Figs by Mary V. Williams

MARY V. WILLIAMS is a novelist and poet living in Shropshire. Mary runs a writers’ group in Market Drayton where she and her husband live in a cottage with a well under the floor and a garden that keeps trying to get into the house. Her poetry has been published in: Flarestack, Lexicon, Acumen, Decanto, Salopeot, Dogma, Masque, The People’s Poetry, Ink, Sweat and Tears, AAS Anthology, and she was the winner of the Hippocrates and Ware poetry prizes. Her fiction is published under her writing name Valentine Williams. Her latest book is a volume of short stories ‘A FAR CRY’ published this year by Mantle Lane Press. Always a writer, she trained as an English teacher in London, where she met her husband, and they relocated to Lancashire. She trained in psychotherapy, working in Mental Health and allied fields most of her life. After completing her writing MA she was commissioned to write two self-help books for Sheldon (SPCK), and has since published five fiction novels, short stories and poetry. Website: http://www.valentinewilliams.co.uk Email: valentinewilliams4@gmail.co

FIGS

I live next door to a funeral parlour. They don’t make much noise, the dead, though they take up a whole building.

Across the way, a fig tree’s bursting with un-ripened fruit.

Today the hearse is being polished, splayed like a cracked black beetle on the forecourt. The coffin is already loaded. It’s not a hump-and-dump. There are flowers and messages. The company prides itself on dignity. This is their undertaking.

They wear respectful working suits with matching faces and wait to greet the mourners in their sober clothes, who follow on,

passing the fig tree, gloriously alive, thrusting its bunched-up figgy fists across the pavement, a black power salute,

reminding us of all we leave behind.