Charlie Sanderson A Lone Derbyshire Lass on Stroud Market Day Christmas 2025

I

Ordinarily extraordinary plastic peopled chairs 

Hessian floors, open doors, fish sellers 

Tattoo on her neck health teller

Ginger, turmeric, munch the yogurt weavers

It’ll make believers from the dead

The organic squash like a cock

Exploding from a basket in front of the church

What act of God grew that

As coppers skive behind the shambles

In their walkie talkie hard hats

And the woollen choir is singing

Sitting to silence the bell ringing

Holding in memorial the moment just gone

To soak up the bitter taste 

Of coffee, berry punnet and dates  

Overlords Jesus on his wooden cross

We are kissing my mammy trusted textiles 

In Five Valleys the mild participation

Of the Virgin and Child beached whales

Floating up the River Severn

The market bides rodent like mushroom

moss on fairy toes, high hat gnomes 

and grows mistletoe on her stall

The wanting of wanting it all

The artist who compares notes 

With the tourist on children

Creating and mistaking logic

for madness

And the grey jowl choir sings on seated. 

Quietly uncompleted song, bottoms up, bottoms on. 

We stand when we sing up North

It’s because we are farmers here

Mrs Won tells me on her stall 

Made up of all the smells of all my past lovers all

I buy one in the smallest bottle to remember the tallest one by

like I am Alice, as a grown Mary Poppins passes, my, she’s

old now with a whippet mongrel cross

in a dog jacket made from her carpet bag

You lot are miners, digging through rock rows pick axes

And the farmers wait for the circle of the year under 

the axis of moon sun rain come shine

To come, to go, to live, to die, to grow

To know that it is circle to know that it is a circle to know that it is a circle

A bubble. 

I drive through a marshmallow storm. 

To press the membrane 

To get to all this drizzled rain

too tired to wake within a frame of sensibility

And the unassuming choir sing on

My Dad died this summer, are their parents dead yet?

A well of salt swells behind my throat pitted in my neck

Spitting date seeds in a paper bag, the church 

at the backside of my eyes

No one asks me what I write

A woman in almost tears over

A punnet of raspberries 

Don’t get too near 

No one wants to catch me

(Not even me).

II

All these years

And the green parties tree

Is an olive branch

And the melodies swell

Like the cool Mums pregnant skin taught tight belly

Shelley put that down! 

Baby cries cut the absent shape of my son here. 

When will I die Mummy? 

When will the babies come?

I don’t want to die Mummy

And the choir sings on 

and the choir sings on 

and the choir sings on

Lions mane mushroom citizens 

Of the Five Valleys of alleys bereft by noon of fresh baked bread

Of graft walls of not so tall men here

Voices in mustard jumper blue Bobble hat 

That one that will only smile at her husband

Paper thin skin old man jowl. 

Makes me think

Under the sky of muzzle

Under the wooden carved toes of the Lord

Under the coffee American tobacco

Under the distant field

Under the artisan gentleman tweed

Under the pinched skin reed woven blankets

Under the one roof, one town, one market day

The glues of difference 

Of every single type of Christmas tree

I like it prickly

I like it prickly

All these societies

They can tell by your teeth what river you drank from. 

Be it the Nile, be it the Severn, be it the Derwent. 

And we watched the flood come

Carry all our cars away

Up in the tops of the farmer miner factory

The softness of these dribbled stories

And the choir sing on And the choir sing on And the choir sing on 

And I want to add one high note to your story

To their story

To this story I want to add one high note

Make it more make it far ray me 

To ring the bell of memory

To float on membranes river 

like the teeth of

The virgin 

The baby 

On the stake 

But my throat is swollen 

Where the salt meets the fresh water

Where I would sing but oughta be quieter

She went into the river 

and made her spirit heard.

III

We are all just normal people

Extraordinarily full of quiet song

Afloat upon jewelled loss lit up dew 

Across electric trees 

walked beneath every type of sun

All these different intestines

Under the roof of the mouths of

thirteen ancient tongues

along the jity ginnel alleyway

Of where we all come from 

Of where we all come from 

Of where we all come from  

And the choir sings on

And the choir sings on

And the choir sings on 

IV

We went into the river

To make our spirit word.