Joan McGavin featured in a Peterloo Poets anthology and has poetry books from Oversteps Books: Flannelgraphs (2011) and Passing Arcadia Close (2017). A Hawthornden Fellow in 2012, she was Hampshire Poet 2014, and for thirteen years taught Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. A trustee of the Winchester Poetry Festival, she curated an anthology, Hogwords, for them in 2014. She is currently working on a third collection as part of a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Southampton University.
Daphnoid
Though I’m tired
with shopping, the tree
catches my eye.
I can’t help smiling
at my dramatic daphnoid memory:
how, near the top, stretching
for an elusive twiggy bit, while pruning,
I once fell, spreadeagle, onto it
and was upheld, branch-buoyed,
as if velcroed to vitality,
clasping the bay’s dense green
globe, needing no rescue.
All I needed to do
was step back onto the ladder,
feeling my way first with toes
of one slow gyrating foot.
Call me what you will
in Freudian terms.
I know it may never happen again
with any other tree.
I can’t help loving my old bay.
It still has me where it wants me:
heart-smitten, each time I see it,
over and again.
Joan McGavin
Rain Started High by Joan McGavin