Wendy Clayton

Wendy Clayton taught English and was active and published in several poetry journals such as A Pennine Platform, A Pennine Anthology, The North, Indigo Dreams, Shearsman, Osiris, Tears in the Fence, Stand, The International Times, The Fortnightly Review, Stride and forthcoming in Stride, The International Times and The Fortnightly Review. Her work has been long-listed for the Erbacce poetry prize, 150 out of 150,000 in summer 2022. In 2021 her book, Twinship and Consciousness was published. With others she worked to found an alternative school in Geneva.

---

Untimely

That’s all I do.

I know. That’s all.

Just sit and look out at the day.

At all that green though the sky is grey and quiet.           

What else should I do but wander down the path

and subject the polish of Aesculus hippocastanum

to scrutiny. Why shouldn’t I wonder at a poisonous pod

being a thing of beauty, a future –                          

from deciduous dying, the conker dropping, rolling,

drifting clocks when ours has stopped –

is stopping

a seed growing into wood,

becoming woodland, holding a family.

Sapindaceae why shouldn’t I wonder

at poison being a thing at all?

---

Judas     

Being the centrality of my own speech              

one felt unease

at carnate self-reflection

polished up to misrepresent      

its secrecy

deflected                                                              

at inhabiting a category

at having to be something or other

at making it up

even an hybridity newly coined

yet steeped in re-collected selves

sighing love me                                                     

discomfort at the chant

of the slanted self’s natal alienation                            

at coming to find one’s affinity more with

something outside

one then takes home as mine

unease at the demurral 

to work to a recipe

ingredients of nothing.

---

Inside or Out    

Pescara, Ascoti Pecino, Ancona, Pesaro

all along the Adriatic

a stranger murmuring facelessly

                   among 

the moon    a river,

a village vanishingly small

or a ship in a lonely sea,

she asks the air or me

tilted towards the pane of the ‘plane

a stranger murmuring faceless                            

quiet   gone   over    the mountains

to reappear with light lining coastal towns

mingling stars black night

Pescara, Ascoti Pecino, Ancona, Pesaro

Quite gone all along the Adriatic.   

Upon arrival at Ravenna  

the voice in my ear smiled

at meeting in the dark.

---