‘Ham Woods in September’ by Rosemarie Corlett
To mark National Poetry Day today, we’d like to share with you new piece by the Plymouth Laureate of Words, Rosemarie Corlett.
About the origins of this piece, Rosemarie says: ‘Earlier this year, I facilitated a Creative Writing workshop around the theme of Climate Change with the Global Climate Cafe at Theatre Royal Plymouth. A participant mentioned visiting the orchard at Ham Woods, and that there were a variety of trees, including medlar, mulberry, cherry, fig and walnut. I wanted to go at harvesting time to see the apple trees. I visited, hoping to find the orchard, and was stunned by how vast the woods were and how diverse the wildlife was. I got lost and ended up sitting, taking in my surroundings and writing this poem sitting on a carved out bench in the rain. It was so beautiful and austere in early autumn.’
Ham Woods in September –
Rosemarie Corlett
Instead, a laundry bag of forest.
The ivy switches on and
smothers
another ash tree. And all the ferns are left
inside out. Like a cat in a window,
the birch barely moves.
Yellow leaves follow one another
down the path and everything
seems to exist by the
process of
moving through something else –
the bracket mushrooms like modern balconies
extending out of the oak
tree.
A collective, inexhaustible pushing gesture,
happening at all different volumes.
Trees always reaching out
until they settle down into old
relaxed fingers.
A kind of safe chaos – the family home.
This place demands time
to be
written about. Trees, like music, require
a great deal of attention.
They need time. And to be
touched.
You must love them like cats –
discover their difficult personalities.
Then their roots on a
ledge
might reconfigure as stairs. Or two trees side by side
will expand against the sky like a
pair of lungs, two ghosts
assuming a form
we can assimilate. We can make the sound of wind
with our hands through the ivy.
We can make the sound
bigger by putting our ear
to the dry stone wall and
this will function
like a cheekbone, allowing the sound to resonate.
A spider whose entire
body
is a wood coloured drawing
pin with eight single
eyelashes animating it. The smell of root-filled
ledges that show us how
to crumble (how to share).
With all the austerity and lush decisiveness
of a brutalist block of flats, with succulents bulging
out of the concrete.
A seaside crazy golf with no theme in winter –
where a landscape casually rejects its own bleakness
and becomes entirely
provocative.
