Christina Buckton lives near Cambridge. She has been writing and reading all her life but has only recently started to explore poetry in her eighties. She was an On the Buses winner at Guernsey International Poetry competition in 2019 and 2020, and has poems published in various magazines including The North and Orbis. She has worked at the BBC, as an education consultant and therapeutic mentor.
Pondskater
Seventy years ago
I nearly
drowned here.
Stooping now
under dark branches
above the uncertain surface,
its floating cloth of weed
drilled with raindrops from a sodden sky
my eye keeps
sliding below the water, slipping
into that self
who drowned/
didn’t drown
that day the log rolled over with me on it,
shrugged me off into
unkind river arms –
– the way its swaying glassy forest beckoned me in –
it was all mist, mouth
drooling water, spit spilling through my sleeves
I was shivered into stillness into
a muffled smothering of scum
How did I not drown? How am I not drowned?
The river gathers images
for my present eye:
a pondskater on the thin skin
somewhere between sky and deep
between here and gone.
Christina Buckton