Eye is delighted to introduce readers to the work of poet and writer Sibyl Ruth, a member of Central England Area Meeting, who has just scooped first prize of 1,000 pounds in the 2008 Poetry Competition organised by Mslexia, the magazine for women writers.
Sibyl's entry 'A Song of Jean' was judged by the novelist Carol Ann Duffy to be 'a skilful, beautifully-paced poem... by a writer fully at ease with her own considerable abilities'.
The winning poem, which we are reprinting by kind permission of Mslexia, will immediately resonate with Friends. It is a lyrical portrait of an older member of a Meeting, eccentric but lovable and worthy of praise and blessing.
Sibyl has been writing for twenty years and recently gave up her day job, working for an arts organisation, to concentrate on writing. 'It's lovely to have some confirmation that this decision was the right one', she says. She admitted to Eye that she finds it difficult ('and risky!') to connect being a Quaker with being a poet. 'But so far I have felt encouraged by the way Friends have responded to this piece.'
Sibyl has had collections
of her poetry published by the Iron Press and Five Leaves publishers.

A song of Jean

Let my tongue and keyboard both proclaim the power of Jean.

For in the meeting house, Jean gets to her feet often and ministers
with a voice that is a clanging gong.
She drives away false peace, awakens us.
Teach us not to fear becoming caught in the long diversions of Jean's
thoughts, lost in the ring road of her speech.

When the appointed hour is done, may we engage Jean in conversation
and not run away from her in the lobby for some invented reason.

Let us acknowledge the aging of Jean
who doesn't enjoy being eighty
but wishes to go on as she did at thirty.
Allow us all to accommodate Jean's fury,
listening with tenderness to her shouts and rants
Jean's demands for help. Her refusal of help that's offered.
Those cries of No. No I can do it. I can manage.

May we make time to watch over Jean
for she mislays her spectacles, her watch, her keys, her purse.

Help us to worship the Spirit that shaped the hands of Jean,
hands that once tied knots, hammered tent pegs, peeled thousands of
potatoes.
Jean's hands now in their fleecy gloves, their knobbly, twisted, arthritic
fingers,
hands that can no longer do buttons, whose buttons are done wrong.
frantic hands that keep on searching bags and rattling papers.

Jean has been diminished, yet we shall magnify Jean's name.
Lead us to esteem properly the engine that is Jean's body
the darkness of her teeth.
the hairs of her head, white and coarse as dune grass
her stertorous breath
her bent back
her slumped chest.
Also let us praise Jean's black-handled stick that likes to slip from her grasp and hit the floor with a great clatter.

May we remember always the muchness of Jean's mind
Her mind that carries those seas from which we crawled in the beginning
that holds those caverns which shall open to receive us at our end.

May glory and honour belong to Jean, and every day that remains to her be blessed.

Labels: poetry