A Note on the Collaborative Process
We met fairly recently, through an interest in poetry, and realised that our lives had many common milestones. Anna suggested the general idea of “letters from home” and a timeline based on multiples of seven. I really liked that idea as it’s my all-time favourite number and seems to follow the natural rhythm and spacing of life.
I envisaged our poems interweaving somehow at those high points. When Anna
mentioned the idea of a double helix these two conceptions came together very naturally in the final shape of the poem. We wrote each stage independently, emailed the results and, because of the intuitive relationship and experience, which is largely common to all women, the poems had an unplanned but inescapable resonance with each other. It grew in tributaries of our individual time and place but flowed comfortably together. The idea was to write independently about life at first memory, then at 7, 14, 28 and 56 and then to weave the pieces of writing together in a double helix.
We really enjoyed the variations and tangents and found the experience of
collaboration both exhilarating and inspirational. Age fourteen took the biggest
effort to tame the ideas and memories but that was part of the fun!
Anne and Anna
First memory: Co. Antrim 1948
Up, up, up
high steps of stone
and the sky is lost.
Only giant feet
and droopy coats above.
Thighs are aching to cry
all the way
to my new patent shoes.
At the top I smell Train
hear the hiss hiss
from the chimney’s black gleam.
Mummy stops to buy the first peach
red and golden furry on my lips.
A mouth full of perfume
oozes down my chin
sticky with sunshine.
Seven: Co. Antrim 1952
Number seven. Mine.
I hear it chime in the clock
above the mantelpiece
and the Sacred Heart shines
red as red as Cherry Lips
that Daddy brings sometimes.
Tonight I feel him sad.
Our baby brother, new today,
is trying hard to live.
I think he might be bleeding
like Jesus so we need to pray,
kneel down on the lino floor
say Hail Mary, Holy Mary
round and round the blue beads
till he goes to sleep awhile.
Then in the morning
Mummy will bring him home.
First memory: The Gold Coast 1959
Look at me!
Planting pawpaw kisses
on painted grown-up lips,
while a sunny baby, my brother,
dances naked in a warm downpour.
Lizards, blue-tailed orange comets,
flash up vine and wall.
And when night falls, like a dropped
match, I’ll lie beneath a mosquito net
in soft sack of black, while frogs, cicadas,
and midnight hands, with shell-pink palms,
hammer out the stars.
Fourteen: County Antrim 1959
His eyes are scrunched up deep blue
drowning in words he cannot read.
Every night we go over the bridge
with the Billy Goats Gruff
and I know it’s tough for him.
Mr Hamill’s juke-box burls
Bill Haley for sixpence while he sells
clove rock-around-the-clock.
Elvis doesn’t have a wooden heart
and I can’t stop dancing.
The sound of Shakespeare — wow!
And how the class listens
when Sister Philip lets me play
the hath-he-not-eyes Jew.
Going home the Model schoolboys
throw stones, bawl out “Ye Papish bitch.”
I read about apartheid. Stop eating oranges.
Seven: Edinburgh 1963
I can read.
I know Colin Sweeney wets himself,
but only cries when Miss spreads
yesterday’s news beneath his seat.
I go to Sunday School, but know
the old ash is my church, the oak
its steeple.
I can take you to where celandine creeps,
lead you to the nest of a wren.
I know the only honest form of cold
is snow and that warmth comes moss-stitched,
hand-knitted, and cardigan-shaped.
Fourteen: Ayrshire 1970
After a steep brae, and before the village,
there’s a river, with salmon, trout and eels,
that come all the way from the Sargasso Sea.
Dairy pasture is rinsed sphagnum-green
by the Gulf Stream, and cows, cottages, and collies
come in regulation black and white.
There’s one church, a Co-op, and three pubs, though
some thirsts are never quenched. July walks out
to big drums, flute bands and Orange sashes.
At summer’s end we’re herded into town,
and up to the Academy, where I like English,
Geography, and any form of game.
Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum’s No.1
and I love an altar boy. And while there’s cruelty
here, there’s kindness too.
Twenty-eight: Co Antrim 1973
Four years back and up to the oxters
in orange and green.
It looked good after the bleed-out
in an ectopic theatre in Cheshire.
“Just as well you have the two already.”
And they’ve grown, hair in long plaits now,
baby teeth daisy-white in the school photo
smiling at innocence.
Last night we danced defiant, their Dad and I,
kept faith with the long awaited Ball
and never slept at all
till the day spilt scarlet as John’s kneecaps
splattered on the floor of the site hut
underneath the isometric drawing
of how to build a new Belfast for tomorrow.
Twenty eight: Leith 1984
Rejoice!
I’m with a fingerless junkie, a woman my age,
when the old man arrives.
I visited him this morning in his barricaded home.
He’s walked miles, through snow-hushed streets,
on bad feet, just to bring me back my gloves.
He hands them in at reception, as a man
with nothing left to lose takes an axe
to six panes of security glass.
This was the year our promise slipped away,
broken and bloodied at twenty weeks.
Fifty six: Edinburgh 2001
Old voices gone pale. Not heard
so I am paid to shout for them
rattle the chains they should not wear
hope for the same when I have faded.
Children’s children cannot be explained
except to say it’s being young again
in the very core of the apple
before it is picked, eaten, ready
to scatter, seed the earth
like welcome rain.
At fifty six — 2012
Let me arrive at my half-life in a garden,
where an early fog has lifted.
Goldfinches are feasting on blackened
sunflower heads.
And for once
let this be
enough.
Anna Dickie
Anne Connolly was born in Northern Ireland. After graduating from Queen’s University in Belfast she began her teaching career which continued in England and Scotland where she and her husband now live. Latterly she has worked as an independent advocate with and for older people who are in long-term care. Poetry was a youthful passion which simmered quietly in the background while the three children were growing up. Performance and concrete forms are of particular interest. She is a member of the School of Poets in Edinburgh and has been published in a variety of magazines including Mslexia, Quarrtsiluni and Poetry Scotland. Anne's pamphlet “Downside Up” was published by Calder Wood Press in 2008 and she won the Glasgow Slam in Autumn 2009. 
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