Slate

Over forty
million years
I have become.
Layer upon layer
laid down under
shallow seas
or risen up
firmed up
by winds
across my skin,
all the while
still mutable
reversible
soft shale.

Then you came.
A white hot
intrusion into
my plain, forcing
me in a direction
I had never been,
pressurising me to
change, harden,
never more to soften
in rain, brittle now
I cleave in a new
plane, cross my grain.
Write on me
your name.

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Ann Foweraker is currently better known as a novelist, having five contemporary and one, recently released, historical novel to her name – however the poetry writing began many years before the prose.

She has been writing and performing with the Liskeard Poets for over 30 years. In this time her work has featured in three anthologies, and she has performed at Literary festivals in various parts of Cornwall, including Fowey, Looe, Port Eliot and Launceston.

Ann is a consummate observer and interpreter of glimpsed scenarios – she also claims to have acute hearing and an acquisitive ear – which, together, provide the seeds of inspiration for work from the wider world as well as her more intimate work inspired by family and experience. She is currently working on two collections ‘Flesh of Dream and Desire’ and ‘Bones of My Motives’.

Her sixth and latest novel is Domenica.