This isn’t live as in live TV but it is live in that I’ve written and posted my drafts as I go — so the process is transparent.

One of the photos I used as a prompt to help generate the poem.

One of the things I do when I’m writing is read other poetry books. I write down quotes and snippets that stand out or relate to my train of thought..

When I set the Hawk Prompt I also picked out this quote by Carolyn Forche, but when I wrote my rough draft I didn't respond to this, although I find that sound is very closely connected to the emotional tenor of my work.

Now as work on this edit I’ve returned to my original notes/free write. I rarely write poem drafts in lineated form. The messier my first draft the more likely it is to produce something worth working on.

I realise also I'm back on a subject I've been avoiding: grief. I don't want to bang on about my angst - but this is where the emotional heart seems to lie. I also picked up Sharon Olds' One Secret Thing in the library. Sometimes I find her work claustrophobic (if brilliant) but reading the first poem in the book 'EVERYTHING' that opens 'Most of us are never conceived./Many of us are never born -/we live in a private ocean for hours,/weeks... really heartened me and gave me the permission I needed to keep writing about this personal subject.

Re-reading my early scrawl I can see that the opening I’d originally marked for deletion, may just be where the poem needs to move towards: ‘I am most interested in the feet and claws’. In the notes above, it’s my son’s feet that I move towards.

The next step is to think about whether this is one or two poems. Is it the hawk or the child? Or is it hawk and child? Now I’ve finished scanning pages I’m going to go back to my notebooks for a bit, see what I get next.

Showing this kind of rough edit is uncomfortable I have to say: this is definitely in my discard pile. It's also disconcerting, changing my mind in public like this, but that's the constant part of the editing process. Trying new things. But it's interesting as a process: to identify the true ambition of the poem - not in terms of its syntactical realisation - but in the 'what does it want be/do' kind of way.

Yes, I definitely think it’s two poems. This new verse arrangement seems to have honed it down a bit – it feels more right like this.

I realise that what I was chasing here is the idea of being able to see an animal very close up - a wild animal. I once saw this fox that had just been run over, and it was all still perfect. It was fascinating. That moment when something's not long dead and still has the life in it. That's different to this, but this idea of proximity - as in Wing - is still there.

My last entry on Open Notebooks was on 30 July when I was waiting to give birth. In between then and now the worst thing that has ever happened to me happened: after a healthy pregnancy of 41 weeks I went in to a long labour that lasted for nearly five days all in all. It wasn’t until the morning of 7 August that the midwives picked up an irregularity in the baby’s heartbeat and I was rushed in to theatre for an emergency Caesarian. Unfortunately, the surgery was unsuccessful and after a long fight for life, our son Otto’s heart and lungs gave out. He was a first and a much longed-for child.

The rest of August is a blur of shock and grief. I think the body literally puts you into physical shock so you can cope with the spiritual and emotional turmoil. I didn’t know whether I would write or not, but as it turned out, it felt quite natural to open my notebook, start a journal and write poems about the experience.

A Parcel from Helen

The next question was whether I would share that process here. In many ways it was something I wanted to do: surely this was the point of Open Notebooks? The death itself had been necessarily public: pregnancy is a time of expectation and many of the physical changes in the body are obvious. Friends, family and colleagues await news. Yet the intensity and depth of grief felt inherently private. My Twitter, Facebook, online blogging and browsing were all abruptly halted. Even connecting to the internet to check email was something I was slow to do. I needed the quiet of trees and birds, to look at the sea not the screen.

The Beach at Cassis

A huge wave of support washed in from everyone we knew. The buzzer would sound and packages arrived. The parcels, notes of condolence, cards and flowers were a comfort, and something I came to enjoy, despite their provenance.

Abiye Sends Me 'The Poet Reclining' and Some Shades. There's a beautiful synchronicity to this package's arrival. All week I'd been working on a poem - in my mind was a long walk in the Luberon earlier in the summer I wanted to compare to a painting by Chagall, with a horse, green fields and a bruised-looking sky. There was something very particular about the colours and the atmosphere I wanted to catch but I couldn't quite conjure up the image. Abiye's gift came with a postcard of Chagall's The Poet Reclining - the very same image.

The Shades Were Hot Too

I began also to venture back online.  One day I clicked through to fellow poet Miriam Nash’s blog post about her creative letter writing workshops which explore the letter as a form. I loved this idea. I left a comment and also started to think about how I’d enjoyed the snail mail letters I’d received and how this experience related to the idea behind Open Notebooks.

With this in mind, Miriam and I met earlier this week and she’s going to be guest blogging on the site with me over the next few weeks.

Notebooks at the Ready

We’ll be sending each other snail mail letters, responding to the contents and using the correspondence to generate poems.

The Book of Stamps

I gave Miriam a book of stamps. She seemed very pleased with them. Now I need to write my first letter…

The monkey that bursts from my torso
burns toast and blisters thumbs.
It swings on bone asymmetric bars,
palms strapped in waxed cotton.

A doll-sized heel kicks in a balloon
bomb of raspberry leaves
while the monkey slides from rib to spine,
fast and strong as a drum,

slips from my grip, rattles
on my ribcage, forces an escape
to an English hillside
grey with rocks and a tupperware sky.

An old soul licks its lips,
swallows salt water, savours the taste
of roasted buffalo
flesh between teeth, wet with juice and blood.

Gulls tannoy traffic, wail
for sea when I wake in the morning,
listening for a heartbeat
under the screech of green lorakeets.

The monkey that bursts from my torso
burns toast and blisters thumbs.
It swings on bone asymmetric bars,
palms strapped in waxed cotton.

A doll-sized heel kicks in a balloon
bomb of raspberry leaves
while the monkey slips from rib to spine,
fast and strong as a drum.

An old soul licks its lips,
swallows salt water, savours the taste
of roasted buffalo
flesh between teeth, wet with juice and blood.

Need to add another stanza from the earlier draft where I wake from the dream but I’m not really in the dream but I’d like to capture the feeling afterwards – FEAR – of something bigger and stronger than you at work over which you have little control.