Fiona Mason
Article
Fiona Mason is a writer, artist and researcher. She read Philosophy at Essex University and has worked as an editor, theatre producer, fundraiser and arts consultant.
Her writing and art are inspired by the journey and touch on themes of liminality, memory, identity and loss. Works-in-progress include a collection of landscape poetry, a collection of short stories on the theme of escape and a non-fiction work about a 1200mile journey by bicycle with a guitar. Fiona is Co-ordinating Editor of Goldfish 2015.
Email: info@fionamason.co.uk
Website: www.fionamason.co.uk
View as PDF: Fiona Mason - Poetry
Oaken Tales
(from The Memory of Trees)
Late summer you sat beneath my green boughs,
my fruit your currency:
a cupped, polished treasure,
that hoarded in my hollow trunk,
was your exchange for fellowship.
My great branches were galleon masts.
Small fingers reaching into deep ridges for grip,
you would scramble up to get a better view
and from the crow’s nest, hand-cupping sun blinded eyes,
would seek the far horizon across an ocean of wind-waved wheat.
Other boys would beg to come aboard:
to hoist-sail or heave-to, plank-walk or keelhaul.
Buccaneers and pirates, merchant-men or navy.
Each lad his own place and purpose,
self-determined and confirmed by consensus.
You didn’t know then that oaks like me
were felled for the ships
that caused mothers to weep,
dressed pretty girls too young in widows' black,
made fatherless boys,
robbed old men of sleep,
and made wheat-fields to weeds.
You didn’t know then that boys like you
grew to hunger-gnawed men
with rope-callused hands,
salt-scoured skin,
sea-blind eyes,
loss-bent minds
and fathom-dark hearts.
Butterfly Dreams
In my preferred version of events, after you were gone,
birds sang the new day to life,
so I opened the window
to let in the endless blue sky
and let out what remained of you
that could still be free.
Then a butterfly that had emerged
before its time and was stretching new wings
on the trunk of the cherry tree took flight
and landing on your pillow said all was right.
In the real version of events, after you were gone,
she held you by the feet
and pulled you down the bed,
she rearranged you,
tried and failed to close your eyes,
pushed a pillow under your chin to hold your mouth shut,
pulled the duvet tight so that only your cold, spent face showed,
made me a cup of sweet tea, and
surprised at my shock asked, ‘Haven’t you been expecting it?’
And after half an hour left us there together,
to figure it all out, alone in that forever silence.
It was 6:30am.
Talking To You From My Hotel At Midnight
We speak.
Our connection
umbilical
yet tenuous. My voice
thick with emotion. Yours
shimmers
like moon on water
or a silverpoint lyric, drawing me
into your orbit,
pouring cool liquor
onto my parched, brittle words,
smoothing out the furrows,
unwinding the spring,
until I flow freely, as you do.
As the ink flows
from your Chinese brush.
