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Alison Brackenbury

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Five poems

The Wedding Party

The house is in the country.
Will great-aunts find the lanes?
The guests may bask by shadowed yews.
What happens when it rains?
The groom’s black shoe ripped spidered lace,
I crawl with safety pins.

The flowers sweep down from London,
Sheaves in a rocking van,
White roses with their frail green flush,
Spring’s dusk poised over land.
Ivy, moth’s stocks, translucent bells
Raise candles to doors’ wind.

The cake purrs up from Brighton,
Chilled in the strange spring heat
With chocolate frozen in white waves,
Red petals hard and sweet
To test girls’ teeth when they flop down
With dancers’ throbbing feet.

The people come from Leicester,
Gloucester, London, Wales,
With beads, blue shoes, tight-waisted suits,
Black hair in plaited tails.
They gossip, clap, cry tactfully,
Sway, linked, as long light fails.

Last night the fierce heat sank my heart
Heavy with all it brings,
Failed crops, streets’ flood, a hard new world
Of change, where no one sings.
But hope is the dance, in her white dress,
The motto of linked rings,
Here are cake crumbs, green roses’ breath.
Here are the safety pins.

Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953. She now lives in Gloucestershire, where she has worked for almost twenty years in the family metal finishing business. Her latest collection is Singing in the Dark (Carcanet, 2008). New poems can be read at her website: www.alisonbrackenbury.co.uk. Her collections include Dreams of Power (1981), Breaking Ground (1984), Christmas Roses (1988), Selected Poems (1991), 1829 (1995), After Beethoven (2000) and Bricks and Ballads (2004). Her poems have been included on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Her work recently won a Cholmondeley Award.

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