Other Work

Song of the Worm

My little grandson picked up a worm
And held it in the palm of his hand.
His bright face looked up to mine,
His shining eyes held me forever in time.
“This” he said, ” This worm is a beautiful thing.”
“Yes my darling. Yes, and you are a king.”

Joanna, who wrote this for her first grandchild when he was 4, has set her poem to music. It is sung here by the baritone Roderick Williams and the piano is played by Graham Lloyd.

Song of the Severn

Only a sigh, high, up in his lonely birth
Falling through simple earth in sun and rain.
Gathering sound, his primeval song is bright
Shooting a path of light on to the plain.
Wild in the shallows, laughing, the children play
Dancing through rainbow spray crazy and loud.
Waters where dark trees lean have become bright green
Pools, that will turn dull grey under the clouds.
Mid-night in Worcester there is a different sound
Covered in lights and roaring round the town,
Nobody sees the gaudy night go down under a star,
Until the star slips into that bright sheet
Where sky and river meet under the sun,
And all the colours and sounds of Severn and sea
Are one.

A poem commissioned for an anthology of poetry about Worcestershire

You Come With The Swallows

You come with the swallows.
Striding down from the hill, the great hill over the sea. Down to the strand, where, there in that loved place will you hold me, and will you kiss my face?
And shall we be? Walking and dreaming
racing the bright shore, diving where waves roar calling your name?

Heaven, where seas touch skies, blue green like our son's eyes. Crying the sun falls down like a dead flame.
You have gone with the swallows.
Lying beyond the hill, that dark hill over the sea.

Under the soft rain, into the lost hours
I see fallen leaves where there were once flowers. Singing and dreaming, I will remember
walking through frost white fields in the pale sun. Love is a tide that alters and changes.
Love is a memory lost in a song.

A poem to commemorate the death of her late husband Christopher