Mary Woodward has poems published in many magazines, most recently Poetry Ireland (no. 122 March 2017) and Southword ( 2019). She has one full collection The White Valentine Worple Press 2013 which was highly commended in the Forward prize, and a pamphlet Almost Like Talking (Smith Doorstop) as a result of winning the Poetry Business competition in 1993.

Tintern Abbey 1975

Newly divorced, and at a loose end, I went 

too. Auntie May had gathered together almost

all her sisters, Nancy, Teresa who was over 

from Ireland, and my mother, for a day out

 

on a coach from the Annunciation church

in Burnt Oak. MYSTERY TOUR said the bus

beguilingly. We guessed coastal towns – Margate 

or Bognor or Clacton, but the driver wasn’t telling,

 

and the coach, crammed to the gunwales, headed

westward. Stopped somewhere for gins and orange, 

charged off in the same direction. My aunts 

tactfully avoided mentioning my single status

 

except Nancy, always the wildest, who said 

I was not a nun and wasn’t it high time

I found a new boyfriend. At some point came

signs to Cheddar Gorge and the Wye valley.

 

Then Tintern Abbey, which added to my sense

of failure when I could not quote a single line.

They believed me anyway about the famous poem.

And the coach hurtled back on the M4, then

 

the A5 north. Nancy, who ran a sweet shop,

produced a large empty ice cream carton from 

her shopping bag, and went loudly up and down

the aisle, collecting money for the Boys.

Honeysuckle

These midsummer late evenings the courtyard floats

in a thick billow of cream scent, the breathing of June, 

July in the black air; a scent burdened with memories –

 

the Avon honeysuckle perfume I wore in May 1968 – 

neither expensive nor classy but then soul of the light 

warm months, giving what my dusty city life lacked,

 

an assurance of enchantment and freedom escaping 

from its little green and yellow box. No great pedigree

heavyweight from Guerlain or Chanel or Dior has ever 

 

possessed such magic and power, bought by my mum 

from a neighbour trying to make money as an Avon lady – 

my mum who once, when I was a child and we were home

 

in Sligo, stopped on our exit through a night time garden, 

reached for a wandering branch of leaves and pale flowers-

Smell that, she said, holding it down to my wondering face.

Ponthirwaun

is where they came to escape

the bombs, a lane crossing

curving woods and meadows, 

three red cottages a wall a river

 

nearby – dark meandering shallow

enough for stepping stones making

a broken glinting path from

east to west. Adders in the edges

 

of the fields.  A garden plum trees

long grass where, as I was playing, 

my first ring fell from my finger

and was never seen again.  Plaited 

 

gold band, an M a W on its blue stone, 

gift from my Welsh grandmother. I can 

still see it – lost and precious – maybe 

valuable, maybe just a child’s gee gaw 

 

from a London market. No knowing 

now. I remember the loss the woods

the stepping stones the freedom

from our beaten filthy tired city.

My Beautiful Bridesmaid

 After family deaths there’s always someone who has the urge

to go through the old photos and unasked send some round

 

so chunks of the past float up through emails, trailing lost people.

Like my cousin. Only twelve, she was my bridesmaid – pale in a long 

 

sea green crepe dress, sea green ribbon holding back her black hair

and a posy of gleaming snowdrops from a Somerset wood – which 

 

a friend’s mother had picked and posted to me in a moss lined box.

Then she seemed happy, untroubled, one of the youngest. But

 

as the years passed for some reason she turned against her mother 

and her sister, cut herself off from all of us, avoided Christmases,

 

then funerals. In that photo she sits calm, demure, a good little ghost. 

No-one ever knew what happened to make her so angry. But now 

 

I want to tell her that of all the gestures at my wedding she was

the only one that worked:  among the tired out of place Irish relatives,

 

my husband – a big mistake, the short-lived marriage – a joke,

 

the solemn rites of the nuptial mass an empty baroque farce,

I know that somewhere there was this lovely girl, a child, quiet

 

and so young she had yet to quarrel with anyone, carefully

holding her January snowdrops, from a morning forest in the West.