Tag: Catherine Baker

A Poem by Catherine Baker


Prima

In front of the big house, 
a wall made long ago. 
Caerbwdi purple sandstone,
solid standing greys and blues.
Washed with soft green,
colour of the moorland mists.
In places rough enough to catch, 
scratch at my black school shoes. 
In places slick enough to slip on, 
polished by the slugs and snails.
Here, I danced like a prima.

Below, a long narrow patch, 
spreadeagled to the sun, 
rows and rows of little fires. 
Dahlias, on the lam from Mexico, 
in my grandfather’s glowing garden.
Growing fierce, throwing heat, 
bigheaded and blowsy 
but stupendous,
just the same.

There he would be, hard hands 
snipping blooms, bending double 
from the waist, braces strained.
Seeing the prima, he would stand, 
lift up his cap, dishevel his dark hair 
and from a pocket take his teeth,
put them in and smile ceramic. 
Standing tall as Bendigeidfran 
offering the prima a bouquet
of flames.


Bendigeidfran – A legendary Welsh giant.



Catherine Baker has been published by Prole, Stand, Snakeskin, Atrium and Amaryllis. She was highly commended in the Prole Poet Laureate competition 2020. Catherine’s poems in anthologies include Poetry from Gloucestershire, Ways to Peace and Pandemic Poetry. In the GWN poetry competition she was runner-up in 2018 and highly commended in 2020.

A Poem by Catherine Baker


It came slow

Two years of evenings from winter
to summer and around again.
Surrounded in plans, wood shavings,
the smell of glue and cedar thick the air.
Hands hard, slick with varnish.
Pipe clenched between stunning teeth.
It came slow, this dreaming himself free.

He steered it down cow parsley lanes,
pushed it to float in the shallows,
raised the red sail.

Left his children life-jacketed on the shore,
his woman sulking moody in the dunes.
He lifted into blue flax looseness,
the white sky stroking his bony shoulders
breathing up salt sticky spray.
He skimmed, soared the sparkle
as mackerel flared and swooped.
Silver flashes under his feet.


Catherine Baker has been published by Stand, Snakeskin and Amaryllis. She has poems in anthologies such as Poetry from Gloucestershire and Ways to Peace. She was runner up in the Gloucestershire Writers Network poetry competition in 2018, and her poem was read at Cheltenham Literature Festival.