The broom has spread remarkably well this year. One of my usual paths in the wood is almost impenetrable with youngster shrubs. When the sunshine’s strong you can hear the seed pods pop. More melodic and immersive is the way they rattle in the breeze, it’s mesmerising. I was thinking about how I’d put this in a poem.

Quite apart from that (now that I’ve finished the wonderful ‘Beef’ on Netflix, and I can’t find anything as absorbing to replace it), I've been watching Simon Schama’s History of Britain and suddenly my ears perked up at a mention of yellow broom! The character Geoffrey, Count of Anjou (1113-1151), married Matilda, the daughter of Henry I of England, and they were the parents of Henry II. That house of royalty, which continued until the Tutor line (1154-1485), was called ‘Plantagenet’, from plantagenista, because Geoffrey wore a sprig of yellow broom in his hat. So much of history is slaughter, ‘beef’. But broom, very much part of my landscape.

Yes, yes, the broom did scratch my throat. Really, and as a metaphor.

WEAPON

Well, he’ll have just snapped it on a whim
as he rode through with his slow day hounds, 
a line of yellow bonnets for his helmet.
The shrub was common, allowed to spread as cover 

yet betraying of the huntsman’s prey.
It was later when he thought to say, 
tough and humble, God-fearing, even, 
the one who makes his badge the yellow broom.

Or did the branch jut out to block his path,
did it whip his face, scratching his throat 
so he wrenched it from its green mainstem?
What remains? Listen how soft wind 

plays the rattle of the black bean pods.
You, who want to understand experience,
reject the losing metaphor of battle.
Who can thwart the sweet peals of  I am? 

There is a story in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, about the youngster, Jesus. He was dabbling in a stream, playing. He collected pools of water and made them become clear. Then he mixed the water with clay and moulded twelve sparrows. Of course, he got into trouble for doing this, it was the Sabbath, someone reported this profanity to his father Joseph. Jesus’ response is to clap his hands: Be gone with you! and the sparrows fly away.

Then things get darker. Another boy muddies the water in the pool and Jesus, Child-Jesus, announces that this child will wither away. Sure enough, it happens, the boy dies or disappears, withers from sight. When another child clumsily bumps into Jesus as he is running past, he too falls down, and dies.

The dabbling in mud and water, all children love to make mudpies. Child-Jesus, our friend and brother, smiting his village peers? This literary tradition from the second and third centuries acknowledges no conflict in portraying Jesus as, in Keith Elliot’s phrase –an enfant terrible. Fun! Elliott explains in his introduction to a collection of stories of Jesus’ childhood, the underlying theme is ‘to show Jesus’ precocious awareness of his supernatural origin and his power over life and death and nature’ ^[1]. The miracle of vivification. I believe there is an illustration of the sparrow story as part of Jesus as a Boy: An Image Cycle, on the ceiling of Saint Martin Church of Christ, Zillis, Switzerland.

It reminds me of the accusations of witchcraft that hung around in the sixteenth century like a miasma. It only takes one thought to make a story up. A miracle. An accusation. There are many fascinating apocryphal stories about Mary, all left out of the patriarchal cannon. Stories about Mary show where Jesus inherited his talents.

Clap your hands and the evidence flies, like a bird on the wing. It can’t be caught in any net of proof.

I’d like to be one of the sparrows, brought to life. I might let go of what I think of as light and life, and to see with new eyes. I’d like to go beyond any net of proof. I might detect an edge to things, a glow. And then, when I’m in the sky, I might notice who else is flying, there, with me. We can enjoy tumbling together, making formations, like the red arrows.

***

Doesn’t wisdom say, the world is a dream, dreaming me? The world dreamt that I dreamt… the world dreamt mud that dreamt it was a sparrow.

***

Last night it rained after many days of July sunshine. We’re not used to such weather here in the Carse of Gowrie. I’ve been filling up a bowl for my hedge full of house sparrows to drink or to wash in. It’s surprising how dirty they make the water, with their little worms of droppings and their shed feathers. Still, they drink and bathe in it, and scold loudly if I trim the hedge. Hedge-cutting can’t happen until the end of August, ‘for the sake of nesting birds’. I know these sparrows would make a proprietorial racket to see me off if I tried. I think of taking some of their generated mud and adding it to a raw clay sparrow, how would it come out of the kiln? Would the waste material invoke any sparrow-like qualities? is what a naïve mind would wonder. I am terribly at home with the naïve mind.

The rain has come. The miracle of vivification. Everything is squished here, on this plane of existence. Life, real life, might occur deeper, inherent, perhaps viewed with a type of insight. That’s why Jesus’ sparrows flew, while those his playmates made did not. In the story. Perhaps he decorated them with chevrons, invoking the ever-renewing Goddess.

***

The artist Bharti Kher, who in her work explores intermediaries as mythological spirits, has drawn inspiration from the Harappan votive figures from the Indus River civilisation, c. 3300BC. These small figures are hollow, created out of two halves, joined vertically. When the terracotta clay figures were fired, they would be ‘activated’, brought into potency by a single breath into the hollow centre.

If you, yourself, have worked in clay, it’s easy to imagine this act and belief, is it not? And to imagine Jesus brushing the last bits of swarf off the edges of his hollow wee sparrow, before a swift, confident in- breath from where he is in the here-and-now, and out- breath into the universe contained beyond a neat hole, as he casts the dark bird to the scrim of the sky. He’d have learnt this from his mother.

Kher made a Pieta figure from plaster in 2018. Our Mother is lying on a pile of mattresses, like the Princess and the Pea. At first glance she is still, reposing like the Four of Swords card in a tarot pack. Then if you look more closely, you see that her face has been bearing with pain. And her womb is ripped open. Her body is cracked, as if she were a shell; inside are the fragments of nesting, some straw or hessian fibre, perhaps a few stray feathers. What has been blown and what has flown? Her wrists and hands are gone, as if they too were released in the birthing explosion. As if her body could not be cleanly separated from the Child, no, the Children, that she bore. How obvious, now we see it, and strange.

^[1] Elliott, J.K. (2008) The Apocryphal Jesus: Legends of the Early Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press. P 19

DESIGN

i.m. Hugh Barker 1949-2026

I rescue her, ceiling spider, with toilet paper,
then I impose my Robert Frost on him.
God help us, I might even sing a hymn.
We did our deep body relaxation earlier
to ease his spasm and his scrabbling fingers.
His lips were dry, his knees tucked up to his chin
as if he’d soothe his mouth by kissing them,
witnessed by the feeding-pump-machine, its whir.

A ready-made web outside catches the spider,
along with a spinning helicopter seed.
He makes the sound agree, no flies in here
for food, though I have seen him flinch in fear –
he cannot swat them from his face. No deed 
is his. And he’d prefer his aviation facts instead.

Originally published in Gutter issue 33, February 2025

WIND GHAZAL

What’s more human than to listen to the wind?
Draw your coat around you, listen to the wind.

You’d guard the holy city with your guns?
Holy, I blow through. Listen to the wind.

I love cold feet; my soles on fire, I am alive.
A frozen encounter will do. I listen to the wind.

Agent of change, behind your back. No woolly hat
protects what I renew. Listen to the wind.

The rock in the Atlantic road at Carrack-a-rede?
Never mind the shades of blue, listen to the wind!

If beams are poison arrows in feng shui, bad luck!
Antidotal chimes bamboo, listen to the wind. 

I bring the hill scent from her mountain cousins; 
no prey to scatter or pursue, she’ll listen to the wind.

Cancelled plans? Introvert, I’m not your friend!
I gave you Storm, your child, to listen to the wind.

When I stripped the trees, what of the forest was left?
I laugh with the void on cue. Listen to the wind.

Soul Friend, sure, it’d be a breeze to write,
if I had the words. But you listen to the wind.

If we breathe the vowels, it’s the consonants 
that name us as the clue. Don’t listen to the wind.




Dawn Wood    May 2026
Illustration:     Beth McFarland 

I love the ghazal: its combination of discipline and freedom. The non-linear way of approaching a theme. The background to this one is that I found an old draft of a poem I’d written in the voice of the wind. There wasn’t anything very human about it; on rereading, it seemed a bit arrogant and stark. I’d written it though, in a flood of relief, because my 60th birthday plans had been cancelled due to Storm Babet. Phew!

It’s spring, but it’s been so cold. Everybody says: Ah, it’s the wind. I love the way my wild Spanish rescue dog snorts out a breath, before she takes in all the information and chat coming her way.

Anyway we’re stuck with words. I hope you enjoy and find something renewing here. My granddaughter really is called Storm, how ‘cool’ is that!

BELTANE

When you are young I will teach you 
about the salmon in the river

When you are old I will teach you 
about the salmon in the river

Everything where it should be
the salmon the fly the leap the river

The blanket stitch on the blanket of your mother
the neat turn
for the corner

The dancing hawthorn
the peppery blossom

Bright flame
I am what dwells in you
beyond your fate
forget  
for your own sake

That you will harvest apples for
young blackbirds at your door, 
tucking them in newspaper.

 

I wanted to write a poem for Beltane, my efforts grew ever more complicated. We wouldn’t have known the word ‘Beltane’ when we were young. May Day was celebrated at our primary school for our first few years there. My twin and I would parade around the playground with our school peers, all of us dressed in special clothes and the girls holding posies. What efforts mum went to, sewing dresses, twisting the flower stems up in tinfoil and doilies. Then we got a new headmaster with more modern ideas, and May Day was replaced with Sports Day. Our mum made us voluminous turquoise shorts.

Our home town is a watery place, where two rivers meet and become a third. Our secondary school’s more sophisticated sports day needed ‘houses’ for us to belong to, and compete against, so they were named after the three rivers: Drumragh, Camowen, Strule. In this poem, thinking about natural cycles and laws, it seemed good to invoke the salmon, in Irish folklore, one of the wisest of all creatures. I was also thinking of the Cailleach Goddess, the old Winter crone, and how she becomes the maiden Brigid at Beltane. That cycle that has to be accepted, it will happen. One of my strategies over the winter is to feed the blackbirds my apples. I give them one a day, cut in half, and they scoff it up. The apples usually run out around Beltane and then the blackbirds come to my back door looking for stray pellets of dog food. They’re not slow.

Scrapantics. Two quid for the last one plastic hand. 
It spoke without negotiation, plastic hand.

No bone or muscle, neither did those nails claw stone, 
yet from the Warehouse of the Mountain, plastic hand. 

What will you do? What sort of art will you create?
Points to possibilities of Adam, plastic hand.

The skin is flaky and the layer below is grey,
a living thing cannot sustain the plastic hand.

Microplastic. Apple trees sequester it.
Earth’s contamination by our plastic hand.

Mementoes throng the mantelpiece, and yet it makes 
the other treasures pop, my bargain plastic hand.

Delusional companion syndrome? Animism?
Didn’t you hug your teddy bear? Same. Plastic hand.

And gie’s a hand o’ thine tae run about the braes
frae dine til morning sun, o’ plastic hand o ‘mine.

A kind connection strings along the lightest touch. 
Eloquence of molecules, hydrocarbon hand. 




Dawn Wood    April 2026

After Easter, I had nothing much left to write a new poem about, but I had set the intention. So I was alert for something that would grab me. Even when I brought the hand home from Scrapantics, I thought I’d got it to make something out of ceramics with it, I still will. But then I thought I’d describe the encounter in the shop as a conversational poem. There had been a whole box of parts donated since a branch of Mountain Warehouse closed down, and I’d got the last remaining piece. The next draft was something more elegant, a ghazal. In keeping with such an elegant hand.

The origin of the word ‘gzl’ is Semitic, it means to pluck (feathers from a bird, to sheer a sheep). It’s the same root in the Semitic languages Arabic, Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic. The word was often used in relation to the plunder and seizure of people, their property and rights.

In poetry, the tone of a ghazal has been described as the cry a deer makes when it separated from the herd, when it realises it is the subject of the hunt. Its last animal sound.

I wrote these for use at St Paul’s Cathedral Dundee on Good Friday, 3rd April 2026. Our new set of stations has been successfully launched :)
 
1	Jesus is condemned to death 

Soldiers. Approaching. 
Something is going on. 
They’re coming towards us. 
A kiss. 
Freedom. How quickly it flees. 
I’m grasped. 
And pulled. They are shouting:
This is the one. 

A crowd starts to gather, 
what’s going on? 
I look at the faces they are looking at me. 
I know this is the moment 
when the path of sorrows must open. 
I can’t avoid it. 
Or dart away. 
The only way is through. 


2	 Jesus takes up his cross 

Chaos. 
Maelstrom. 
I’m… pulled and pushed.
And there is The Cross. 
That I must carry. 
How heavy. 
How could I even shoulder that.
It is strapped on me. 
The Cross. And I. 
Are already bound. 
Together.

I have not known pain like this. 
I have known the imagination of pain. 
I have seen the pain of others. 
I have healed the pain of others, but
This?


3	Jesus falls for the first time 

What is this river of blood? 
Why are they shouting so much?
I am weak 
How weak the body is
How weak I am 
in separation


4	Jesus meets His Mother

My mother. 
How did she make it through the crowd? 
She is here. 
We are both weeping. 
But I look into her eyes and she into mine. 
This where I am from. 
My mother. 
We are together. 
Of the same mould. 
It is as if the two of us 
are sending strength to each other, 
backwards and forwards in a flow. 
A flow of love. 
What else could it be.


5	Simon of Cyrene carries the cross 

Simon? 
Simon, through the crowd. 
Carries the cross for me. 
Takes all its weight. Onto himself. 
I’m not aware of how I am moving. 
The cries. 
There is no time to think but, Simon, 
for a moment, 
is shouldering the world. 


6	Veronica wipes the face of Jesus 

Is it possible to help? 
I feel another touch on my cheek. 
Not a kiss of betrayal, a smooth cloth. 
How wet is blood and sweat. 
How soft this fabric 
to hide my shame for a moment.
How golden her face.


7	Jesus falls for the second time

I am lost. 
I have forgotten how my body moves. 
The flow of events. 
Must carry it. 
I long for nightfall to flow into. 
The shadow. 
But this is broad daylight. 
And I can only fold 
into the seam of events.


8	 Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem 

A change in the sound. 
Oh, there a cluster of others wailing… for me? 
For me? 
Why do they wail for me? 
Weep for your children. 
And your children not yet born. 
Who come into this hell of destruction.


9	Jesus falls the third time

My sight is gone. 
I can see the colours of the mind. 
The body below.

Am I..? 
I hold onto my heavenly Father – 
my spirit is fragmenting.
Soaring. 
Even before I am lifted.


10 	Jesus is stripped of His garments 

The body can’t be clothed anymore. 
That level of normal decency is long over.
I feel pity.
For those who do not believe. 
And for those who shout. 
And sprawl like children. 
And those who believe, 
like children. 
This is no time for any sermon. 
The way is deeper than they will know.


11	 Jesus is nailed to the cross

I see the hands of my father and my mother. 
All the work is over.
How beautiful my fingers once were. 
There is a story that they healed, 
simply by touch. 


12 	Jesus dies on the cross 

And I am raised.
I am
suddenly alone.

I hear the cry of an animal. 
It has come from my mouth.
Why?
Am I 
so 
forsaken?


13 	Jesus' body is removed from the cross 

How beautiful my fingers once were. 
There is a story 
that they healed, 
simply by touch. 


14	Jesus is laid in the tomb 

The quietness of the body. 
Curled in the tomb. 
The white shroud, 
the swaddling clothing of a baby. 
To know my body held, 
even now when my spirit is gone!

Here, Jesus’s face is the ‘positive’ convex version of the face from previous ‘falling stations’ (Stations III, VII and IX). I picked up the flambé glaze (used for the clothing at station X) as a flow down J’s side (on the left hand side of the image).

Station XIII Jesus’s Body is Taken Down from the Cross

Wound in the hand to prefigure the story of St Thomas. Lovely dark blue, not sure how that happened! Usually barium oxide gives a paler blue.

Station XIV Jesus is Laid in The Tomb

I thought of this as a peaceful place, Jesus is cupped by that same hand shape. Like a shell. From which he might rise, but not today.

s

The only station where Jesus’s clothing appears, is the one where it is taken away. I used a glossy glaze called flambé, which I will pick up at station XII. The stoneware clay folded so nicely into this thought of the letting go of the clothing of the self.

Jesus says to the women: Do not weep for me, but for yourselves and for your children. How it continues.

The women were likely to have been professional mourners. I made them from this mould shown above (derived by pressing a ball of clay into one of the angel carvings at St Paul’s Cathedral, Dundee, and bisque-firing it). I made them wail in the visceral act of opening their mouths with a cocktail stick, swirling it round. Open wide! Like a dentist. I kept one closed-mouth angel as a witness.

The other item shown above is a tester piece, which I carried around in my pocket for weeks, relieved that after many hideous experiments, I’d found a good glaze to use. The Station shown here (below) served as a multi-tester piece for a range of glazes. These Amaco matte ‘Shino’ glazes are named after hot drinks: Cacao, Chai, Oolong, Hibiscus (another type of herbal tea, apparently). Every Station has a spot of ‘barium blue’ glaze thrown in for good measure. Here, it’s just between Jesus and the closed-mouthed angel.

I’m pacing out the 15 stations to take us into Holy Week. We’ve reached the second fall. Most of the stations were made in stoneware, but this one is porcelain. Someone suggested to me that porcelain’s a bit posh, yes, and it’s also a bit of a Diva. It does not do what you want necessarily, it’s wilful and wayward and likely to collapse in heap of exhaustion, without warning, if you overwork it. How alive clay seems to be!

Porcelain takes up details from the moulds that I use very faithfully. Only two Stations in this set are porcelain, one comes up later (Station XIII) and I chose to use it because of the colour. This one, I decided to use, because of the flow that connects Jesus to the cross as he falls in his own heap of exhaustion.

The colour is a manganese dioxide ‘bronze’ mix underneath Amaco ‘cacao shino’. It gave a surprisingly rich colour and texture, which I’ll store up in my mind (or notebook) and use again. It amuses me, if it’s not too irreverent a comment, that it looks like delicious dark chocolate, a foretaste of Easter feasting… some stations still to go though!

These two stations gave me some unexpected results. In the first version of Simon, the stoneware came out of the mould with one eye too subtle to be seen, so I drew it in slightly. However, my attempt at a light touch was crudely done, it came out of the kiln looking as if he was winking through from some other dimension. Below, is draft two, a more symmetrical eyed Simon, helping shoulder the ‘hibiscus’-coloured cross.

Veronica, meanwhile, in the first version had a golden face, she looks very lovely, except that the glaze pooled below her nose to give a gold moustache. That oh-so-often, sinking feeling when something odd comes out of the kiln! I spoke about the project and process at St Paul’s Cathedral, Dundee last Monday, and people liked the golden Veronica just as much… which to finally use?

Jesus’ face is shown as if imprinted on the cloth, revisiting that idea of negative or indented space being used to denote ‘The Divine’.

Jesus meets his mother, they understand each other completely, they look the same since they are of the same mould… They both weep for the world. The cross pierces her heart too, she lends her strength. J has a crown of thorns, M has a crown of roses… below a pic of the items I used, the thorn stem is from a wild rose by the side of my cottage. I naively thought it would be a simple matter of pressing it into the clay to get a ‘thorny branch’ indentation, but that only left a row of small holes, what was needed was to keep turning and gouging it in. The squirrel-chewed pine cone is from my local wood. Mary’s crown of roses is filled with Amaco ‘shino’ glaze (the colour is called ‘oolong’) and some barium oxide for blue.

In terms of constructing this piece, the challenges were – attaching the faces and stopping them from crumbling before the clay was dry enough to hold. Lots of propping up going on! I made quite a few versions of this station IV, but chose the one where their haloes make a heart shape for the final set of stations.

The funny thing about Station III is that it only works this way up. The red glaze on the cross makes a river. Do you see Jesus’ face, at the top right? It’s indented - I pressed into the clay the face of a dancing statue that I had around the house (I made it when I was recovering from illness, 2022).

It’s an idea that comes up in sacred art, that a Deity might be depicted in a liminal space, a niche or a ‘threshold’. Or that they themselves might be made concave, to show that their presence is watchful, but different. I thought that when Jesus falls under the cross, he could be shown sunken. His body is obliterated by that heavy, but somehow flowing, cross.

Here is the dancing statue that I used below: