Mary's Bridge


Mary Forest walks a bridge
Across a gully steeped in mist
As on a stair not actually there
She treads her way upon the air
Each stepful, a half-pace to a truth never found
Before the consecutive heel meets the ground
In just such a nick of delirious time
Her stumbles are kept from falling
Callous inglorious depths
Blind through fog, the whitest of fears
Sensing her ridicule by silenced jeers,
Pierced by the angry jutting of chins
Of rugged scorn on opposed rockfaces
Massively dropping to their temporary bases
Where the merest trickle of the sharpest doubt
Is the blade that gouged the entire gorge out.
Crossing these breaches of self-infliction
Are the bridges that span self-belief's suspension
Where the stalwart traverse the humped back stone
Anchored from whence and toward,
While Mary is offered only upturned bellies
Of rotting timbers, unsecured,
Over which she now scrambles
To the loud snap and crack
Of a long strained hope too ferociously yearned.

Mary washes her sorrows with sins.                



                                                                               2



Midway across is an icy draught
That creeps through flesh and catches hearts
On a note of pain in the key of flight
Its perfect pitch kills the beat of life
To leave its victims turned to stone
Standing upon the bridge alone
As if before an invisible door
Forbidding an entry that cannot be seen
By its own non-existence its closure remains
In equidistance from losses to gains
Where souls sway as the raging trees,
Rooted, yet flailing in the mounting breeze,
The Herald of Almighty Storm.
In the wake of The Storm not arriving
Comes weariness in place of calm
That might have rewarded her patience,
Her waiting, her withstanding harm.
But incentive is a vague nostalgia,
A perspective of sepia'd passio
n and pain,
A leeching of colour from a prime desire
Necessary to Mary's creative fire
Long since extinguished by a rain-sad cloud
Dissolving belief to build self-doubt
As a phantom bridge of crumbling pride,
A disintegration to no other side.



                                                                                3

Mary Forest does not fall,
There is no vertiginous gorge at all.
The drop is Delusion harnessed to Desire
Where Sorrow and Disappointment conscientiously conspire
To lead her across Humiliation's rift
On the pride broken back of an illusory bridge
And suspended so high in her dizzy minds eye
A life-locked, death-white, bone chilled fright
Has muted true talent, once forthright,
Now left at half-mast to Vocation's call,
A ragged flag in a bitter squall,
Tattered by the hoists of expectation.
Disastrous insignia flown to distraction
That were better folded deep in the hold
Of some secret vessel that might chart a life
Without emblem or figurehead inviting dissipation
Of the one sure course and true.
For while Tall Ships are dispatched to port after port
Of Umbridge, Pique and the Cape of Forlorn,
Their rudders shifted by others' scorn,
The sea-mist boats and low grey barges
Steer their own invisible voyages
By the hand of self-recognition,
Through storm after storm, past fear and submission,
To the places that shout "AHOY".      




                                                                             4

Mary Forest has known such a place,
"Ahoy" and welcome to this sacred space
Of knowing who you are and what you must do
Without recourse to the counter view
With which others will try to wear you down
By the glower of a strange and eerie frown
That understands nothing of a Path or Way
But fearing your success, insists you stay.
So Mary has embarked on her peculiar Life,
Undaunted but aware of its inevitable strife,
And so she strode far and wide,
Bonny and bold with nothing to hide.
'Til an evil twang from an enemy bow
Shot an accurate arrow from her crown to her toe.
Poison tipped and poison barbed,
It fastened its septicaemic fear,
Year, after year, after year, after year,
Bringing Mary to the fever of her hallucinatory bridge
Where from such parallel, pre-constructed crossing,
Her foe, already maimed, had maliciously aimed.
And Mary will duplicate the venomous quiver
Should the malignance grow and her soul not deliver
A formula once lost as a remedy regained,
And by this rediscovery reinstating the pure,
Walk from her bridge by miraculous cure.    

Isabel was either writing or thinking about writing and she wrote many different kinds of things. Among these were her stories for children and I've reproduced one here in the hope that you might read it to a child in memory of Isabel or any other lost loved one.
              The story is taken from a collection of ten entitled "A Woodland Journal", which opens a window into the life of the hedgehog Genevieve Hedgley Hogg and Ottersby a befriended otter.


                                                           OTTERSBY'S DRAGONFLY

               A little bit quite before the mid-of-the-day, Ottersby sploshed into the cloudy-green for his swim-time up the upway of the stream for the surprise-catching-out of a fat-lazy-trout.
               With his paws a-paddle beneath the cool and the summer warm upon his back, he kept a tidy pace on the exact mid-line with his special V-shape ripple a-rolling out from each of his either sides to the backwards and outwards, to the east bank and the west bank, making all the river his own.
                 In the flash-of-a-blink out of the corner of one eye, Ottersby glimpsed the hitheree-ditheree hover-dance of the delicately beauteous-ful dragonfly and changed his direction with a roll and a dive to resurface wet-nose-first beneath the jewel of all the flies for a closer close-up spy.  She hitheree'd and ditheree'd all garmented in shiny rainbow and kingfisher blue and Ottersby was entranced in a dreamy trance until such time as off and away she flew.
                 Ottersby scampery-skipped up the bank and through the long-sweet grass that edges the river's edge and trot-trotted into the woods to a place where the wood-chop-men had not very long ago been.  He picked up a tiny-pointy piece of charred-cold wood from the wood-chop-men's old-burnt-bonfire and sketched himself his very own dragonfly onto a roundy slither of the pale inside of tree. Then he mosaic'd his very own dragonfly with the pretty petal pieces of bitter-sweet-forget-me-not-Rosebay-willow-herb-robert and varnished them down with the sticky clear resin from the fir cone tree and for his finally finishing touch he dippy-dipped the endmost tips of his whiskers into the ashes of the wood-chop-men's old-burnt-bonfire and finely traced the faint fairy filigree of his dragonfly's wispy wings.
                All gleamy-eyed with pleasure and pride he raced home to Genevieve his most favourite Hedgley-Hogg and showed her his very own dragonfly to be forever kept and forever seen where he bang banged it with a nail to the wall and when his tummy rumble-tumbled with the forgetting of the catching of the trout, Genevieve served him with an especially fat slice of devilled worm pie with mint and rocket salad and they toasted Ottersby's dragonfly with an especially old and favoured vintage of rosehip and crab-apple wine.

19th Century Creen Indian

Only when the last tree has died
and the last river been poisoned
and the last fish been caught
we will realise that we cannot
eat money

(Taken from a postcard)

the smile

it is autumn
a woman steps through soft bars of moonlight
on the edge of a tall forest
a white owl hoots from the tree tops,
leaves drift down all around her
in the dark wind
like huge flakes of golden snow;
as she comes nearer
she can hear the rustle and sigh of the ocean
see the distant gleam of the surf on the beach,
she smiles
as though she has found a way
to climb through the air to the stars.....

The Lions Carcass

By
Isabel Wallace

This novel will capture and challenge your every thought and emotion - are you who you really want to be or has someone taken the self from you?

The Lions Carcass based on the story of Samson and Delilah a must read and only £4.99. Follow the link to make your purchase.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/isabel-wallace/the-lions-carcass/ebook/product-21130454.html

By Chief Seattle 1854

"This we know - the earth does not
belong to man, man belongs to
the earth. All things are connected
like the blood that unites one
family whatever befalls the earth
befalls the son of the earth. Man
did not weave the web of life, he
is merely a strand of it. Whatever
he does to the web he does to
himself."

The Jewelled Cover Of Night

The jewelled cover of night
Defeats oppression;
The mind in sleeps' arms
Lives the subconscious,
Where "Stars shine on revolutions"
And no prophecies freeze

Such prophecies freeze
When a frosted sun
Awakes reality's silence
Time to get up
and conform.

(October 1977)