The Fig Tree - Issue 6

with Featured Poet Hannah Stone

Welcome to the sixth issue of The Fig Tree – the first one of 2025. We hope that you had a great Christmas and wish you all the best for the upcoming year.

2025 will hopefully bring a further five issues after this one, but that will only happen if we get enough quality submissions. So, if you haven't submitted yet, please do so, and if you have then consider submitting again. Also spread the word to your poetry friends.

In addition to the regular issues, 2025 will see the first Fig Tree Special Issue on the theme of Coal Mining – miners, the 1984-1985 strike in the UK and the communities before, during and after the strike. Submissions are open now until April 30^th – depending on how many submissions we have, we may issue it in two parts. There are different submission rules for that issue, which is more of an anthology of new and published poems and has no Featured Poet. I may sneak one of mine in there too.

This issue sees a Featured slot for Leeds based poet Hannah Stone, who has already appeared in two previous issues. You can read my reviews of two of her previous collections, including the most recent collection The Invisible Worm over at my personal blog timfellowspoetry.substack.com

The issue also includes a second poem by Doncaster poet and singer-songwriter Mick Jenkinson, whose full collection Iron Harvest is available now.

Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it.

Thanks

Tim Fellows, Editor

Contributors: Hannah Stone, Michael Burton, Eleanor Cantor, Stewart Carswell, Sarah James, Mick Jenkinson, Emma Lee, Ian Parks, John Short, Tim Taylor, Rod Whitworth and Paul Brough.

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The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Hannah Stone

Allotment moment

Shieldbug drops
from the plump dome
of a raspberry, grasps

my sleeve with pin-thin
splayed legs

Oh, its perfect pink
undercarriage, the fine trimming
of its carapace, as it walks
down my arm,

halts
for a moment.

Gorgeous green broach.

Shieldbug shits;
brownish spots splatter
onto the fabric.

I flick it lightly
into crisp September air.

Hannah Stone

How to recharge with renewable energy

lean in to the tug-of-war
between core
stability
and gusts
on the crest of the hill

trickle-charge feet on rainy days
when every path’s a stream
each waterfall in spate

trust that each stride
on wet limestone
slips
the dynamo a few more volts

climb from dale-bottom
to summit
and back again
to etch their grid of contours
onto legs

watch the insidious river charge
low-lying fields to share its flow

Hannah Stone

Poem Beginning with a Line by Jack Underwood

(‘Instead of Bad News about a Person I Love’, from A Year in the New Life)

Rain was washing everything that seemed in need of washing
and you lay in bed, wriggling with ear-worms
from the evening’s rehearsal. Your knees
were arguing, and couldn’t agree
on how to be comfortable; you offered
various forms of arbitration,
and eventually settled for stacked, right on left;
they continued grumbling, but by then
the cat had come in, complaining
about the rain, and settled at the back
of your legs, and it seemed there was
enough discontent in the room already.
The last thing you remember, before being swallowed by sleep
was the decision to count blessings, instead of sheep.

Hannah Stone

Hannah Stone is a Leeds based poet who has published over 450 poems since completing an MA in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University in 2015. As well as solo authored books she has collaborated with poets and composers; among other contributions to the local poetry community, she facilitates the poets-composers forum for the Leeds Lieder festival, and comperes Wordspace open mic in Horsforth. Last year her work was chosen as a Poem of the Week for the Guardian. In other lives, Hannah is a hill walker, volunteer farmer and enthusiastic chorister.

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The Fig Tree Selection – January 2025

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

A New Morning

Mum’s closed curtains freeze when I try
to open them, caught on a memory
of how the world used to be. Yesterday’s
unread newspaper wilts by her chair;
the arm’s fabric has frayed away,
small blue butterflies flittering
across the threadbare floral carpet.

Outside, an angry grey pigeon blusters
off the ‘Give Way’ sign. Somewhere
further down the street, someone
shouts, their words narrowing
to a significant but incomprehensible
loudness. Is this what life always
reduces to in the end?

Overloaded, her washing machine
shudders through a final cartwheel,
then cuts out before the water’s drained.
The window’s sudden sun erases Mum’s name
from the teaching certificate still proudly
framed on the wall. Dust varnishes
my fingernails as I straighten it.

Sarah James

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The Nod

It was so long ago, that day, the memory
has almost leached away, and I no longer know
exactly what was said or done, only that you
took umbrage, and when next I passed your way
where once there would have been a smile, there was none.

Perhaps, I thought, you turned your back
attending to some task, or did not notice me
but each day from then on it was the same.
We are prisoners of geography:
to go about my business, I must pass
your house, and in unbroken sequence, trip by trip
there’d be a silent echo of that first rebuff.

No words are spoken and no blows exchanged
but you communicate each day, in subtle ways,
nothing has changed; whatever wound I made,
real or imagined, festers still …
Until today,
purely by chance, we caught each others’ eye
and in that moment, I could sense you
pondering on why it had to be like this.

After a second I received the faintest nod –
a token of forgiveness? I gave one in return
and resumed my progress with a bolder step,
heartened that even hate will fade away
in time, for those prepared to wait.

Tim Taylor

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On Track

We’re cruising through
the industrial estate,
I’m perched on your lap
alive to everything,
my hands at the wheel.

We play our usual game
singing out the factory names,
Jacob’s, Hartley’s
that neon-lit winged horse
floats against a screen
of night and stars,
real magic when you’re three.

For a while I pretend
I’m in control of the old Consul
as it rolls over road but
of course it’s you who’s driving,
an eye out for traffic,
ensuring we stay on track.

John Short

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Seeds

Resist the temptation to tally tasks
you didn’t get to do;
this no day for self-recrimination,
but to be looking out
on this dissolute late summer garden,
its raggedy magnificence.

There’s nothing here that will not be enhanced
by idle contemplation,
and neither would the world be much improved
by some remorseful mood.

A day’s vindication; if you believe
it rests in moments
of incidental wonder,
then watch with me a while
as these weeds gleefully cast down seeds.

Mick Jenkinson

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Romulus and Remus

Romulus

How and when we were born remains a mystery,
but it’s clear we were pared off the same tree.
Yours is the face I see when I lean over a pool
or stare into a shield a conscientious armourer
has polished until it mimics the moon.
Mine is the pain I feel when you are hurt.
When the she-wolf found us we sucked
at adjacent dugs, or shared the same one.
I am you and you are me and that’s as it should be.
We strove together to build my city
and you are always welcome there.

Remus

Two pips in a pear they called us
that day we left the wolf-pack
to live with our own kind of thing.
We’d grown in the kindness of wolves
and learnt the joy of sharing.
We were romulusandremus-remusandromulus,
fighting side by side, back to back.
We dreamt a city, made it.
Now I find you’ve built a wall,
closed gates, with me on the outside.
I don’t want to feel welcome. I want to be at home.

Rod Whitworth

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A Withheld Breath

i.m. Moon Bin (26/01/1998 – 19/04/2023)

Chrysanthemums, roses, baby’s breath in muted
shades pile into a tribute, cellophane wraps shining
like the name of someone who left too young, too soon,
who sung of a butterfly, the fear that love is ephemeral.
Notes flutter. A small white with male markings, unusual
in a capital city, hovers as if reading, with feet as sensitive
to the letters as petals, antennae extracting the sentiment.
Sunlight sparking stars on its ever-moving wings.

Emma Lee

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A Summer Spent Falling

That summer when two of us fell from the top bunk
in the same bright week as close as a Lancashire town gets.

My sister was the first to tumble,
me the witness to her body as it thrashed top to bottom

like a flash of girl drowning in sped motion
through a river of silence she broke before her thump to floor.

It was me only days after we’d agreed to swap ascensions.
My descent more a float than fall.

I must have looked as deathly as a bomb dropped,
awoken with her prod to my shoulder,

my arms still crossed at the neck.
Nothing felt but a soreness in my chest.

In the rooms around us others woke to half our story,
our parents sisters and brother privy only

to our crashes cries and squabbles.
And in all those hot weeknights after,

every one of us sleepless in our beds,
every creek in our house

holding Its own potential child,
rolling over the edge.

Michael Burton

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Earthworks

Maiden Castle

And I’m here again,
how these ramparts beckon with their scale and shade
and this rampant grass, long like the tail of a field mouse
spied by a sharpened kestrel who balances on air
as though wind and time mean nothing—
a simple tilt to rise and hover higher—
while high over the coastal limestone
there’s a distant naming of thunder,
the sound waves travelling in as air compressed
like how history is time compressed
into memory, into flint—but the real wind
rises with the escarpment, from the ramparts
it is a casual gale on my face
blasting my cheekbones, carrying in the salt spray,
the small vessels, the bartered wine from Europe
that travels as freely as an idea,
as freely as a kestrel upon the idea of air,
and knowing the advantage of height and high ground
the hill fort with a vision of acres
overlooking Durnovaria and the distant Downs—
to look down on an attacker
and know how a sword can pierce flesh
and know how a collar bone cracks when struck,
to look down on the rotations of agriculture
and see the fallow transformed beneath the plough
while high above the flickering grass and the votive mouse
the swoop and snatch of a kestrel upon land-bound mammals
as I walk downhill to the car park
and the single track of tarmac
aiming straight at the town centre.

Stewart Carswell

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It Will Do

Union Road in Sheffield
Dusky Springtime
looks like West Hollywood somehow
Formosa,
think about a union that will
never be
steeped in Sunset & Magnolia
breathing in the blossom & the pollen
gazing through the gates at villas
unstarved
cats greet and sleek away
between the dream and its
brokenness
Synthesis.

Eleanor Cantor

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The Visit

The candle flickers out and there you are:
your tinted glasses and your pocket watch,
your high starched collar and your silver cane -

your fingers drumming on the table top,
immaculate and bringing in your wake
a wisp of smoke that might have been a ghost.

For ten years now I've listened to your song
in dim tavernas, in the afterglow
where cadence and inflection touch the heart

and learned to think of you as of a friend
who visits sometimes, sometimes stays away.
I've tracked you in the squares and alleyways,

the overhanging balconies of cheap hotels
that open out onto the shore
until your ancient city lived in me.

My eyes have scanned the books you read
until your voice would wake me in the night -
the fastidious turning of each phrase.

Or is it you that has been tracking me
from room to room, from youth to age?
And in the tarnished mirror opposite

you smile and nod as if you seem to say
refill the glass, draw down the blinds,
relight the candle, start another page.

Ian Parks

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Contributors

Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here

Michael Burton’s poems have been published most recently in The Interpreter’s House, The Honest Ulsterman & Pennine Platform. He also writes and performs as NotAnotherPoet and is one half of the band New Age of Decay whose debut album can be found on various online streaming platforms.

Eleanor Cantor is a writer, translator and musical performer based in Yorkshire. Her work appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Wingless Dreamer, In Parentheses, Klecksograph, Free-the-Verse, Plate of Pandemic, WAPoets and elsewhere. She is the 2024 winner of the Ellie J Shakerley Poetry Award. Her music can be found at www.sisterchainbrotherjohn.com

Stewart Carswell grew up in the Forest of Dean and currently lives in Cambridgeshire, where he co-hosts the Fen Speak open mic night. His poems have recently been published in Under the Radar, Finished Creatures, Ink Sweat & Tears, and The Storms Journal. His debut collection is "Earthworks" (Indigo Dreams, 2021). Find out more at www.stewartcarswell.co.uk

Sarah Leavesley/James is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Her recent collection Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic (Verve Poetry Press) won the CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry 2021 and was highly commended in the Forward Prizes. She also runs V. Press, publishing poetry and flash fiction. Website: http://sarah-james.co.uk

Mick Jenkinson is a poet and songwriter from Doncaster. He runs Well Spoken, a monthly poetry evening at Doncaster Brewery and delivers songwriting workshops for community projects. His poetry collection, Iron Harvest was published in January 2025 by Cyberwit, and his latest album The Wheel Keeps on Turning was released in 2024. www.mickjenkinson.co.uk

Emma Lee’s publications include “The Significance of a Dress” (Arachne, 2020) and "Ghosts in the Desert" (IDP, 2015). She co-edited “Over Land, Over Sea,” (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for magazines and blogs at https://emmalee1.wordpress.com

Ian Parks is the editor of Versions of the North: Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry. His versions of the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy were a Poetry Book Society Choice. His Selected Poems 1983-2023 is published by Calder Valley Poetry. His work appears in the Folio Book of Love Poems.

John Short lives near Liverpool again after a previous life in southern Europe. He's a Pushcart nominee and has appeared in magazines such as The High Window, Morphrog, Dream Catcher and The Galway Review. His most recent collection is In Search of a Subject (Cerasus Poetry 2023).

Tim Taylor has published two poetry collections, Sea Without a Shore, and LifeTimes, both with Maytree Press, and two novels. His poems have appeared in magazines such as Acumen, Orbis and Pennine Platform and various anthologies. Tim lives in Meltham near Huddersfield and teaches Ethics part-time at Leeds University - https://wordpress.com/view/timwordsblog.wordpress.com

Rod Whitworth, born in 1943, has done a number of jobs. He currently works as a medical rôle-player. He lives in Oldham and is still tyrannised by commas.

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All contributors retain copyright of their work.