“The poem is about a human experience of illness, due to a virus in the human body. But the illness itself takes a human form, and our abuse of shared ground gives the poem its monochrome palette.”
Ponies
Considering I was popping
blister packs of paracetamol, peeling
foil seals off testing vials and hoisting
my sweaty shadow onto pillows,
I could only be flattered.
Here was this illness cavorting over me,
paying copious attention to every bodily inch.
Steady on! I croaked,
as the illness stripped my clothes off,
slipped rings off my fingers, and galloped
me out over the burning common
where fire was spreading like a storm cloud,
edges lit in flame.
At the scorched centre the ground
was velvet black. It smelt abused.
The illness plucked gorse
flowers off a charred branch, dropped
petals on my tongue, and I swallowed
the only colour in sight, everything else
was either black or white: soot against quartz,
the bleached bones of livestock. Deadstock.
A horse skull goofed at me as I ate
the yellow, piece by piece, tiny flags.
Smoke curled up from the horse’s empty
eyes and the yellows
fluttered down to my interior
and here too the illness busied about,
arranging the petals into bunting,
hanging the whole hall of me, beckoning
the piebald ponies in off the hill.
The fiddle, the guitar, the flute!
The illness played them all
calling out the twmpath
and I was arm in hoof, tossing my mane,
stomping my clocsen
but I couldn’t shake the persistent
thumping filling my ears
from the inside, drumming out the sickly
melodies, pulsing
with such insistence
the stuff of me vastly swelled –
the dancing, the animals, the party –
all squeezed into insignificance
as I bulged up to the rafters,
flicked a kiss at the illness, and burst
through the roof of myself.
The use of active verbs in this poem alongside the fractured form gives it great movement and pace. Could you talk a little about how you settled on the form for this piece?
It found this form, which I liked because it reminded me of a village hall knees up – messy and tripping over itself, but with a regular pattern.
The title of the poem gives little away, and I really enjoyed the surprising direction the poem took. How easy was it to decide on the right title for this piece?
Ponies… is it the right title? This poem was part of an animal sequence but so many of the animals have run off in different directions. Maybe the right title is Old Flame? No. The Illness. No. Ponies. No…
I loved the personification of illness and the dream-like quality of the writing, which is often how we can feel when we’re very sick, slipping between the two states of wake to sleep. Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write about illness in this way?
It is, exactly as you describe in your question, about trying to capture that feverish place. I’ve tried a few poems about viral illnesses. In one, a virus creeps around a terrace at night, trying the doors and the windows. In this one, the virus is a little more rakish and upfront, doesn’t bother sneaking about, and why should it? It’s on everyone’s lips – the village celebrity!
You reference ‘twmpath’ in this piece, the Welsh word for barn dance. I think its literal translation is ‘hump’, used because of the mound on the green where the musicians would play, and I loved the idea of ‘hump’ as something to also get over, like an illness. I associate barn dances with chaos and laughter, and exhaustion! Can you tell us a little bit more about its inclusion in your poem?
A friend of mine told me about the ‘Rhaeadr Hot and Sweaty’, which she used to go to as a teenager. It sounds excellent! My experiences in village halls are more ‘cold and draughty’, but once I danced with a man who wore an LED belt that flashed ‘STROUD’. That barn dance had to stop because someone broke an arm. As you say, chaotic. In the poem the illness is the caller, so the dancers surrender physical control to the instructions of the illness. Exhausting.
I thought the use of black and white imagery woven throughout the poem was really interesting and helped evoke a feeling of being slightly jarred or split in two, as can often feel when you have the flu or a terrible cold. Could you tell us more about the use of these shades in your piece?
Where I live common ground is often burnt deliberately. One day there’s ground-nesting birds, hares, a badger sett. Then fire. In the weeks after, the living colour is all burnt away. Soon recovery begins, bracken and gorse grow back, the birds try again. Then, late summer, new fires. So the poem is about a human experience of illness, due to a virus in the human body. But the illness itself takes a human form, and our abuse of shared ground gives the poem its monochrome palette.
