Since completing her doctorate in Creative Writing, Joan continues to publish in magazines (e.g. Literary Imagination) and anthologies (e.g. Summer Anywhere). When free from grandparenting, she still occasionally teaches poetry sessions, most recently for Waterside Writers and during the 2025 Sark Creative Week.
On such a day
15th April, 2015*
On such a day
you can imagine
how every piece of litter
on motorway verges leading here
turned to primroses.
On such a day
you can imagine
how each blackened sheet
from a burnt book
drifted back to reunite itself
with its spine.
and every creature –
magpie, fox, badger –
rose up, renewed,
looked at the car
that made it roadkill
then turned away
into the trees.
On such a day
you can imagine
a kind of beauty
in the sweating, middle-aged,
lycra-clad bodies
of the cycling club members
crowded into Mr Bun the Baker’s teashop
in Church Stretton.
And on such a day
you can imagine
the dead of Bergen-Belsen lined up,
shoulder to shoulder,
all along the top of the Long Mynd
with their faces turned up to the sunlight
as its warmth enters their bones
and the spring breeze passes over them.
*15th April, 2015, the 70th anniversary of the liberation by Allied troops of the death camp at Bergen Belsen, was the hottest day of that year so far.
Joan McGavin
Photo Credits:
All Imperial War Museum Images: © Crown copyright reproduced under delegated authority from The Keeper of Public Records
THE LIBERATION OF BERGEN-BELSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP, APRIL 1945
IWM (BU 4072) Portrait of a camp inmate eating bread.
IWM (BU 3815) A girl who is too weak to dress herself is helped by another woman.
IWM (BU 4103) Young girls suffering from typhus recover in their new cot in No 3 Camp. They have been bathed, reclothed and put into a clean bed.
IWM (BU 3734) Two malnourished women in the camp.
IWM (BU 3737) Women and children crowded together in one of the camp huts. There is no furniture. Any spare clothing is hung on the walls.
IWM (BU 3803) Women prepare a meal near the heaped bodies of the dead.
IWM (BU 4847) View of a filled in mass grave. The grave marker reads “Grave No 2 : 5000 lie buried here”.
IWM (BU 3728) A prisoner, too weak to move as a result of starvation, sits by the wire fence with an expression of agony on his face.
IWM (BU 4270) Roman Catholic Padre, Father Michael C. Morrison, a British Army chaplain, and Father Stanisław Kadziołka, a Polish Catholic priest and former inmate of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, conducting service over one of the mass graves before it is filled in, 24 April 1945.
Via Pixabay
Burnt Book: Life-Of-Pix
Primrose: Buntysmum