Nicola Nuttall-Wood originally hails from Lancashire and has spent the last 25 years living and working in Cornwall. She is a third sector governance, strategy, partnership and impact specialist, and runs her own cultural consultancy Tempus Fugit.
As the Director of the Charles Causley Trust, Nicola has developed a strong connection with Causley’s life, poetry and surroundings – which have directly influenced her writing. Her poetry and life writing explores themes of family, lived experience, deep time, and their intersectionality with the natural world.
You
I see You –
in the space
between land and sea
I hear You –
as green, grey tides
race on and in
I smell You –
where wave carved sand
lies close
I taste You –
by the shingle shore
dancing with orange weed
I feel You –
against cornflake covered rocks
littered with mussels
I wait and watch –
before scaling
the slate-faced cliff
I walk on –
in fragile fragments
to a far-off place
I am blown –
where dismantled dreams and pulverised plans
go to die
I turn away –
with salty tears
warm on cold cheeks
I am here –
with nothing but salted air and
screeching sea birds for company
All I knew –
lies in a damp, dead place
heavy in my soul
6th March
On the 6th of March
I pause again –
and think of You
of all that was
and should have been
your tiny hands
and breathless lips
shattering grief
and broken dreams
fractured lives
and self-harm
I changed forever,
when You went
my horizon shifted –
my world stopped.
all hope of You gone.
On the 6th of March
I pause again –
and think of You
Small
Small nervous hands
and urgent fingers
entwine,
and connect with mine
I encircle your hand
and childhood’s sticky heat
sealing,
my promise to you
Between my palm
and your small glistening fingers
loving,
the fingers I grew
Life’s Tide
I am nothing,
but a g-r-a-i-n of sand,
worn
smaller…
smaller…
smaller…
smaller…
smaller…
by the rolling f-r-i-c-t-i-o-n
of life’s tide.
In the Room
In the room –
where we argued
every day
for twenty years –
she lay
silently lifeless
all breath gone –
from her body
those bitter years
shouting ourselves hoarse –
didn’t matter
not now anyway
Somewhere
Somewhere (buried in my mitochondria)
ancestral thoughts (passed on through gene and gesture)
manifest a predetermined life
A complex backdrop (of theatrical scripts)
against which, a newly auditioned cast (with recurring characteristics)
affect pace and relevance
Sounds from early life (resonating with images and smells)
feature dreams (belonging to those long gone)
contextualise the pathway
_____________________
The photograph of the magician,
my grandfather –
wand hovering over a pack of cards
The inscribed, black, leather-bound, family bible,
my great-great grandmother –
memories of long forgotten individuality
The Italian red, leather beret
my grandmother –
bought it in Rome in 1950
_____________________
Regardless of denial (I am after all pre-shaped)
the curtain lifts (my Act begins)
I take my first breath
Their monochrome lives (that stare with drilling eyes)
from my mother’s sideboard (over long years)
recognise all the befores
Digging deep (stilling my nerves)
feeling their voice (that runs through my veins)
I move on
Morwenstow
I hear c-r-a-c-k-i-n-g timbers –
on black, bestial rocks
Amidst steeled sea and cliffs,
In covert shadow,
Hidden,
I watch green, pastoral fields –
folding, rolling and dipping to the tumbling surf
Framing the sea birds
as they swoop and s-c-r-e-e-c-h low
against salty sea tides,
Washing long dead sailors –
to phosphorous
nothing.
Sitting in my driftwood hut,
Opium-fuelled
I call to the wretched souls –
and I hear their voices – h-o-l-l-e-r-i-n-g in reply,
Rag dolls, tossing – helpless in foaming cocoons,
Shattered on razored, ripping rocks –
I cry out again and again,
Against the blowing gale and greyest of summer skies
and the certainty of
death.
And when the storm is done,
I stumble down the sliding shale
to the pebbled pathway and beach below,
and there – they lie,
disfigured and broken into tiny, unrecognisable pieces,
And I h-e-a-v-e, bilious waves –
as I piece their limbs and souls back together –
wrapping them in sacking, like butcher’s best cuts of meat,
Hoisting their dismembered lives onto my
I scramble up the shale,
Catching my hand on the coconut gorse,
before crossing the greenest of fields, now
lit with flaxen sunlight,
Summer’s scent of rain catching in my chest
wiping my acidic lips, as I drop my cargo
on the granite slab in the charnel house,
Flinching as I hear –
the unmistakable groan of dead
flesh.