I have just spent a week in Cyprus working in the British army schools. I did it last year and was so pleased to be asked back. As ever the schools and young people I worked with were delightful. Poetry filled my head throughout the week, the brilliant efforts of the youngsters and revisiting my poems written last year in response to being on the island for the first time.
I mentally checked them off against the real island on this second visit and was relatively happy with them, though it seems on my drive to Ay Nik primary school I had imagined a monastery on a hill, which try as I might I could not locate again from my taxi window.
Th other thing I was doing in my week was trying to locate a poem, a poem for a friend. And then on a bus-journey around Larnaca we came across Angeloktisti Church, a tenth century church hung with ikons and wonderful vaulted arches. I lit a candle there and put it with the others, realising with a shock that I had lit it for my friend and that she had gone for ever. Hence this month’s poem of the month, ‘Candle for Mags’.
