The Fig Tree - Issue 1

with Featured Poet Ian Parks

Photo Image by Ben Kerckx from Pixabay

Welcome to the first issue of The Fig Tree. I hope you enjoy this selection of poems and I also hope that you continue to support the webzine by sending us your work.

This first issue has a Featured Poet who I've known almost since I started writing poems 7 years ago. Ian Parks has been involved in poetry for over 40 years and is the driving force of the Read to Write group in Doncaster, where he has helped and supported many of its members, including me, as well as educating us on great poets both historic and modern. He has generously provided three new poems for this issue, and is providing advice and support for this venture going forward. Although we come from different counties, we share a similar background and it was very easy for me to tune in to his poetry, particularly in the superb collection Citizens.

I have been delighted with the quality of the poets who have submitted their work for this issue, and those that are already filling the forthcoming issues. There are poets who have been published multiple times and are editors in their own right, but there are also contributions from poets who have only recently ventured into submitting their work. These poems may help you understand the kind of poems I admire, but don't be surprised if something different pops up occasionally. Light verse, haiku, or (a personal favourite when done well) the villanelle, may make an appearance at some point.

I hope that you enjoy the ones I selected for this issue, and, if you are a poet yourself, don't hesitate to submit your own work. There is a definite Yorkshire flavour about this issue but I’m certainly hoping that future issues will have a wider geographical base.

Tim Fellows, Editor

Contributors: Ian Parks, Matthew Paul, Peter Donnelly, Stephanie Bowgett, Abigail Ottley, Mike Farren, Simon Beech, Ian Harker, Paul Brookes, Bob Beagrie and Hannah Stone.

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The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Ian Parks

Photo by Allan WIlkinson

Winter Hill

I met her at the top of winter hill,
a rucksack slung over one arm.
I noticed her, she didn’t notice me.
The path was steep and rutted, filled with rain
and when she asked me if I had a wish
I wished I might be young again;

to lean on the unmended fence,
look down into the flooded valley and to see
each footstep of the way I came
past slanting cottages and sinking farm,
the tall graves of the hidden dead
keeping their secret safe from harm

and feel the climb required no recompense.
I made a promise I couldn’t fulfil.
These are the only words we said
there on the hillside with its frozen name.
Before the coming of the storm
the trees are restless and the roots are still.

Ian Parks

Thatcher

The day they buried Thatcher
I was standing in the rain
in Goldthorpe where the closures hit them hard.

Someone had made an effigy
and dragged it from the yard –
her handbag trailing and her wig askew.

They pushed her in a rusting pram
past empty bus stops and crumbling schools
to where a bonfire waited
on the recreation ground.

And when they lit the newspapers
a moan erupted from the crowd:
men wept with joy, the children danced
and all the women cheered.

The mask slipped first then melted.
The smoke was black and stung my eyes.

Ian Parks

The Nephilim

They spent all weekend in the pub
before the pits were closed:
bruisers, fellers, crude intemperate men

who took exception if you caught their eye.
Beer by the gallon, Park Drives by the score,
discoursing loudly on the racing form

there in the tap room where the lights were low.
These were the mighty ones of old –
offspring of angels and working girls,

of random couplings in the fields –
who had no children of their own
and perished in the waters of the Flood,

their wad-filled wallets floating on the swell:
their scuffed, raw knuckles turning white,
their oaths unspoken and their teeth of gold.

Ian Parks

Ian Parks is the editor of Versions of the North: Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry and the Selected Poems of Harold Massingham. His versions of the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy were a Poetry Book Society Choice. His poems have appeared in Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Strix, Poetry (Chicago) and the Folio Book of Love Poetry. He runs the Read to Write Group in Doncaster. His Selected Poems 1983-2023 are published by Calder Valley Poetry.

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The Fig Tree Selection – March 2024

This section features up to ten poems, with a maximum of one per poet per issue.

Deauville, 1999

Sunrise, before les beaux gens Parisiens
staked their parasols: ball-tyred tractors
raked and striped the beach.

From my Paul genes surfaced the trauma,
recounted in his dotage memoirs, of Granddad,
at Eastbourne, 1908, sinking in eddying quicksand,
for yonks, until his horrible cousin yanked him free,
ginger pigtails flailing his lead-white cheeks.

Who knew Deauville had a film festival?

Outside the iced-cake Casino Barrière, hordes
of paparazzi bawled, ‘Salma!’ at a black-haired queen.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked, and the nice lady standing
beside us replied in broad Barnsley, ‘I’ve no idea,
but my daughter’ll kill me if I don’t get a snap.’

Then two paps yelled, ‘’Arrison, over ’ere!’
Who knew how short he was; that even his resting face
contained the winsome, contagious perma-smile

of a chap with stacks in the bank?

Matthew Paul

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Before Taps or Plugholes

We may pity the poor servants
who had to carry pails of hot water
up the back stairs
from the kitchen range
to fill the baths of their betters.
Do we forget they had to
empty them also?
Up and down again
and this time outside
even in mid-winter.
To do it completely
must have been impossible.
Did they sponge the tub
with towels, absorb the dregs,
wring them out, wash them,
wring them again?

Peter J Donnelly

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Ties

Grandma crocheted strings
to keep my mittens safe. Sewn
to either end, threaded through
the sleeves of my Robert Hirst gaberdine,
they dangled past my hands. My shadow
was a four-pawed monster. Invincible

She made lots of strings, many more
strings than I had mittens; posted them
to Germany, packets of rainbows
addressed to Miss Stephanie Silver Plimmer.
I loved them, hoarded, knotted, plaited,
sorted by colour, texture, length.

Grandma scoured wool-shop bins for exotica,
made each string different. The best one
sparkled had flecks of real gold, and one,
a knobbly pink yarn had special knots
I worried between thumb and finger,
to hush me to sleep each night.

Each string had a story:
This navy marl’s our Eric’s Sunday jumper;
the cherry-red angora’s from that tammy
of Edie Peedle’s; I got the egg-yolk yellow
for your Teddy’s new trews; Battleship grey,
Gramp’s boring balaclava. Chains from home

and Grandma, her hook at work
on shocking pink nylon, three ply fawn,
chunky angora, flecked double knitting,
fluffy baby blue, never stopped crocheting
string after string, keeping
me and my mittens safe.

Stephanie Bowgett

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Considering Tomorrow 

What  is  tomorrow? my  little  dog  asks  me as  I  fondle 
his silky, white ears. It’s easy, I tell him. Tomorrow is a 
plan.  It’s  a  list   with  nothing  ticked  or  crossed  off. 
A dragon’s breath on the back of your neck, a crocodile 
snapping  at  your  heels.  Sometimes  tomorrow is  the 
moon  coming  out,   a cold shiver, or a  solemn promise 
given. A letter on the mantelpiece waiting for its stamp, 
a  needle  threaded to sew.  Tomorrow  is  the thing you   
have  been  putting   off  for  weeks  that  comes  in  the  
night  to  reproach   you.  It’s   the   knock   that startles,
waking  you  from  sleep,  a  river in full spate that  runs  
dry.  Tomorrow  is  the  stuff  that  dreams  are  made of 
and the  greensward  we  may  not walk  on. It’s the wish  
you make blowing candles on your cake and  the colours  
of  a rainbow  as it  fades. Tomorrow is the  bargain coat  
you fight for in  the  sales  and then find  it doesn’t really  
suit   you,  the   feeling   you  get  when the  phone  rings  
and rings and no much-loved voice says hello. Tomorrow  
is  the coin  you  choose not  to spend and the Christmas 
cake you leave in the cake tin. It’s the news  you  wait for  
with hope in your heart and, when  the  doctor  brings it,  
it  breaks  you. It’s a  walk  in  the park with magpies and  
squirrels, purple  crocuses  pushing  through  the ground.   
So much  to remember.  My  little  dog  blinks.  He  is old 
now.  His  brown  eyes  are milky.  He rolls  on  his  back, 
presents   his  pink   tummy.   Tiggy   me.  Tiggy  me  now.

Abigail Ottley

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Falconetti

After ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’ – Carl Th. Dreyer

In this world, everyone is ugly
except you and you are not beautiful
in a way that might be appreciated
in this world. The full moon of your face
fills with silver the sky of the screen.

Only your eyes reflect a light that might
be God – your God, who is nothing
to do with the old men, with the word
made manifest – in this silence –
through their spittle on your cheek.

To exist in this perpetual state
of rapture is not to belong in this world,
this body, which is as contingent as
your straw crown, your boy-drag. Burn it
all, as fuel for your leaving of this world.

Mike Farren

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The Fig Tree

The sun is hot
it’s somehow still worth saying.
The Rabbi in the distance
inches off. Something stirred there earlier.

I’ve had visions too, but never
made a fuss.
Angels can ascend all day, descend too,
but there’s work to do,

clothes to beat, corn to thresh,
water must be brought up from the well.
Do you believe, he said, merely on account
of my saying I saw you

underneath the fig tree
that I’m the Son of God?
Nathanael, you joker,
promise you’ll never forget

how briefly circumspect you were,
your urbane wit. Promise me
the memory you’ll most water
is the fig tree I saw you sitting under.

Simon Beech

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Shirland and Higham

You made dad slow down
as we went through the village
your own father grew up in:
where men and women
with your maiden name lived
from when the two hamlets
were mentioned in the Doomsday Book
until five brothers all upped and left
within a few years of each other.

They are walking past us now,
my granddad and my great uncles
shining like seams of lead, pretending
not to see us, smoking, hands in their pockets
and caps at jaunty angles.

And we're ignoring them
and the gestures they're making
and the shared colour of our eyes
and the hills that have started
joining hands around us.

Ian Harker

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The Day Shift

Blessed, no industrial lights. Blessed, sun
Behind cloud, in rain. Now too warm I strips,
Tie off, layers off, look a tramp. No one
Notices. Stickler officers insist

On dress, idlers couldn’t care, look for bed
To kip, tell me keep eye out. In, I fret.
Their long silences demand chat, but all’s been said
As twelve hours inch by, they say I know lets

Lob halfbricks through windows. Record ‘vandals’
In accident book. I want to build shapes
From broken window frames, on blank walls
Draw murals, sculpt smashed pallets, iron plates,

Tapered steel, abandoned sand, engineer
But demolition men already here.

Paul Brookes

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Plainsong

Down the dale, around the rind of congealing night, through gale-riven trees, stripping off leaves, tugging at the dropped shawl, rollicking through river hollows where the banks have broken, with roads blocked by sandbags, crows hoyed across the curdled sky, cloud-scudding raw and sharpened on ridges of granite cliffs, tugging at the shawl Mary dropped, bleat-whetted upon the dripping horns of black faced rams, tuned against the quivering throat-song of ewes ready for tupping, Classic Rock on the radio Love Is A Battlefield tugging on the shawl Mary dropped during an attempted escape, gossip over scones, cake and cheese in the castle cafe, whistling about the buttresses, echoing like farts in privy holes, awail in dungeons, tugging at the shawl once dropped by a Queen of Scots held prisoner and plotting revenge, through barnyard yodels to go blathering under stone bridges in the runnelled froth of haste and funnelled force, and carrying the primal dankness as a shawl of feathermoss and long leafed flapwort from sheltered flushes, like unutterable wishes, up onto the scree slopes and limestone scars for starker moon-struck lodgings.

Bob Beagrie

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Everything is going to be amazing

(From Jo Bell’s Fifty Two)

She left simple instructions: unpick the silver linings,
and wash them by hand. Rinse in mist, and dry in sunshine.
By dusk next day, the pieces shimmered and hummed like electric fences.
Soon, they started to shape themselves into solid forms, each rising
like cheap ghosts, or dust on an arid path, each adopting the shape
of something you never knew you needed.
Each day your needs were met without question; the pile never shrank.
What seemed gossamer was tough as tensile steel; magicked itself
into solid objects of great delicacy, and, it transpired, durability.
She never returned to check on progress, but one day you woke
with great clarity, and found a mirror beside the bed, and the compulsion
to take it in both hands, repeating again and again:
‘Thank you, thank you, thank you for everything.’

Hannah Stone

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Contributors

Bob Beagrie (PhD) lives in Middlesbrough and has published numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Kō (Black Light Engine Room Press’ 2023), Eftwyrd (Smokestack Books 2023), The Last Almanac (Yaffle Press 2023), When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden (Stairwell Books 2021). His work has appeared in numerous international anthologies, journals and magazines and has been translated into Finnish, Urdu, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Tamil, Gaelic and Karelian. He also writes short stories and plays.

Simon Beech is a writer and poet from Barnsley, South Yorkshire. He has been published by Black Bough, Dream Catcher and Dreich.

Stephanie Bowgett is one of the founder members of The Albert Poets in Huddersfield which has held poetry readings and community workshops for many years. She has been published in several magazines and her most recent publication was “A Poor Kind of Memory” (Calder Valley Poetry).

Paul Brookes is a shop assistant. His chapbooks include As Folktaleteller, (ImpSpired, 2022), These Random Acts of Wildness, (Glass Head Press, 2023), Othernesses, (JCStudio Press, 2023). Wolf Eye, (Red Ceilings Press, 2023). He edits The Wombwell Rainbow Interviews and challenges and a new webzine, devoted to words and images called The Starbeck Orion.

Peter J Donnelly lives in York and has degrees in English and Creative Writing from Lampeter University. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies and was a runner up in two competitions. He is the author or two collections. Solving the Puzzle and The Second of August both published in 2023 by alien Buddha Press.

Mike Farren’s poems have appeared widely in journals and have won and placed in several competitions, recently winning the Red Shed prize (2023) and coming second in the Plaza Prize (>20 lines – 2024). His latest pamphlet is Smithereens (4Word). He is part of Yaffle publishing and co-hosts Rhubarb open mic. His website is here.

Ian Harker is co-founder of Strix magazine and a director of Leeds Lit Fest. Shortlisted for the Troubadour and Bridport prizes, he was runner-up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition and poet in residence at the Henry Moore Institute. He has two previous books with Templar Poetry. An Honorary Fellow of Leeds Trinity University, ‘A - Z of Superstitions’ is out now from Yaffle Press.

Abigail Ottley writes poetry and short fiction from her home in Cornwall. More information about her life and some samples of her work can be found on Chillsubs.com or on Instagram

Matthew Paul was born and grew up in South London and now lives in South Yorkshire. His collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017. He is also the author of two haiku collections, published by Snapshot Press. He writes reviews and essays and blogs about poetry here.

Hannah Stone is the author of ten volumes of poetry (single-authored and collaborations) and also edits Dream Catcher literary journal, acts as poet-theologian to Leeds Church Institute and convenes the poets-composers forum for the Leeds Lieder festival, among other activities in the poetry community.

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The authors retain copyright of their poems.