They love to ask about the fire:
those scorch marks on my living room floor. Or they sit in the garden hoping
an angel might appear
looking like me – red gingham scarf,
a chisel behind each ear.
The holes are where we meet –
for them, a weightless place of possibilities,
for me, the hollow of what’s missed –
the inside edge of stone, unpolished bronze,
sounds like the mirage of sea inside
a shell – an ocean of far-off moments.
And I want to tell them it’s as true now:
there is no fixed point
of light – everything still asks
to be touched, walked through.
© Rosie Jackson
Picture 10064106, © Mary Evans Picture Library/IDA KAR
Rosie Jackson has won many awards for her poetry, including first prize in the Stanley Spencer Poetry competition 2017, first prize at Wells 2018, and second prize at Torbay 2018. Her pamphlet What the Ground Holds (Poetry Salzburg, 2014) was followed by her collection The Light Box (Cultured Llama, 2016) and her memoir The Glass Mother (Unthank, 2016). Rosie has taught at the University of East Anglia, UWE, Nottingham Trent, and runs writing courses in Frome, Somerset and Cortijo Romero, Spain. Her poetry has been published in Acumen, Ambit, Frogmore Papers, High Window, Scintilla, Tears in the Fence, other journals and anthologies, set for GCSE, and used for a sculpture by Andrew Whittle in the grounds of a Dorchester hospital. In 2017 she was a Hawthornden fellow. A collection of poems about Stanley Spencer and his first wife Hilda Carline, Two Girls and a Beehive, written with Graham Burchell, will be published by Two Rivers Press in April 2020: ‘An impressive and original collection, varied yet unified.’ (Anthony Thwaite). www.rosiejackson.org.uk
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