Poetry
Jenny Hockey

Photo Credit: Mayastar Lavi/Flickr (CC-by-sa)

Change of Heart

It’s 7 a.m., says Radio 4
but I spare the kitchen light,

stretch out darkness
like tights matted in the wash.

Our kettle boils, gulps your words
but you just gruff, call me deaf

and let the cold get its foot in the door
as you leave—maybe for good.

It’s 8 a.m., says Radio 4
and I’m stuffing my briefcase with work.

Here you are easing our grandson’s pram
gently, tenderly back up the steps—

his Buddha smile derails me
as sun tumbles in through the door,

as you slide the car keys out of my hand,
put the kettle back on.

Shows You the Colours

The window in your back door
has grey lined up for today,

has you fumbling for keys
on your grey larder shelf
then stepping outside, what else,
for isn’t it always like this,

the valley’s gash of a river,
the everyday practice of sad—

or maybe you grab an orange coat
to climb up high through the park,
to stand and gaze into pink
flooding through clouds.

Pale yellow moonlight
sleeps on my 6 a.m. rug,
dirty old stop-out.

Remember the lakeside chalet
we borrowed the summer we met,
marigolds, orange like sunbursts,
ravenous geese at 6 a.m.,
the lilac sky as we almost held hands.

Wolf, Storm and Strawberry moons,
Milk, then Blood—or Blue,
a moon that makes her quiet way,
into a month where two full moons
have flowered, a full-term child
behind the belly’s stretch.

Run towards Forge Dam
into a tunnel of rust, drab,
brown—summer lost

till a startle of feathers, blue
and grey, shows you gold, orange,
red—lets autumn begin.

Ruby cyclamen
bloom on our garden table
after forty years.

September

relishes rain, embraces the sadness
of putting summer aside, folding away
the softness of cotton frocks.

September hangs around,
drenching a cyclist who scoffed
at a mac, making us sweat
in vests we put on too soon

or nudging a woman to raise
difficult Christmas plans
while lunching à deux by a lake
on Chablis and sole meuniere.

September slides its palm
from August’s humid grip,
welcomes the tug of October.

Thursday morning

and here comes my bed,
ambling across the page.

This time I’m stuck in the dark
with a Timex Light-Up Watch

that won’t, opening the curtains
to more darkness still

that pours in across the carpet
along with a wet sighing of tyres.

Has it been raining all night
or only just begun?

Jenny Hockey lives in Sheffield, UK. She belongs to Hexameter, The Poetry Room and Living Line, with poems in magazines such as The North, Magma, The Frogmore Papers and Orbis. She retired from Sheffield University as Emeritus Professor of Sociology to write and read more poetry and now reviews for Orbis magazine. In 2013 received a New Poets Award from New Writing North and Oversteps Books published her debut collection Going to Bed with the Moon in 2019. Twitter: @JHockey20

Poetry
Jenny Hockey

Photo Credit: GIS@Sam/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

Eltisley Avenue

Thursday 4th
and school kids thunder by
as winter daylight creeps about our purple room
in a ground floor apartment with an unwanted piano,
where I sit out my hours working green nylon yarn
into doll-size jackets and mitts, my swollen body
squeezed into a vinyl armchair.

All day and the midwife doesn’t show.

Monday 23rd
Two weeks past my date
they gather me into their arms—a stretcher’s too long
for our door, set aslant in the small shared hall.

Tuesday 24th
Wearing a dressing gown abandoned
by an old boyfriend, I step down out of the ambulance—
a baby asleep in my arms.

Two doors up the road, a neighbor wipes her eyes.

He was a Good Person

You knew that whatever you asked him for—
a tea bag, a hand with pushing your desk
nearer the window, the name of someone in Central Admin
who could organize a payment,
his face would brighten
at the chance to help,

a good person who’d ease back his chair
from his desk, ready for a chat
and even a cuppa shared—

after he’d walked down the corridor
—a word with a colleague along the way,
to fill his kettle in the kitchen,

a good person with a long institutional memory
and an amusing story or two to tell
about the woman in Central Admin
who never paid out on a Tuesday,
only on Fridays every other week,

a good person who, even before you asked for help,
would enquire about your husband
and whether his stress fracture had healed
and how your recent conference trip to Ukraine
had gone

and something would prompt him to tell you—
by the way, about the ducklings,
six or was it eight of them, newly hatched on the pond,
not the pond by the Vice Chancellor’s office,
the pond they recently dredged,
just behind Central Admin—

and what kind of tea bag exactly would you like?
PG Tips, decaf, ginger and lemon?
There might be a lapsang souchong somewhere,
if you could just give him a minute—

Jenny Hockey lives in Sheffield, UK. She belongs to Hexameter, The Poetry Room and Living Line—with poems in magazines such as The North, Magma, Toasted Cheese, The Frogmore Papers and Orbis. She retired from Sheffield University as Emeritus Professor of Sociology to write and read more poetry and in 2013 received a New Poets Award from New Writing North. Oversteps Books published her debut collection Going to Bed with the Moon in 2019. Twitter: @JHockey20 Email: j.hockey[at]sheffield.ac.uk

Poetry
Jenny Hockey

Photo Credit: solarnu/Flickr (CC-by-nd)

I found a Chinese baby’s shoe
with a bell to warn off mice

that’s smaller by far
than any shoe I’ve worn

and holds only the ghost
of my fat-toed child’s first pair,

one lost on a roadside verge,
one kept.

Jenny Hockey‘s poems range from the sad to the surreal to the celebratory. A retired anthropologist, she takes an oblique view of the ups and downs of everyday lives. In 2013 she received a New Poets Award from New Writing North, Newcastle, UK and, after magazine and anthology publications from 1985 onwards, Oversteps Books published her debut collection, Going to Bed with the Moon in 2019. Twitter: @JHockey20 Email: j.hockey[at]sheffield.ac.uk