Poems posted on Write Out Loud by John Darwin and Cathy Bryant have been published on The London Magazine website in an online poetry swap. The idea was put forward by The London Magazine – and Write Out Loud took up its offer. The London Magazine is England’s oldest literary periodical, and has published Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, TS Eliot, and Auden. John Darwin’s The Daylight Comes With Me and Cathy Bryant's The Poetry Diet – drop a stanza in just two weeks! were selected for The London Magazine by members of Write Out Loud’s editorial team. You can read them here on The London Magazine blog. In this new initiative, and as part of the poetry exchange, Write Out Loud is publishing The Veil, by Manash Bhattacharjee, and Girlhood, by Holly Howitt, below.  Watch out for more poems in the Write Out Loud-London Magazine poetry exchange. 

 

The Veil

By Manash Bhattacharjee

 

She walks past the wave
Of curious glances
An apparition eluding
Light and desire
Everything she hides from
Trembles in her body
She remembers the lures
In every street
But no street will ever
Remember her
Only the walls and the mirror
Engrave her silence
Her memory remains buried
Among blind objects
Certain mornings she discovers
Eyes with no face
Or a face wearing someone
Else’s eyes
Certain afternoons she wonders
Why custom demanded
That her body be torn from
Its glare
One night she picks up the pen
To draw alphabets
Appearing to her as eyes

 

Girlhood

By Holly Howitt

 

As a girl, I lost most of my time on the hillside.

It fattened the hedgerows

And got caught on barbed wire.

 

Some might say it was wasted,

All that youth washed away on wet afternoons

My feet warm inside wellingtons, even on icy days;

 

But now I see it was lost.

Like a keepsake, or a spoiled prize dropped in anger

It became overgrown and forgotten.

 

I found my old doll once,

Perched on a yew tree

Her face eaten in by insects.

 

I think of her often, her despoiling;

The pinafore on her dress

Stained red by berries.

 

Like her, I never found that time I lost –

That girlhood, which I had hoped

Would be pegged on the branches or propped on a stile.

 

Instead, I now look for that time inside myself

The stopped clock of childhood

Nesting between my ribs.

 

And I know that if I dug like a mole with long fingernails

Between the heavy lines frowned by my eyebrows

I might find there a small girl, cowering under my skin.