Maggie Brookes-Butt, "Wish: New and Selected Poems"

Maggie Brookes-Butt has been writing all her life, starting work as a journalist and a BBC TV documentary producer. Her books include six poetry collections as Maggie Butt and two historical novels as Maggie Brookes, published by Penguin Random House. She taught creative writing at Middlesex University for 30 years, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent. As well as being a writer she is a compulsive reader, hopeful gardener, dreadful cook, besotted grandmother and a Londoner to the bone, though she loves to swim in the sea.

About Wish: New and Selected Poems
Wish contains 50 poems from Maggie's six previous collections, about the strength of women, concern for our planet, and hope in the power of love. They are gathered here alongside 21 bitter-sweet new poems about the joys and fears of a grandmother in this troubled, vulnerable and precious world. The new poems are addressed to her young grandchildren, to be read by them when they grow up.

You can read more about Wish on the author's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the poetry collection. 

From Wish, by Maggie Brookes-Butt

Murmur

My heart is whispering – this faint back-wash
is slush and suck of waves over shingle,
tumbling the stones which will lie underwater
when storms rage far above their flooded world.
 
My heart is whispering – a breeze turns
over leaves, its shivery message passes
from branch to branch at the far-off crackle
of forest flames and thudding feet of animals.
 
But whispers lullaby your sleeping form,
your peaceful unknowing, sharing secrets
of here-and-gone, here-and-gone. Listen
to its echo: love ... love ... love ...
 

Eyes
 
Mine have seen first breaths and lasts,
the beginning and end of everything,
 
green shoots and heaps of rotting leaves.
They've seen horses pulling coal drays,
 
milk bottle tops pecked by blue-tits,
peace camps, walls torn down, glass
 
ceilings cracking, gay weddings,
but children slippered in class, life vests
 
washed up beside migrant boats, turtles
choked by plastic bags, smoking ruins.
 
Mine are hooded now, the teal and amber
marbled irises surrounded by crinkled deltas
 
of skin, but still see clearly thanks to small
acrylic miracles and astonishing dexterity.
 
Yours are wide and bright, the whites whiter
than paper, almost blue, the irises two shades
 
of grey, dove grey circled by wet-slate grey.
They can spot the smallest dot of crumb,
 
bending to retrieve it, or point to the woods
where a squirrel is camouflaged against a trunk.
 
I can see what's coming, my vision unclouded
by the twin cataracts of helplessness and dismay.
 
Polar bears claim abandoned villages. Tanks roll
in again. Together we watch the leaves fall.