Hefted

My poem ‘Hefted’ started with a very specific memory from my childhood. Our village church was a distance from the old Sunday School building (a red sandstone building which smelt of damp and buttered scones at Mothers’ Union teas) so the small Sunday School was held in the church vestry, except in the summer when we used to spill out into the graveyard. There we’d do our worksheets and listen to Bible stories in the sunshine.

The poem maps some familiar Sunday School stories onto the Cumbrian landscape – the feeding of the five thousand, Noah’s Ark, the calling of the fishermen and Jesus’ calming the storm. This is a child making imaginative leaps so that the settings of the stories can be made to fit the limits of their knowledge of place. The final section takes this a step further and maps stories onto childhood experiences, specifically those of the school playground with David and Goliath, and the Lost Sheep. In the poem David wins and the Herdwick lamb is found. My own playground experience, as an outsider in a small village, wasn’t always happy and there was something healing about writing those lines, but perhaps there is a slightly unsettled air about the end of the poem born of that memory.

I am particularly delighted to have found a home for this poem as I’m very fond of it.

Highly Commended: MK Lit Fest poetry prize and featured in the MinK2025 anthology – MinK#5: Home

‘… an assured and lyrical piece.’ Hannah Copley (competition judge)