Poem Of The Week: Skew Hill By Alan Payne

Skew Hill
Sheffield

My mother’s ashes
scattered
between
flinty showers;
a resolution
at last
of all
that reaching out
towards others.

Her desire
to be useful
shrunk
to a circle of roses
whose petals
shake themselves free
of the loss
that shapes
a man’s bent back
in a field
stunned by rain.

A sense of emptiness inheres to the fabric of Alan Payne’s elegy for his mother. Picked out in threadbare lines whose length is an expression of the foreshortened view yielded in the finality of crematory ash, such consolation as remains is sundered in textures of grey.

For the ‘flinty showers’ that begin the poem, and the stunning rain that end it, obliterate any sense of the mother’s former raison d’etre - the ‘reaching out / towards others’, the ‘desire / to be useful'. ‘Resolution’, in this climate, is the thinnest of solace; it will not restore the indifferent petals to the circle of roses, or straighten the back of the man – perhaps a father figure; perhaps the poet at distance – whose grief is overwhelming.

‘Skew Hill’ is taken from Mahogany Eve, published by smith|doorstop (2024), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.

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