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Rae Howells
the poet
Rae Howells is a poet and journalist from Swansea, UK. She's won both the Welsh International and The Rialto poetry competitions, and her work has featured in a wide range of journals including Magma, The Rialto and Poetry Wales. Rae's poetry has recently appeared in anthologies including The Result is What You See Today and A470: Poems for the Road, in which she also translated her poem into Welsh. She was one of ten poets selected for a digital residency and exchange between Wales and Vietnam, resulting in the collaborative trilingual multi-media showcase, U O | suo. Rae co-authored the pamphlet Bloom and Bones with Jean James, and her collection, The language of bees, is out in 2022.
the poems
Merchant Vessel Defoe, 1941
Moon nights were the worst
like being on a ruddy stage
with the spotlight shining in your eyes
the audience somewhere down there
in the oily stalls beneath your feet
you couldn’t look them in the eye
but they saw you all right
unblinking periscopes with the waves clapping.
we’d clank across the water
a band a moving factory
waves riddling on the rivets
and the machine of the ocean grinding
they knew exactly where we were of course they did
we were the great flywheel rattling over
and they, iron whales, waiting in the tide’s deep belt.
So we kept our backs to Brazil
and breathed our hope to Swansea.
We were bananas tucked in our skins
sweating in boxes in the tin stomach
of the hull our hands worrying black spiders in our sleep
I couldn’t swim a stroke y’know
kept my steel helmet on so I could drown the quicker
I hated the watch
all that starless black stretching out like a long ear
listening
our convoy was the world
we could have been the only people alive
the others wavering candles alongside
lamps and smoke the cigarette ends flaring
and then – BANG!
you always saw the white flash of death
before you heard the whump of it
before you retched at the cordite stink chlorine fire and oil burning on saltwater
and the shouts of tiny men
flung into the moonroad
you couldn’t help but wonder
when your turn would come
I’ve still got my medals somewhere, y’know,
tucked up in a tin box
round as faces.
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The swing
Six years on but still, sometimes,
I wake and find you in the dawn,
the woman
from the mother-and-baby group,
pushing the swing, still there,
in that playground –
do you remember?
both of us in the park:
your older daughter is
straddled into the safety swing,
her legs flying up
towards the sun
as she leaves you and comes back,
leaves you, and comes back
and I am
with you,
the wind insisting itself
into everything,
the row of boats along the foreshore
with their metalwork
ringing,
crying out,
my own baby snug
in the hull of her pram,
and her small,
reliable, heart
working,
winging in its chest
so that when I gull myself next to you
– squawking too noisily
about motherhood –
I almost
miss
your daughter’s eyes,
locked onto you,
airborne tight,
as she reluctantly leaves you,
and leaves you,
a series of
small griefs,
her swoop,
her snag of delight,
each time caught uncertainly
in that belly-drop moment
between soaring joy
and parting.
I was too slow to notice
you were a cracked egg,
albumen
leaking out of you,
the way you forced yourself
to push the swing away,
willed your muscles to obey,
each push a wrench of the heart.
I presumed you had simply left your baby boy with your mother.
But of course,
there are your daughter’s eyes,
fixed on you
as you slowly implode – you,
with your heart
strung up on a pendulum –
transfixed,
watching you
caught in that terrible
moment between:
oscillating, flying away,
hands outstretched
for the miraculous return.
The winter-king
little-word bird little wren
feathered lung only built for singing
purifying freezing air through
a feather ball chitter chatter piper
little wren little brownleaf keeneye
built for singing
round like a minim
little wren pink wire feet
gripping winter’s branches
holding on to cold little bird
only built to pipe built to whistle
keeneye watching snow fall
crowning the holly little thornbeak
feathered bauble hanging on the pine
only built to sing
turning cold air into arias
too quick for the ice to catch
little keeneye raised eyebrow
jingling the dead leaf bells
surely too small to be –
but they say you’re the winter-king
only you can sing us into light
Publishing credits
Merchant Vessel Defoe, 1941: Magma Issue 74
The Swing: Please Give Me Your Heart to Hold
Longlisted for the Winchester Poetry Prize 2019
The winter-king: The Rialto
