The Spaniel Pup, by Gillian Fielder

China Dogs in a St Ives Window, Christopher Wood (England) 1926

​The Spaniel Pup
 
Mother’s claws are blue,
painted by an eight-year-old labourer.
 
She is still in the chair,
yellow eye fixed.
 
Her daughter is smiling.
Her son is clawing her stomach.
 
He is climbing onto her back,
slipping down onto the windowsill.
 
Scents of salt and storm and hot dough
are wafting through the open window.
 
A boat is sailing between the boulder and the island.
Clouds are dimming the lighthouse.
 
A grey mass is bobbing in the waves --
hat or seal or drowned man?
 
A red flag
is clapping in the wind.
 
The roof of the doughnut van is dirty.
A boy is leaning against the van.
 
He is biting a doughnut.
His chin is stubbled with warm sugar.
 
The pup leans too far
 
falls
 
breaks
into
four
pieces.

Gillian Fielder

Gillian Fielder is a writer based in Wallsend. She has recently graduated from Newcastle University with a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. She writes poems in response to a variety of existing materials —paintings, archaeological artefacts, medieval manuscripts. Her ekphrastic poem "Bird Song," after Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s painting of the same name, appears in the pamphlet Beyond Abstraction, 2023, published by Newcastle University in collaboration with the Hatton Gallery. She lives with her husband and three school-age children.