We’re featuring three poems by Pippa Hennessy, Project Director for the Nottingham City of Literature campaign and director of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio.
In Old Light Cottage
A threadbare armchair enfolds me
the flue howls back at the gale
that portrait of Wellington gazes
out of the window at the lighthouse.
Handwritten scrawls fill the log book
not mine, not yet.
June 28th 2000
Saw a puffin. No time to write.
Boat leaving soon. Sad to go.
August 13th 2000
Another lovely stay. Did lots
of walking.
Then twenty-three and a half pages
in one hand.
October 23rd 2000
…The electricity went off at 12:23
tonight. I had to get up to go to the loo
at 2:14. The flue kept me awake for 3 hours
and 47 minutes altogether…
That October, when he wrote that,
we were here for six days
and another
because of the storms.
Slipping and sliding
down the Clovelly cobbles, our pink labels
matched his.
Hello. We’ll be neighbours
he said, standing too close.
I turned away to laugh with my friends.
We drank and tied our tongues in knots
in the lighthouse, for six days
and another.
The girls won all the games
and I fell in love
with this peat-topped block
of granite, glued by the Gulf Stream
to the Atlantic’s edge.
We celebrated the extra day,
he complained
his train ticket would expire.
Now I know too much of what he did,
when the flue screamed.
He didn’t write that he asked me for
a safety pin
to hold his trousers up
so he could get to North Light
on schedule.
He didn’t write
that our singing woke him up
when the boat was cancelled.
His review of the garlic bread
served in the tavern
was detailed
and informative. He didn’t mention
that we sat at the long table
playing bridge
loudly while he ate, alone.
He wrote:
7:58am, I washed up.
8:13am, I took the rubbish
out to the bins.
He didn’t see
the oystercatchers digging for worms
just behind the cemetery wall
or the gravestones
of medieval chieftains standing
where they had stood for centuries.
He didn’t hear
the seals singing as they rode the storm.
He didn’t feel
the spindrift skidding like rabbits
across the heather.
A threadbare armchair enfolds me
the flue howls back at the gale
and I write
18th April 2002
I am here.
Author Bio:
Pippa Hennessy has published poetry, short fiction, graphic short stories and creative non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies. She is Development Director at Nottingham Writers’ Studio, Project Director for Nottingham’s UNESCO City of Literature bid, and works for Five Leaves Publications. In a past life she was a software developer, but she’s feeling much better now.
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