Susan Taylor began writing in her teens in the idyllic setting of her family farm in the Lincolnshire Wolds – Tennyson country. An ex-shepherd, she has become rather a turncoat now, with much sympathy for the plight of the wild wolf. She has seven published poetry collections, including Temporal Bones, published by Oversteps Books in July 2016.
Susan is a keen performer of her poetry and has developed and toured many collaborative poetry shows, including La Loba – Enchanting the Wild and The Weather House, which appeared as an Indigo Dreams Poetry Pamphlet in 2017.
No Waters More Clear
I am stretched out in a bed of grief.
Green as watercress, it is.
I can feel the love of ones that love me
supporting me all around,
holding me,
like the water beneath the fronds
flowing through them constantly.
So here I am
able to shed these soft word seeds
among dark curling leaves of pain,
so fresh and tender that I begin
to understand more
the nature of bereavement. It is a spring
renewing itself from deep down.
The worst of losses has come into my life:
the loss of a child, loved and so loving,
young and so strong. He was taken
on impact by a freakish hurling force,
a race against time
in some stranger’s life.
Let there be no more race against time
for me. Time drifts on a bed of watercress.
There’s no waters more clear than here
in the quietest part of the stream
where cresses grow. During days
when I am stretched out floating,
too stricken for tears, these words
shed my freshwater grief.
Susan Taylor
