Manx Gaelic teacher, musician and composer, Annie Kissack is the fifth Manx writer to hold the title of Manx Bard. Each month she shares one of her poems with us, and explains what led her to write it.

A few years ago the Manx Wildlife Trust held a Christmas wreath-making workshop at the top of Silverdale Glen. Being rather badly co-ordinated, I normally keep well away from anything arty- crafty but as I like real greenery in the house at Christmas, I agreed to go with some friends.

So I went and learned how to select and combine various leaves, fronds and berries and very satisfying it was too.

Time drifted by in a sort of green fog and I went home elated, having thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Furthermore, the wreath itself looked lovely.

It was bursting with colour, and graced the back room over Christmas, surviving both parties and climbing cats and lasting well into the new year.

While I was making the wreath, I felt unusually rested and happy.

I thought of my mother who had died a few years previously and how she loved the trees and plants of the glen and knew all their names.

As I worked, I felt both a powerful connection with her, and also a great peace and a sense of completion which was quite unexpected.

Then I came home and wrote a poem, while shedding a few tears and smiling to myself.

I thought twice before sharing it here but if poetry is worth writing at all, sometimes it must deal with the deep feelings we all experience.

I’m trying to vary the poems I put in the paper, so apologies for not writing anything jolly and entertaining this time (or spooky and weird or particularly Manx), but I hope this poem might be appropriate in its own way.

Encircled

Although my hand is small

My fingers do not fit your ring.

You talked of these things these last years,

And I looked awkwardly away, Not knowing what to say.

Today I have made a Christmas wreath

And it is a lovely thing

All green and golden leaf

nd flash of bright berry;

There was joy in the making of it

In the sifting of the colours, As they moved from tree-light to trestle table.

There was a quiet intensity

In the bending and trimming,

In the twining of feathery fronds And their tight binding to a mossy circlet.

For Christmas, this wreath, for Advent.

It is early December, damp, but not yet cold.

Wreath and grief.

Connected, but also not so, as we now...

It has been two years.

Yet you did wreathe and wrap me tight in our time.

You bound me in a circle,

Clad in the colours of the glen.

Yellow sings always for me,

No pattern, no clear melody,

A song only in the joy of it.

Unwitting, I lay it on the deep green of your memory.

Splashes of red too and the twisting of the creamy-laced ivy. In flower now in the dead season.

Sweet singing, such sweet singing.

This is a life then;

All that is laid upon it,

Fronded, soft, brittle, sharp-edged,

Comes from the forest.

And here, the leaves of life are gathered,

Here they are laid

in the hopeful colours of renewal, In the encircling of the year.

by Annie Kissack

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