaf-falls’
...

I stayed in Scotland as a girl, on the East coast:
a kind of salty smell and gritty sand.
When I was ten I learned about selchies;
those seals who are only sometime-seals; sometimes human
...

Acquiescence is
an opening into the world as you
have never known her;
quietude inside you
...