Heidi Williamson
Heidi Williamson Born in Norfolk in 1971, Heidi lived
in Stirling, Brussels, and Salisbury before returning
to Norwich in 2001. Her poems have appeared in The
Rialto, Guardian online, Smiths
Knoll, Orbis, Poetry
News, South and others. Work has also
appeared as part of the Poems in the Waiting Room initiative
and at the Salisbury Festival. She was a runner up
in the Mslexia Poetry Competition in 2007 and 2008,
and short-listed for The Poetry Society Hamish Canham
Prize 2008. She is currently poet-in-residence for
The Science Museum’s Dana Centre (www.danacentre.org.uk)
and has just received an Arts Council award to complete
her first collection and establish a website (www.heidiwilliamsonpoet.com).
The florist
The florist tends her children like flowers
– shapes them with a knife,
murmurs love when no-one listens,
digs their roots and upends them
when the Spring takes her.
At night she listens to their sleeping
and dreams of forests full of wildflowers
grappling towards sun. In love’s usefulness
her children nurture herbs, learn to seize
the small and pleasant bitterness of thyme,
shock of mint, nestling breath of rosemary.
She helps them turn the soil,
spread the sand-like seeds,
scatter wishes for a sturdy crop.
Distant as a sunflower,
she turns towards them by degrees.
Williamson County gloves
My lover sends me cowboy gloves
bought in a county named for me.
The leather is unbroken, its scent
musky as stallion’s flanks. I trace
the smooth edge of each finger,
lay them by me at night, and become
a rolling, low, black land, guarded
out west by limestone hills,
swathed in prairie grasses - somewhere
grain and cotton prosper, delicate
but fulsome, blowsy in Atlantic breezes.
My dreams range with a candour I lack
when awake. I lick the leather,
watch the wet darkness linger.
© 2008
Salt Publishing Limited 
