This is the book of poetry Lucy has just completed: Take Time to Dance.

A publisher would be appreciated. Here is a poem from the collection:

Tough Love
or
The Auto-Mechanic’s Wife

He comes home late and full of sweaty oil,
a dull grey-black and slick as an eel’s coil.
There’s a collusion between him and cars:
he fights with rack and pinion his small wars,
his hands slide smoothly over hardened steel,
his ear translates each murmur, flutter, squeal,
his eyes intent to search transmission’s heart
and find the crack before it breaks apart.
Axles, like athletes’ limbs, are greased to move
as the wheel turns and twists in the gear’s groove.
These cars suck life and energy and leave
my man at fifty worn, with no reprieve.
His body’s workings need an overhaul:
time will not wait, it will not run nor stall.

Too long he’s pulled and tugged and thumped and fused
the recalcitrant bodies of abused
and much-used cars. Such pulls and tugs and thumps
have echoed in his body till it slumps.
His brain staves off a blood-clot that has burst;
so he must learn to speak and spell and, worst,
to think again, as his impatience burns.
And I, now weary, yet with heart that yearns
for no more subterfuge but for his words
however rough, will take his mouth, like birds
do, in my own, and mould his lips to move
in speech, or even make such sounds of love
as I have waited all these years to hear,
and kiss away our paralyzing fear.

This poem received a Highly Commended award
in a Petra Kenney Poetry Competition
and was published in the Artsforum
(Region of Durham).