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8th December, 2023

Friday Poem – ‘The Larder’ by Judy Brown

Wheels of cheese sitting on a larder shelf.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Larder’ by Judy Brown from her collection Lairs. You can listen to her talking in depth about the collection on Series 2 of The Seren Poetry Podcast. Listen and subscribe on your favourite podcast app to listen to the series so far.

The Larder In the shop’s moist basement the red wines lay prone in their cool dormitory. Beyond the jars of lobster bisque and canned truffle sauce, both Lancashires sat squat on their wood: Tasty and Mild like a pair of underground kings. No satisfaction in breaching the waxed cloth, breaking the stiff robes they were buried in. Only the owner had the right to draw the cutting wire twice through the horizontal before quartering. It was ritual, to bear each portion upstairs to the shop. Later we’d peel the cloth off the soft edge and unpuzzle the grain of the clotted blank face. Down there, too, was where they kept the unripe moons which were soft as what’s inside a baby’s unfused skull. In the dark they would salt to rock and start to spin. When at last the old satellite has worn to a nub, an uncut cheese will rise, white and purposeful with the sun’s reflected buttermilk light, to do its work. Think of the store of teeth a shark is born with; which, one by one, drift to the front of the mouth to take their turn to be the ones to shine, to bite.

Judy also appeared on the Mouthful of Air podcast to talk specifically about ‘The Larder’ with Mark McGuinness.

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Related Books

This cover shows a 1950s style collage of a woman sitting in a field looking at a mysterious black orb. Red mountains stretch into the distance behind it. The text reads: Lairs. Judy Brown.

Lairs

Judy Brown

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