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 worked on a third collection as part of a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Southampton University, awarded in 2020.
Just a cup
…. of orange juice is all the child asks
so here’s the little mug we keep for him.
Present from a Dutch friend, painted blue on white:
a pattern of windmills, clogs, a twee girl and boy
who lean to kiss each other. It somehow
just escapes being tat, is glazed inside and out.
I place it beside him, hear myself warn
about spills… and picture other children
riding bikes, hidden in secret places, anxious
about the next meal, skating on thin ice
and accusing us with their eyes as they sit
outside crumbling schools, lost playing fields —
worried how to fathom ways
of holding back the sea’s big thirst.
Joan McGavin
