Frances-Ann Norton: Poetry

Silence Poem:   Let me scream and rage rend my clothes, sob my heart out in pure frustration.   Let my tongue be cleaved to the roof of my mouth with the wordlessness of my fury and despair.   Let me smash priceless porcelains. Rip costly canvasses. Fling myself into the torrenting vortex of the sea in the thunder storm.   Let me throw all the furniture from an upstairs window to splintering crunch and splitting asunder.   Let me bloody my knuckles punching time on the kitchen cabinets.   If you need me not. If you want me not. If you love me not.   If this be so…   Let me dive to bell-depths of the ocean floor deaf to sound. Let me close myself in a silent sauna of tears. Let me bury my head in the sand of peacefulness.   Let me become another self, a silent one. Half bird, half snake, half woman. To fly the somber skies, shunned by every other creature.    First...

Willow Pattern:   Snappy handbags and porcelain ginger pots The lovers banned from the Spar Local For smooching in the aisles.   Why are Dads such a pain in the ass? What do they know anyway? Were they ever really young and in love?   The boat is waiting A banged up beater of a boat They have paid the captain two crates of Newcastle Brown. Their destination? Love Island, In the Melanesian Pacific.   The edge of the pattern is theirs to create anew The snapped willow, the kicked in fence, the smashed pots the shattered mirror where the motif runs out, what happens there?   This is where their story begins The old repetitions are left behind, forgotten in the amnesia Of true love The pattern is changing, mending, re-growing, piecing itself back together The willow, the boat, the fence, Set sail and don’t look back. First published in Magical Women Magazine , October 2020  

Curled in the Nautilus of Herself:   Curled in the nautilus of herself, she dreams in polynomial time, multiverse. Each night a different life, crystal clarity. Playthings in a painted ladybird tin. Vertebrae of a fish, single portion of ground black pepper Tiny matryoshka, from tight in the middle of the mama dolls. These things she takes out one by one, each with its own tale, talisman for the first day of school. Tokens of her nautilus world. Inside the Fibonacci curves she is beyond reproach or recall. Full of potential, myths and future lives, waiting to be born, gestating in rose coloured dimness. The pink light making a fingernail home. First published in Magical Women Magazine , October 2020  

Potential in a Pandemic: In this time of Pandemic, my eye catches your eye and a moment and eternity passes in recognition, in understanding, in possibility. A future telescopes in vacant potentiality, what if I were in this relationship with this man? who would we be, how would it work out, what would we say to each other?   A flick book of stances with each turn of the page. Vignettes of occasions and milestones slide by in stop frame transitions. Our wedding day, the birth of our first child, standing our new house, first day at school, first argument, first separation, living in separate worlds, end of story.   All this goes by in a flash as I stand in the yellow light of a doorway and you pass by in the darkened hospital corridor. Our meeting of eyes, total conception of the entirety of a human life, a human relationship in a moment as we pass. First published in Dwell Time Zine November 2020.

Lockdown Canticle of Thankfulness: O most inventive creator, all good maker and author of my being. Praised be you O Originator, with all your creatures in Lockdown. Especially our Sister Time, who is the context of my day, Who flies and drags in equal measure.   Who gives moments with loved ones, a pause to think and be. Who calendars a season to put things right, a heartbeat to say goodbye. Who offers space to make plans, a stretch to be friends in and a season in which to plant and germinate.   Who encourages a period to connect as family. Who reveals an interval to rekindle stories and creativity and a stint for games and play. Who gives a duration to hold our breath waiting for the pandemic to pass; and a while to find a new normal.   Sister Time bears likeness to you, without shape or form. You give her to us so we know when to rise and when to lie down; when to fall in love and when to let go. Published on Dwell Time Blog, ...

  July 2022 - Mythos II zine - Ghost stories of Norwich "ZAKS. Barrack St, Norwich NR3 1TS. Once the city morgue, the building that now houses Zaks waterside diner is infamous as one of Norwich’s most haunted buildings. Staff members have reported glimpses of figures they cannot explain, objects being moved and in one case a jug exploding on a shelf and hearing their names called, with them responding before realising they were working alone." The Torn Veil: Zaks   In a small out-house, down a set of slippery sand stone steps, black ripples eddy around the great body of water The sheds and buildings shown little love     in this dank backwater, the river by the building gulps sullenly behind a veil          of choke weeds, convolvulus and nightshade, deep   under the structure, the eternally turning Other.   In a corner stands a girl, one and another.     ...

the Augustine Steward house 1530, Tombland Alley, Norwich Step it Out Mary: The Augustine Steward House   Mary do not step it out tonight.  My fine daughter, stay in with us instead. Here in this house. Please, for the Love of All That is Holy, do not show your legs to that country man. Norwich is a ghost town and the deep stream running by has been diverted past the Steward House.   It is your wedding day, pretend someone else is getting married, instead put on this grey work dress, wander from room to room, make yourself busy. Although the moon is high it is not yet midnight, stay here with us.   Do not go down to the water with the Soldier Boy, no matter what he promises. Stay here with us. It is not worth drowning yourselves over.   The Augustine Steward house is hushed and dark in midnight shadows. There is no music, the fiddle band has left, turned away at the boarded-up door. Her Father, his rage played out, lies voicel...

Till Receipt, English Seaside: Cherries so glossy and red with syrup. Droplets of unguent juice cascade down my twelve-scoop-ice-cream-wonder in pastel colours. Flavours melting together in pistachio, cappuccino, bubble gum, blue-raspberry.    The high road curves and a steep slope drops away below the parked ice-cream van. The grey-green mossyness of the ice-cold North Sea, crash-crashing on the demerara sand of a misty beach in the British summer. Sitting up on a heather strewn brackeny hill in the wind-blown scrub, I shelter behind a broad gorse in golden-yellow bloom. Ice cream in hand, green-sleeves never sounded so sweet.   Towards the beach looking down-hill is a crazy golf course, flags fluttering on miniature stone bridges and little buildings painted ultramarine and salmon. To the West, a Victorian funicular trundling up and coming down for the price of 20p. The sea is a graphite smudge in the far distance and tiny trotting donkeys ...

Seaside Traybake: Travelling around the headland, the cliffs are silhouetted against the whiteness of the sky. The sea breaks close to the vertical. High tide, the sea is in.   Wait here, I must swim the last part around the promontory. In the next cove my clothes still lie high up on the shore. As I sit pulling on socks and shirt, I look around for you.   But you are not there, you have gone. You are not in the next bay cut like teeth marks in the coastline. You are not anywhere here.   This is not your place anymore, you have moved on. And I have just realised you are not coming back today. Or in my lifetime.   This knowledge could be a freezing bucket of seawater thrown in my face. Or a warm clear rock pool full of the life of another place. I choose the latter as I stand ankle deep in sun warmed sea eating cake.   I am happy with jam traybake that has been laid out for me, I listen to the warning and leave the fo...

Taken From the Land of my Fathers: Oh Shoe, you have taken me from the island of my fathers. Across a rough and dangerous sea, used for your pleasure, only to be tossed aside like last night’s dinner bones.   And yet my life has been preserved when I might have been taken by the whole crew. I live to see the dawn, yet castaway on a foreign shore. With no recourse to a friendly face, I am left to make my own way. I turn without a backward glance at where I have been.   This poem is an ordinary tale of woe, sung by a brown bird princess and freedom is my song. This rough sea journey has given me a narrative, a starting point from which to make the rest of the story with my own hands. My agency is my gift from the sea and this verse is my gift of telling.   I recount this tale in the spirit of thankfulness, for a life given and well lived. I sing for the wisdom to find the good so as not to be drowned by self-pity. I pray for the heart t...

Submerged Cathedral, After Debusy: Blue-green light reflects off the polished wood of the knave in the sunken cathedral. It would hold songs and poems suspended in blue-grey, turquoise light. The day would be blue every day, the night black as a velvet opera cloak.   In the submerged cathedral we would never see snow or rain anymore. Never see clear stars, they would always appear as constellations in fragmentation.   The bottoms of boats would be our birds of the air seaweed our plants and coral our trees. We would never cry, tears cannot be seen underwater, how would they show?   We find an air lock of negative space under a bell in the sunken cathedral under the sea. Inside the tenor bell tangy with iron, there may be a breath or two. How did we end up at the bottom of the sea, inside a bell, breathing the very last air that there is?          

St Christina: Plastic bags, sea glass and microplastic is consumed by hermit crabs. Is shriving across the sea floor in multi-coloured drifts. The whipped and foaming Sea rushes in and hurries back out crunching pebbles. knit the soles of my feet, with bladderwrack and bottles that I might walk on water. I am bathed with incomprehension at the wild beauty, the raw force of the waves. I am parched from over-salination, like a beached and salted cod choked with too much land. The sea laps at my legs, soaks through the broderie anglaise of my paper-thin veneer of respectability. As the Hanging Rock girls erased in the setting sun never to be seen again. My hat flies backwards off my head, tossing Mr Softee hair into my eyes, dissolving my façade of decorousness as I strip to my costume. Feel the brute strength of the riptide drag and pull, over balance and push at my computer-weakened body. Tide pools of tiredness wash back into the sea leaving me refreshed...

Spurn, 53.5737° N, 0.1083° E: Lay me down on spurn point while you walk with our daughter to see the place where the land has been changed by the Great Wash Over, making the Point into a tidal island.   Lay me down on spurn point on the sandy flattened beach, once high sand dunes, now so easy to see East and West, the estuary and the sea just by turning my head.   Lay me down on Spurn point where we lay together at the turn of the century and saw the Mean-time-line lit with flaming torches.   Lay me down on spurn point to feel the sun on my back and the wind at my heels, before me roaring sea, behind me flat estuary. Ahead of me the rest of my life with you.      

Sea-Fret Fogbank at Start Point: Sea fret fog banks descend on this rocky peninsula, creating their own liminal space. Erasing the past and the future, time becomes a loop. Makes a  tidal island of Start Point.   Once before the fog came, maps were destroyed in the deluge of my grief. I was lost, moorless, drifting and dead calm in a place between land and land.   This time my anchor is this lighthouse built on this rock and the sounding of this fog bell. Sea fret fog descends, but yet I stand firm. I feel my toes grip the moss on the rock. Land is obliterated, without compass I am ignorant of direction, it matters not.   The fog bell sounds, a voice of low sonoration, waves of ultrasonic sound As the voice of God on the immensity of the multitudinous waters, it shatters the cedars and small houses drop into the ocean.   The fog is a gateway, a place where the veil thins. Do not step out, for I know the cliff drops raggedly to...

Orkney Crossing : Ring of Brogdar, Stones of Stenness. At the centre, the pendulum drops, Down, down, down. Think, imagine, centre. Concentrate, reach, reach out. My thoughts have not yet shifted and sifted or sorted themselves into chapters. They are still out to sea.   I am looking towards Orkney from on board the good ship Hamnavoe just past the Old Man of Hoy, an enveloping fog bank drops. A smothering grief, moves over me imperceptibly. Covering, obscuring, changing outlines and landmarks, erasing the compass until I am submerged.   And although I know my feet stand planted on deck and I hear the ships engine roaring on and on. there is no feeling of forward motion, nothing to indicate progress through the water. The fog covers all.   Floating clouds how vast, how vast. How you deaden with white light. How you deafen with density. How you change the topography with veils of water.   And you waters above the heavens, ...

Muffled: Star of the Sea, watches over fishermen in the bitter cold and snow.  Freezing in ice-cold blackness they work out at sea on a trawler.   The mild waves on this calm midnight slap, fizzing on the sides of the boat. Under the waterline is a kind of silence that I cannot get used to.   Underwater are sound of air-bubbles, And the muffled clangs and bangs of the fishing boat mechanisms.   All around me the darkness weighs me down in the water like wet jeans. Like heavy shoes that protected on land, treading water drag and pull in the wrong direction.   The moon lies on the flat of the water, like a theatrical spot, like a serving platter of silver.   My face lies just below the surface, basking in moon glow, not ready to surface just yet.  

Heavy Mantles: The draw of the sea, unpredictable, dangerous, and destructive, yet sparkling, playful and enticing. She thought you were going to relieve all her pain. Immersing her body, she is encumbered with layer upon layer of heavy and sinking clothing. She fights to keep afloat, to keep her head above water, with all these heavy mantles she has shrouded herself with. If she could take them off, a piece at a time, she would let them float free. Let them take on a life of their own, as they sink in the water. Each one, fills out to become a new form, like a multiplicity of versions of herself, floating under the green waters. Lithe and twining, curving, rippling, soft and pliant to the pull of the riptide. Eventually after their silent dance, each one sinks to the lower depths of the sea, where the light cannot penetrate. Moving from glass green to teal and forest green, to black green. As they sink beneath, lost to sight, so she is freed from each burde...

Fragment: In my memory I slip down the miles of high-hedge-rowed, single-track roads, closer and closer towards the coast and the craggy edge of the universe edged by lace. The sea smashes endlessly, relentlessly on rock knifes. The motion of the fierce waves slashing strands of foam, beating and pulverising the saltwater. Echoes of grinding and groaning sound off the crags on this distant peninsula, the lighthouse keeping watch. The brine working it's guts out, forever tossing and turning and tearing itself to pieces. As if a great brawny man is turning a krank handle working hidden mechanics under the sand and rock, endlessly, tortuously and will never ever stop. I stand on the edge of the tearing and grinding, the smashing and ribboning, imagining myself atomising, deconstructed, running like sand through an hour glass, into the sea until all that is left is a tiny fragment of sand.    

Trainers:   Assertive, sassy and cool. You did not used to be like that. Well I am now. I am doing it. I am as classy as a continental coffee drinker in Sainte Germaine. I am tight, tanned and toned, zipped into on-trend leggings and running vest. My fluorescent pink trainers are state of the art. This beach is my drawing board, my game plan, my cleansing detox, my white noise. As I run the vibration of my foot-fall quakes the sand right to Australia. As I am frozen mid-stride, no feet touching the beach. My aura disrupts the atmosphere causing mini thunder rolls and cracks of lightning over the sea. As my pony tail swings, it causes the clouds to rain. Right behind me the precipitation erases my footprint with its downpour. As if I was never there at all.    

A Christmas Specular or Mirror poem This poem is written from the perspective of Sister Water. As St Francis says “Be praised my Lord, through Sister Water, she is useful and humble and precious and pure”   Give me peace. I lay down at the bottom of a riverbed looking up through the green, clear, water. Up through the aqua ripples, up to the sky, contemplating as clouds slowly move across. Dawn parts to reveal full day, and afternoon atomises into cool evening. The dew falls, and the sun sets behind a green hill, clustered with trees, the moon rises in the East. In a cave on the hill, a refugee couple labor through the night. The hardest, most unknowable work a woman can do. At last she holds her baby. She has sewn soft blankets and coverings to keep him warm. She holds him so close. Everyone is asleep now as dawn breaks, it has been a long and difficult night. In the cave on a hill they rest. Gently neighbors call in to offer joy and congratulations....

The Bric-a-brac of my Heart: Walking up Horsforth High Street, how out of breath in the January gales I am. Winded by the steep hill, blown along with last autumn’s skeletons. Our mission to slough through winter mud in search of cake. We pass a fantasy junk shop, every item bid for, collected and arranged in vignettes. Memories of dancehall days and imperial measurements, glamorous film stars in contrasting monochrome, toys of yesterday chosen with hauntology and nostalgia,  I can imagine each item in my hand, in my house, in my studio.  T hese objects are discards from other peoples lives  come and gone, no more than a watch in the night.  I turn away reluctant to fill more of my time and eyes with consumables of a bygone era.  I fix my sight on something other than stuff.   Still working that out.  What would the junk shop of my life look like?  My bygone fragments are – jobs I’ve left, relationships that slipped away, places I used to live....

Paternoster What is my world of pain? Just thinking about it, riding round and round the Paternoster. It is the pain of remembrance.   The feelings, the thoughts, the understanding The knowing what I have felt has a word, a phrase. Yet not having the language to express it.   Like Helen Keller with her hand in the water. Letters, urgently, in rapid succession written on the other hand. W-A-T-E-R. And through the fog bank of realization comes a reflection of a conception of what it is.   The experience is in my mind, but to express the inner narrative, speak the words out loud… I am not there yet.   I have a taxonomy of the words associated with that emotion listed in my innerness, Someday soon I will speak the words out loud. Bring innerness to birth.   This is the start. Having the letters strung into words and phrases. De-coded language of re-remembering this time last year.   Radiotherapy treatment. Hoping, wishing to ring that shiny brass bell on the wa...

I experience the world as someone with imagination and arts based thinking processes. Using tactility, relationship colour and form I create narrative scenes in poetry. I am Obsessed with stories and use it to explore the rich and complex visual markers inherent in the traditions and rituals of the culture I inhabit. One of Celtic fore-bearers, Yorkshire Gothic, brought up in a  household of bohemian artists and musicians contextualised by the beauty, spirituality and generosity of Franciscanism. I ask myself, does our day to day existence represent a neat motif, a perfect device, a blemish free composition? Or is it the variations, the imperfections, the mishaps and diversions that make the story interesting? Poetry enables me to express, among other things, deep joys, fears and hidden imaginings, inexpressible and unimaginable in another art form.