TEXT poetry

Maggie Butt

There is a sweet redemptive joy
in the simple naming of things:

crisp apple
light on water
sleeping child
new mown grass
ploughed field raked with frost
fish-bone clouds high in a china-blue sky
fragrant down on a baby's head
metallic taste of rain

As if by naming they are made anew
to cradle in my hand.

Maggie Butt teaches creative writing at Middlesex University, UK, and is the chair of the National Association of Writers in Education. Her first poetry collection, Lipstick, was published in 2007. M.Butt@mdx.ac.auk