AFTER MAGGIE SAID

AFTER MAGGIE SAID

After Maggie said
It’s all the same stuff,
I knew to go with it,
To let my hands mould,
Breathe into the clay,
To allow the form to come.l

It was a matter of trust.

Trusting myself, the material, the process,
The desire for
art,
Like the sea swirling in a cove,
Water swaying back and forth,
Like breathing
Like music,
Like a recognition of something deep,
Something inside and outside,
Familiar and distant.

Sometimes quiet blue
Still and silk like,
Stretched out to the horizon
Where the fluidity of the sky
Loses itself and mingles.

Sometimes expressive
Ferocious even,
Colliding and crashing, frothing and spitting.

When the form came
It was a suggestion of two women
With long undulating hair, like waves,
Sweeping and curling over their
Rounded curves,
Holding their bodies together.

Like the visitation in EIN Kerem,
Mary and Elizabeth,
My women’s interfaith group,
All my friends,

Connecting and interwoven
Like rivers, like red clay,
like skin,
Echoing the promise
Of a world more feminine.

Author: Lucy Calcott

I write poetry, children's stories and the occasional article. I also love to paint and usually work in acrylic, water based crayon and charcoal. I am principally interested in an emotional or spiritual response to landscape so I am more focused on creating atmosphere than actual representation. I like figures too. In my writing I am searching for a contemporary religious female voice which is tolerant and open hearted . I have a MA in Creative Writing from Sussex University and have had poetry published in various journals. I also have a small collection of poems in print; Magdalene and other poems. I have exhibited paintings and poetry locally in Eastbourne and the surrounding area and with Christian Arts nationally. I am also a nurse and a mother of three grown up children. I long for a greener, more compassionate, unified world and am active in the interfaith movement. View all posts by Lucy Calcott