Archives poem - Emma Parfitt Proofreading Editing Services

In memory

Emma Parfitt — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 10:27:17 +0000

In memory of Auntie Pinkie. A beacon of love, inspiration and spirituality. She travelled the globe and people loved her wherever she went.

A poem in memory of Auntie Pinkie.

Wanted

New body for open-hearted soul,

Described by some as “an elegant hippy”.

The candidate must be willing to travel and make friends

Wherever they go.

Gender unimportant.

Ideally with their own inbuilt sense of fun

And a pinch of mischief.

Okay more than a pinch.

A being who is prepared to spend most of the time outdoors having adventures.

Foodie.

Must understand that Covid vaccination is not an option

Please mail CV to spiritual_elegant_hippy_inthesky@soulmail.com

Reflection

I wrote “In Memory” because I love my aunt very much. The last birthday card she sent me was so typically her, saying although it went without saying she loved me very much. I kept that card after her death last year, as a reminder. But I don’t need a card to remember how surrounded in love I felt whenever she was around. Believing in reincarnation, she will be out there somewhere seeking a new body, in who knows what universe, or world …

If you’d like to read other fiction written by be, check out my goodreads page.

L’article In memory est apparu en premier sur Emma Parfitt Proofreading Editing Services.

Poem Elephant Tusks

Emma Parfitt — Fri, 14 May 2021 07:24:00 +0000

Inspired from the above photograph Rainbow by Helen Patience from the Hold Still digital exhibition, I wrote the following poem.

The Duchess of Cambridge and the National Portrait Gallery revealed the winners in 2020, which featured 100 portraits from 31,598 submissions during the project’s six-week entry period. The images aimed to record of our shared and individual experiences during lockdown, and have been exbitited in Times Square in London.

Elephant tusks

Grey, What of grey?

A rainbow window. A little girl.

Upturning the gravel of her mind.

A lassie’s sunflowered Macintosh waves from a distance

bending towards her ma’s swan neck cocooned in a tartan scarf.

Amber, turquiose and carmene are easy to understand, but what about grey?

A woven net of grey weaves infront of her eyes, dangling on a stick.

Pencil on paper the girl composes a list:

scaffolding,

TV aerials,

paperclips,

guitar strings,

tins of peaches,

hubs on the car,

water pipes,

elephant tusks.

Ma’s youthful face and silver hairs.

Da’s lead eyes crinkling at the edges.

Seals’ graceful stares.

To say your world is grey, she decides, makes it full of unpredictable things …

like in stories, where silver fills trunks guarded by saucer-eyed dogs.

It glints off wolves’ pelts amongst birch bark.

It pays the boatman across the River Styx.

Yet silver is not as sought after as gold or ivory.

Could be, like an elephant tusk, the colour of our soul is beautifully ashen.

The shadowy line between stealing a pound from Ma’s purse or not.

Grey, then, is even the hue of consciousness.

A rainbow window. A little girl.

Upturning the gravel of her mind, to seek coined fishes.

About Emma

Author Emma writes books about the people of Scotland. Her recent book (A Friendship of Thistles) is about the resilence of friendship. If you are looking for another book to read about sisterhood it might be for you …

L’article Poem Elephant Tusks est apparu en premier sur Emma Parfitt Proofreading Editing Services.

The non-violent violinist

Emma Parfitt — Sat, 08 Sep 2018 10:24:00 +0000

A poem inspired by a conversation with Dorota and Stéphane, with a nod to Debra Basset’s research on digital grieving.

The violin, in itself, is not violent.

What if, says the artist to herself,

the instrument’s lines and angles are a shared mental framework of hidden influences and meanings.

The bow, for instance, thrums across one’s deadened consciousness,

strokes a beat across the heart and back again.

The violin is almost drawing blood in the way it shakes me awake.

A violinist can create a crisscross of cuts in the ice of a soul as easily as soothe and glide.

Its movements start soft, the space between the notes casting the magic of a first lover’s kiss.

Gaining momentum, squiggles on pulped leave dance pirouettes, marionette-like shadows across the lines.

I don’t know what it was like to live amongst candlelight and clicking piano keys,

when the only entertainment was string, wind or percussion.

The miracle of live experience still occurs due to the privilege of electric currency ̶ digital money.

What a crime to compare the virtual to the living!

Digital avatars beckon Beethoven, Shubert and Seuerling to foxtrot from their graves in binary revolution.

The metamorphosis has commenced, c’est-à-dire… (it’s so cultured, even now, to throw in some French)…

let’s close our eyes and breathe it in.

Escape one simulated world for another one.

The passion of the non-violent violinist traverses the pores of our skin, sinking into sinew and bone with pinpricks of pleasure.

The violinist does not produce a flat tinny sound from a digital device. This is real music. Live. Transcendent.

As the music reaches for its applause there is always the promise of another tune…

like the lullabies that welcomed us into this world.

A lullaby of slaps

from a violent violinist

watered down by kindness and love.

L’article The non-violent violinist est apparu en premier sur Emma Parfitt Proofreading Editing Services.

A poetry reading that inspired a poem

Emma Parfitt — Tue, 27 May 2014 14:30:00 +0000

I went to a poetry reading on the 17^thMay, Warwick Arts Centre, at the University of Warwick. Good writing always inspires me to write something, not necessarily good, so this is why that poetry reading inspired me to write a poem.

Louis de Bernières is a talented British writer best known for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. By his name you might expect de Bernières to be French but he is British. It is a shame that authors are not rated by their talent, by their choice of words, the quality of writing, since commercial success outweighs all else, the stories of the powerful survive as history is rewritten from their perspective. De Bernières is fortunate enough to possess both talent and acknowledgment though not as much as he deserves. He talked to a small, yet privileged, following of perhaps twenty people about his lifelong love of poetry, two folders of which he brought with him to delve into.

De Bernières, sitting on the theatre stage shared with us that he had overheard some beautiful, traditional sounding songs whilst visiting Greece. He had commented on them to a Greek friend who informed him that this was not traditional music but modern composers setting much loved Greek poetry to melody. De Bernières explored from there and was inspired.

My favourite book in the collection of poems, Imagining Alexandria, is The Brighton Dress. It captures the raw emotions of a past love, and how memory plays its tricks by flirting with imagination. The poetry reading was wonderfully informal. De Bernières flicked through his folder of unpublished works while people asked questions. One of the unpublished works he read was a favourite judging by the warm applause, was called something like Jackdaws and Ravens. He also gave a lively and vivid reading from one of his novels, A Partisan’s Daughter.

I was interested especially by part of the discussion which involved the poet Michael Hulse about poems with emotional content. During this De Bernières mentioned a poet who talked about fingers becoming roses. De Bernières said that a British poet couldn’t have written it, because we skirted emotion. I was not surprised, because in my own, poor, attempts at poems I always had the sense that I was trying to express something that often came across as clichéd and empty of the true emotion. But listening to De Bernières’ poems about his children, about his father, I realised I’d been going about these poems the wrong way because I’d being trying to capture the emotion and not the context. For example in the way The Brighton Dressdoes so beautifully. The whole history behind the lover and the dress is never explained, only a fragment. For after all what is poetry but a captured moment in time we care too much about to let go.

This inspired my first attempts to write in a new way. If as Hulse and De Bernières discussed there is a lack of emotional poetry I believe that is because it is a tough thing to make a living off poetry, as I think my mentor Douglas Dunn would agree. I feel sad that I did not take my chance to show Dunn my poetry, instead focusing on my prose, because I was anxious that my poems would be too emotional and unrefined compared to the complexity of his poems which I didn’t really understand at the time. I don’t understand everything now, but the difference now is that learning comes through asking questions, exploring the billion questions that pop into my head all the time, that make me write.

Especially now I am researching emotion, interested in the interaction between research and creative writing, I step hesitantly into the world of poetry, knowing that I don’t know enough of poetry to make a polished job of it. So this is a snap shot of the relationship between a mother and daughter.

Visiting mum

I wish I had the mother that I wanted: the mum that gave warm hugs and kisses.

Except my memory is defective because a child sees a mother not the difficulty.

I keel for my mum, for me, and try, try to replace those overturned memories with the new

as we wish to be the mother that’s wanted, the daughter that’s wanted.

I have a vision that the complicated mess of this relationship is replaced by a clay dough family atop a wedding cake.

A perfect home where separation didn’t happen because the war didn’t happen,

she changed her mind before the wedding, and I was never born.

So we never found each other imperfect.

She would be free, dancing in the Cat’s Whiskers

and I’d be at peace.

L’article A poetry reading that inspired a poem est apparu en premier sur Emma Parfitt Proofreading Editing Services.