Place of writing: Macclesfield, Cheshire

This February, I had just returned from the area of Italy first hit by coronavirus, and having so recently stood in the squares shown shut and empty on the television made the pandemic real to me even before it reached Britain. I remember the suspense as cases mounted here, while our government seemed confident that we were too different from other counties to need to take action. The lockdown was a relief to me – but after the first month, time took on a strange dimension.

Travel is what drives my writing, and it feels strange to have reached the end of the year without having bodily been anywhere unfamiliar, even though the outside world is gradually de-familiarising around me. Lockdown gives everything the sense of a dream in which you suspect that you are dreaming … existing somewhere strange … while knowing that, in fact, your body is asleep in bed.

For me writing is always partly about going places and experiencing things I never could in the flesh, and this aspect of it has been accentuated. I need the freedom of my imagination now more than ever.

Sometimes I wonder whether a collective attempt to imagine what we have never yet experienced would help us deal with events like this on a national level.

* * *

Connection

In January I stood in a bright piazza

Where with flying of shadows and sounding of hearts

A city once gathered and throbbed

To a bell with the voice of a cow

Lowing all to the silence of knowing

Its call was their call, many in one –

Sharing one leader’s breath of hope

and the shade of one preacher’s nightmare

of a sword hung over a city.

Each citizen a mother cherishing

the tender republic

like the nape of her toddling child.

Back home the piazza flashed brief

and empty on my screen, drained of its people.

They went inside and left only campanile

and palazzo tower to speak for them

telling stories of a shut city to an empty sky.

In a shaky video they sang in Siena

into the night I half could smell,

words half-drowned by the dogs’ familiar chorus.

Viva la nostra Siena…

Singing of their small square

curved like a shell

to cup them.

I cried for Siena and for Italy and all though

everyone was saying

Italy is not Britain,

I stockpiled tears for us.

But now,

I cannot feel us,

only my family of seven

and a population of 67,834,511

all staying at home.

I listen for a bell and a chorus

and hear babble placeless echoing hollow –

the tweets

of a gaping world

lacking boundary or connection.

Who did they sing for

Siena or themselves?

Who was it I cried for,

a people

or every person?

I know only my house and a web

tangled, easily shattered

by breath.

* * *

Skyline

August, 2020

This time of the year,

I go always to some bare shore.

My heart, either clock or compass,

wants mountains to tear open winged skies,

and hungers for horizons. Every place there is

to tremble a hair’s breadth

bright between sea and sky,

now and then.

This time the trees closed over us, mimicking time

by budding and breaking into leaf,

even threatening

to turn yellow any day.

Time and the garden coiled round the house,

a sleeping snake

head and tail the same, narrowing to nothing,

black beads closed by green lids.

What has and what will

shut up together in memory

like a dark locked house.

But then I found I still had words

breaking warm from the tongue like waves

rippling wide on a shore paper white.

I saw the places

rolled into my first line like the rim of the horizon.

To write, then, of a voyage taken

not for its end or its beginning

but for the strong song of wind in rigging and

ropes uncoiling,

sails wings shaking wide as wings

and the white wake over forbidden seas.

Wooden eyes of a figurehead opening wide,

to brave the biggest blue.

* * *

2020

History seen from the distance

Is an exclamation mark.

When the sentence sped and fell over itself in panic we waited for it to

BREAK!

a wave over our heads declaring

This is History!

Foaming white with the relief

of having announced itself.

A pause before it broke I expected –

We all held our breaths and went on holding them

and found ourselves curled within a comma

I am curled in

curled in a garden,

And History

Is no more than a shade of the actors

Playing across rising shoots

And the swift dazzle

Of sunned copper beech leaves blinking to a new colour –

Wine-dark storm-tossed in a shower of light.

History the change

in a few faces well known

and a few leaves that would always have changed.

I have never before so noticed

the decadence, the slow night-sweetness

of wisteria dripping heavy heavy

from the windows

like foam.

* * *

Bacaro

When I was in Venice before lockdown, we spent lots of time during the freezing winter nights in traditional wine-bars called bacari. The name comes from the Venetian dialect expression “far bacara”, to make a noise. They are tiny, ancient (some dating from the 1300s), and really crowded, serving cheap little glasses of local wine, ‘ombre’, and snacks – ‘cichetti’ – often seafood fresh from the lagoon. The bacari have come to symbolise for me the antithesis of lockdown; but my memory of them, on the one hand investing all of missing physical social intercourse with a warm glow, has also taken on a strange edge since Venice was one of the first places in Europe I heard of the virus spreading.

***

We were drawn to the windows’ warm honey,

moths to a lantern or a night-musk flower,

but so much heavier,

tired of catching iced breath, faces aching

to be touched by the dawn of sudden heat.

Feet throbbing with plodding calle of frozen shadow

and pathless warrens of sotoporteghi threaded

only by fog to find

dead

ends

black water.

The little door clicked shut against wan mist behind,

and we drowned in the rippling warmth –

ducking low beams and laughter

copper pans blinking like bright opened eyes –

and shoulder to shoulder ordered one of everything

as the crowd

bursting from coats like opening buds

pressed loud and snug.

Morsels of fresh cod fished

from chill quicksilver tide in thin rain,

are whipped into a cream

and the squid, stewed in its own subterfuge

sails in tiny gondole of corn.

Ombre, little glasses of sparkling red,

bubbles rising as in the wave

of warmer, stranger seas,

tingling down my throat and filling inner cold

with a slow sweet rush.

Knowing little more than ‘Grazie!’, its exchange

was deeply satisfying, full

of the companionship of being out of the cold.

When we turn to go, the moment

trembles like a weighing-anchor

and the doors close like time behind us.

Doubling houses foam-frail in the fog

Canals of spilt ink open to a dream silence

louder than laughter.

Standing at this cross-roads of water

I feel the surface tension of the city of masks

mirror-image of a city

blown from sand and sea like a bubble of glass

frosted by history’s tide of plagues and fear,

But Serene still.

There seems a facelessness behind the mask,

a cruelty in such serenity.

Over the bridge there rises moon pale

a young Madonna,

sleeves falling like water at slack-tide,

pressing her child’s cheek to hers,

eyes seas wide.

*

Ide Crawford is a 2019 winner of The Young Walter Scott Prize

All writing, all images © The Imagining History Programme UK