It's About Time: Poems of an Uncertain Woman

By Lesley Storm

"I'm a woman. I support them. I'm bisexual. I support them. I'm a feminist. I support them. I endure regular abuse for being trans. I support them. I am called a "poof" by the unenlightened. I support them. My name is Lesley, and I'm a woman ― that is to say that I am human, just like you, and you like me."
A meditation on the passing of time, a declaration that life, love and poetry are defined by time, are all about time and timing.
Here are love poems, life poems, elegies, aubades, odes, existential solitude poems, prose poems, joyous poems of fleeting human pleasures, poems compassionate, sanguine and witty, poems delicate with vulnerability, urgent poems on survival over time.
*
These are powerful, moving and accomplished poems that speak to all humanity, written by a certain woman documenting her uncertain becomings over time.
Whatever the certainties of those enforcing it or of those of us willingly or unwillingly defined by it, the category 'woman' has always been uncertain.
'One is not born a woman', Simone de Beauvoir observes, 'one becomes one'.
But what is it to be deeply certain of an urgent calling to womanhood all of one's life yet violently excluded from such a becoming?
What is it to win through?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leamington Books
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781914090219

Book preview

LESLEY STORM

IT’S ABOUT TIME

LEAMINGTON BOOKS

Edinburgh

CONTENTS

Title Page

i

[of course I'm alone]

And writing and listening, and sleeping alone

Rapture, contingent on consent

A Carthaginian Peace

Take my hand

Simple desires

The fear

I may be wrong

I live alone, I love you

Bremen

Bright Bouqets

Circumstantial evidence

How do I love thee?

Oxford (2017)

Preferences

My life, my heart, my love

My poem, and you

Near but not close

In parenthesis

In the Lammermoors

How symposia might be cosier

Hysterical euphoria and incomprehensible despair

I'm alone, it's night

I am awake

Common courtesy

Dave Swarbrick

Dear A– –, thank you for listening

Berceuse

Does it matter?

As you were then

And that is all I need

A sweet intoxication

A simple enough truth

A willingness to storm heaven

A bequest to my old love

A grief in time

A last goodbye

ii

Needed, and couldn't find

My love affair …

untitled

Lines constructed in a Lubeck coffee house

Into Hades

Recovering well

On reading Anne Sexton again

On wanting to die

For CA again

Blind to all suffering

Breakdown and nightmare

Another country

And go on

After my first death

After the storm

A light flirtation with death

iii

I had no heart to break

Just lock the door

Love song

Of course, I've changed

Impulse and restraint

In Cavendish Square I sat down and wept

Friends and lovers

Some days of my desire

The choice – an epithalamion

After our walk

I'm always up for an argument about God

Camelot

Exile

Promises we never keep

Rather this than that

Further still to go

Just my bad luck

GBC

iv

Morning song – between waking and dawn

Morning song (trivialities in verse)

Morning song (coffee-time in the city)

Morning song (this winter bourne)

Morning song (she'll never know)

'Ubique' to Zem Zem, for my father, James Storm 1918 - 1998

So far / so good

Miracles

I am your child

Lost and found

In memoriam – five brief poems

PTSD

Of course, I can't forgive, but love

My first stroke of luck

Doreen Winifred Bruce

A letter home

A father's fears

The lid on the box of screams

v

Elizabeth Jennings

Emptional debris

My own study of reading habits

I love you to no purpose

Home

I love my love

Love me, leave me

Divorce 2015

Night and day

Nothing! and everything changed

A sense of decorum

untitled

Time to miss you

It's not about you

I would rather forget

Now may I go?

vi

Epitaphs

Bury my heart in Port Meadow

Introducing me to you

I am human

An autobiography

Blackbirds and magpies

My truth in any moment is always mine

Villanelle – I will not sing

How far you have come

On becoming a woman (having been one all my life)

Faith, and John Davidson, for Anthony Ross, OP

Lasciate ogni speranza voi che entrate

Wheesht

You stayed with me

In my time: a squib

About Lesley Storm, by herself

Acknowledgements

Copyright

i

[of course, I'm alone]

Late at night, so late

and alone,

[of course, I'm alone]

with my own thoughts.

Were you aware that

your gentle rebuke

cut through my flesh,

tearing sinew, exposing bone?

My love of solitude, my

uncompromising self-reliance…

… yes, I confess it

… my fears …

are barriers against intimacy.

How well you know me!

And writing and listening, and sleeping alone

I'm happy enough on my own,

I don't need you, my love,

I don't need anyone.

I'm happy enough on my own.

I sleep alone,

in my narrow bed,

pushed into the corner of my room,

I sleep alone.

I take my coffee black, with sugar,

and solitude;

I like it strong,

I like it best when I'm alone.

I read on my own,

and write alone; I share what I write,

if I can, I share what I write with you,

with anyone.

I'd much rather eat on my own, eat

and return to reading,

and writing

and listening, and sleeping alone.

I admit it: I am weak

weaker for being alone.

I would stand up with you;

stand up and be with you, loved one.

I'm alone most of the week,

home is the shell and the cell I share

with my past and my future;

we never speak.

Rapture, contingent on consent

Nothing has changed ― nothing ―

soon enough fireworks

will tear the