Making the transition from Psychologist to poet has been Jenny McRobert’s most pleasurable journey. Despite the disadvantage of being taught it at school, poetry has been her lifelong passion. She has always known it, though her career demanded writing of a different sort (Psychology textbooks and articles). Her poems have appeared in Dream Catcher Magazine, and online Journals: Ink Sweat & Tears, Picaroon Poetry, The High Window and Words for the Wild. Her first collection will be published by The High Window Press in 2021. She lives in a house on The Watercress Way with her husband Bob.
Touched
Crunch-cold,
the unravelling path frays
a spindling yarn
swirling violet and green,
in rain pools like dreams
that tinge a restless night.
Mud sucks at slow boots,
sliding down,
pushing up brambles
hollow faced,
hostile homes
like burnt-out city slums.
Travel sick with the inward journey,
I look up,
and they are there,
where they have always been,
shocks of thick green hair
in the brown baldness of winter;
Yew trees
huddled in on each other as if for warmth.
Soft-veined old arms of time,
beckon me to their counsel.
I touch the ancient,
the slow seeping memory of pagan
the warp and weft
of tangled roots;
that sing of the time when earth
once lost its battle with sky.
Time stutters and stalls,
as I pad-out thoughts
in small steps,
author of my own mystery play
where the broken mind is
born again.
Jenny McRobert
First published in Picaroon Poetry Issue #12
Sea shanty for a ship in a bottle by Jenny McRobert