This week I’m beginning the first of a series of writing workshops in St Michael’s Gardens, the old churchyard of the lovely and active Headingley church. As I’ve been saying, it’s my shortest commute to work ever, being just at the top of my road. Information about the activities in the new recreational space can be on Insta under @stmichaelsgardens
The November writing dates are 11th and 18th, then February 10th and 17th, finishing on April 14th and 21st; all from 10.30 and running for two hours and you can chose to come to one or all of them.
You’ll find me lurking around the church porch… looking a bit suspicious.
Here are a couple of [rough and ready] sonnets I wrote when I observed some awesomely talented first year Fine Art students from the University of Leeds begin to interrogate the space for themselves… they created some extraordinary images and some pretty fine words.
The space between
Sometimes I can conjure in the space between,
Catch a fleeting glimpse, a shining blade,
Then gone again as if I had never seen
Between the sky and steeple, tree and stone.
Sometimes I’m wondering just quite how,
Vaporous and rising like mist or steam,
This blends with my past so I never know
What is real or what a waking dream.
And here is my place of contemplation
Where I can connect to what I once knew.
I love the uncertain, broken meditation
Of a less certain and imperfect view
And sometimes between the shapes I see
A blurred and less than perfect me
Crooked Shoulder
Gravestone, a crooked shoulder in the earth,
Thomas Padgett had hardly any time
To make his mark in the few years since his birth,
Now an epitaph in a poet’s rhyme.
Thomas Padgett, we cannot begin to know
Whom you loved and in return who loved you
But perhaps sometimes when the cold winds blow
There is a whisper amongst the leaves that strew
Your grave, and at night when the owls screech
Do the flitting bats in their shadowy flights
Remember you, is there something here to reach
Us over the years, all those chilly nights
So that we can scan your life, wonder who
Thomas Padgett was, dead at thirty two.
