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the poet
Kelly Davis lives on the West Cumbrian coast and works as a freelance editor. Her poetry has been widely anthologised and published in magazines such as Mslexia, Magma and Shooter. She has twice been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and she appears in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–2021 anthology (Black Spring Press). In 2021, she collaborated with Kerry Darbishire on their poetry pamphlet Glory Days (Hen Run). Her debut solo collection, The Lost Art of Ironing, was published by Hedgehog Poetry Press in 2024.
the poems
Calling them in
Come home for your tea!
We called them in, as day fled
and night ate our words.
The sun had already set.
Come home for your tea!
Anxiety edged our voices
and night ate our words.
It was much too late.
The sun had already set.
Come home for your tea!
Anxiety edged our voices,
imagined fears grew larger
and night ate our words.
They grew up so suddenly.
Dusk took us by surprise.
It was much too late.
Come home for your tea!
They could no longer hear us.
The sun had already set,
with darkness at its heels,
and night ate our words.
We were wasting our breath.
It seems a moment ago
but it’s twenty years or more.
Somehow they gave us the slip.
Time wouldn’t wait.
Did we suspect, even then?
Anxiety edged our voices.
Perhaps we had a premonition –
imagined fears grew larger.
We tried to call them home
and night ate our words.
Grandfather
My grandfather’s hands
were thick-knuckled and strong.
Bear’s paws that scooped me up
when we swam in the sea at Durban beach.
Sometimes they held carving knives,
sliced succulent roast chicken or salt beef,
stole the fatty trimmings, popped them
in his mouth when he thought no one saw.
As a boy in Lithuania, his hands
must have been small and soft.
Perhaps he played chess with his brothers,
helped sort envelopes at the family post office.
In 1941, in Durban, those hands opened
a letter that said his parents,
brothers, brother’s wives
and children had all been shot.
Somehow his hands continued
brushing shaving cream on his chin,
patting his daughter’s head, fastening his
cuff links, wiping his eyes when he wept.
Meeting in deep time
I’m on a journey inside my husband’s head. We normally exist in different worlds – me with my words, him with his rocks. But now I’m editing his book and travelling back 400 million years. I’m starting to understand how slowly tectonic plates meet and move apart; how layers of rock can shift; how they thrust, fold, edge into one another’s space; how vast glaciers freeze the warm earth and thaw into torrents, sculpting jagged peaks and scooping out deep valleys. I’m seeing orange pyroclastic flows obliterate ancient slopes; and swarms of rounded drumlins under the grass, like whales breaking the surface; realising that a million years is the tiniest sliver of time; that the two of us, and every thought we’ve ever had, are at once utterly unimportant and infinitely precious.
Publishing credits
Calling them in: Dusk: Stories and poems from
Solstice Shorts Festival 2017 (Arachne Press)
Grandfather: exclusive first publication by iamb
Meeting in deep time: Magma (Issue 81)
Author photo: © Clare Park