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.
Rain Started High
at Hawthornden
You could see rain high
against the line of conifers
that made our horizon.
It seemed as though its waters broke –
plummeted down the trunks of trees
smashed off their branches
pooled round their bases
created a new ochre-coloured river
that plunged down the hill towards the
North Esk, the roaring of which
increased, a thousand times louder
than the yell I gave
when my waters broke
years ago, and soaked my feet.
****
In the gorge
the trees, afterwards,
shrugged their shoulders
of the extra water,
gripped down with roots
towards aquifers –
each and every one of them
on the strength of all this water
pretending to be
Yggdrasil.
Joan McGavin