As the white boat glides
along the wide brown river
bare branches shiver.
A trumpet, a train, a gull.
In the distance a footbridge.
Pinpricks of snow fall
on the abandoned roadworks.
The pavement is cold.
Tomorrow oysters, people
and the clink of champagne flutes.
The recollection
of Christmas is distant, caught
between seasons, waiting.
Today a sharp Winter sun,
a hint of what’s to come - warmth.
Now the rain has stopped
the parakeets are noisy
and the soil is soft.
Hats and gloves come off
inside the vintage dress shop:
red lipstick, blond hair.
Miriam sent me an origami Valentine. 
It was very exciting to receive in the post and I would have posted more on it sooner, but I was ‘between printers’ and have only just got my new scanner up and running. I decided to use it as a base for a freewrite. I’ve never posted a freewrite before. Or written one knowing that it would be public. So here it is: unedited. Cliches and all.
Five cyclamen bulbs
and a red anemone:
will tolerate shade.
Some sheep and ponies
in the fields that flicker past,
windscreen wipers on.
Red circle, white square:
a name for a new book.
Some sunshine at last.
The town clock strikes two.
A bus with misted windows
arrives at the stop.
On Friday I took a workshop with the poet Kwame Dawes. Kwame is one of the most inspirational teachers I know. At the end of the day I’d committed to writing a crown of sonnets and a haiku a day. The timescale? 100 days. I’ll be posting my haiku here.
Day 1
Seven hour roast lamb
and rhubarb panacotta.
A bustling market.
The post has been sneaky. On Thursday I opened my letterbox to find one of my letters to Karen returned by Monsieur La Poste - the address label must have peeled off in the cold interior of the postbox. On the same day, my forward-mail from London arrived, including a card sent by Karen on 17th December… part of our correspondence making a late entrance. In some ways this is apt. Because it takes a while for our letters to travel from Geneva to London and back, they often overlap - I’m not always sure which letter Karen is responding to, but I like the guessing, the calculating, the chance arrivals…
Here is a post-van I caught speeding away in the Old Town:
I don’t think letter writing is dying, but escaping, changing into something else, speeding down the road in a yellow van. I wrote a lot of letters this week, including one to my Godmother, who I had lost contact with for about seven years, and who found me again through my blog. We used to keep a ‘letter book’ - a small book we sent between the UK and the US, writing new entries to each other over time. It was a bit like a secret blog between two people, or a shared notebook.
My 'letter-workshop' from my week of letters
Before I read Karen’s ‘Wing’ on the blog, I received it on the back on a yellow bird. I do think sending a poem in a letter can give it the secrecy to breathe and come alive as Karen quotes below. Secrecy brings excitement, an impulse to continue or take the poem elsewhere. It makes it more like a curious object, that can be looked at from several angles and appear different. It moves it outside of the person who wrote it.
The 'Wing' I received
The yellow messenger
Is Karen is one step ahead of this blog post? Has she received my latest letter? Partners in crime La Poste and Royal Mail keep this a secret…
Karen McCarthy was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. Her poetry pamphlet The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She is also an editor.
Check her website for more.
