Write to me soon.

New fruits sing on the flipside of night in a market

of language, light, a tune from the chapel nearby

stopping you dead, the peach in your palm respiring.

Taste it for me.

Away and see the things that words give a name to, the flight

of syllables, wingspan stretching a noun. Test words

wherever they live; listen and touch, smell, believe.

Spell them with love.

Skedaddle. Somebody chaps at the door at a year’s end, hopeful.

Away and see who it is. Let in the new, the vivid,

horror and pity, passion, the stranger holding the future.

Ask him his name.

Nothing’s the same as anything else. Away and see

for yourself. Walk. Fly. Take a boat till land reappears,

altered for ever, ringing its bells, alive. Go on. G’on. Gon.

Away and see.

Carol Ann Duffy

‘A girl unbridled’ – Feeling Free

These are poems to shout and shimmy to, united by the sheer sense of exhilaration with which they leap off the page. Here are all kinds of ways to get free, from Sarah Crossan stomping splashily through streams and Olive Runner racing the wind, to Amy Lowell laughing in the bath. (Also, please do seek out the Shirelles singing ‘What Does a Girl Do?’ before you read Marilyn Hacker’s bold and jaunty answer in ‘Mythology’ – it’s terrific.) There is a certain flavour of freedom I hadn’t felt for years that comes back to me vividly in Esther Morgan’s ‘The Long Holidays’.

These are writers who have found their voices and are not afraid of raising them, celebrating women who – as Carole Satyamurti gleefully notes – ‘sang their own numbers’.

Freedom

Give me the long, straight road before me,

A clear, cold day with a nipping air,

Tall, bare trees to run on beside me,

A heart that is light and free from care.

Then let me go! – I care not whither

My feet may lead, for my spirit shall be

Free as the brook that flows to the river,

Free as the river that flows to the sea.

Olive Runner

Mythology

Penelope as a garçon manqué

weaves sonnets on a barstool among sailors,

tapping her iambs out on the brass rail. Ours

is not the high-school text. Persephone

a.k.a Télémaque-who-tagged-along,

sleeps off her lunch on an Italian train

headed for Paris, while Ulysse-Maman

plugs into the Shirelles singing her song

(‘What Does a Girl Do?’). What does a girl do

but walk across the world, her kid in tow,

stopping at stations on the way, with friends

to tie her to the mast when she gets too

close to the edge? And when the voyage ends,

what does a girl do? Girl, that’s up to you.

Marilyn Hacker

Freedom Poem

Breathe

In.

Breathe

Out.

Gasp,

Sigh,

Scream,

Shout.

Spread your arms wide and smile

find yourself

find your style.

Make yourself tall, as tall can be

do the impossible

one time,

two times,

three

and say out loud

‘I am Free’.