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Spin Cycle

September 4, 2024September 4, 2024humanist55

Separate whites from coloureds
wisdom has it
but my clothes are so old
there’s no possibility of
dye displacement
I am a keeper
I have T-shirts
forty years old
faded a little
but not turned pink
I use conventional wisdom
when washing something new…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, whimsygizmo in Quadrille invites us to write a Quadrille – a poem in exactly 44 words – a regular feature at the pub and although we may use “spin” in any sense of the word, I immediately thought of a recent poem I wrote on the subject of washing clothes. The last stanza was 46 words long and might have made a standalone poem with just a two-word edit but I decided to practise the art of distillation and go for editing the whole poem down to 44 words to see if it caught the gist of it. I include the original below so you may be the judge of whether it works or is an edit too far…

Colourfast?

Always separate whites from coloureds
in your weekly wash
conventional wisdom has it
as passed down from
mothers to daughters
and even to sons
given the reluctant recognition
there will be a lacuna
between a mother’s ministrations
and another’s

But my clothes
are for the most part
so old and washed
so many times
there’s no possibility
of errant dye displacement
polluting one colour with another
so I sort according
to type – trousers and pants
socks and shirts
one wash destined for
the drying rack
one on coat hangers
hung up to dry

I am a keeper you see
I have T-shirts and
hand me downs
from my late father which I calculate
must be forty years
since newly purchased
on a trip to Australia
did my mother hope
to see some resurrection
in my wearing them?

Those T-shirts have
I grant you
faded a little
the fabric at least
if not the poster extolling Australia
or the intricate dots
of aboriginal art
but they haven’t turned pink
in some laundry accident
I do, after all
use conventional wisdom
when washing something new…

Alone Is the Star I Follow

August 30, 2024August 30, 2024humanist55

“alone is the star I follow. In love & in solitude”
– from February & my love is in another state – by José Olivarez

to live with the one you love
Is to immerse one’s self
in the illusion of not being alone

but alone we truly are
Coming into, leaving &
passing through the life of this world

so when illness, short of death
physical or mental, intrudes
we are shocked by our solitude

reminded we are alone even
in the presence of the other
and all the constructed togetherness

house, history and family
are all props in the play
& all of us but strolling players

not to disrespect the construct
which is our way of fighting entropy
creating meaning amongst disorder

we weave our fabric and let our flags
flutter in the winds of vicissitude
for friends and family to rally round

but in. the end, we are all
fallen soldiers in a battle
that nobody can win

Take the timely reminders
of essential solitude
to wrap your flag more tightly

around you & your loves
and Reaffirm the meanings
you choose to fight for…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Punam – paeansunplugged in OpenLinkNight offers us the chance to post a poem of our choice. This is one from my writing group after discussing and writing in the shadow of “February & my love is in another state” – by José Olivarez

Stormy Weather

August 27, 2024August 27, 2024humanist55

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

”From “Ozymandias” – Percy Bysshe Shelley

Like the banks
we deemed ourselves
too big to fail
but when the rains came
mudslides and hurricanes
and all of them stronger
and more frequently
we discovered then
there was no-one
to bail us out…

Our leaders
many of them
thought that wealth
concentrated upwards
would rain gently
down upon the
huddled masses
or at least as far as
the middle classes
but the one percent
were so elevated
they couldn’t see
our plight
so far below

They thought
complexities of
climate change
too gnarly to
change course
and set their sights on
settling another planet
spaffing their pointless
bucks to fire off rockets
some of which
increased their wealth
seeding satellites
in an unholy net
across the heavens
to offer others
the dream of making it
to the top
or charged other
aspirants to admire
the blighted but
still beautiful Earth
from brief
sub-orbital sojourns

Will their legacy be
any more than Ozymandias
half buried in a desert
of their own making?

And what of us
the little people
are we to throw up
our hands in helplessness
and blame it on
those above us
for failing to
curb or even
feeding our appetites
for cars, fresh fruit
flown out of season
and batteries for our
mobiles – phones and cars

We may not leave
individual
broken statues
as our testaments
yet we are not islands
but part of the main…

Tonight, I am guest editing the prompt at dVerse Poets Pub for the Tueday Poetics spot. I have suggested an activist poem on any subject that gets your goat and as an optional challenge, poets can choose to begin with a Glose or quote, from another poem as I have done here…

Shelved

August 23, 2024August 23, 2024humanist55

I sit beside
a bookcase
laden with my life

The Charm of Birds
is the only gift from
my grandfather

I early read my
father’s G.B.S. complete
plays and prefaces

The camel teapot
contains half
my sister’s ashes

The group of geese is
my memento mori
to my mother

Books of hobbies
work and music
fill my shelves and brain…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, merrildsmith in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft challenges us to write to the Triversen form.

*Three-line stanzas (Tercets). Each tercet is a sentence.
The tercets are grammatical, and they are broken by breaths,
the accents and rhythms of normal speech—two to four beats per line.
*Unrhymed
The ideal length is 18 lines or 6 stanzas, but even Williams did not always follow that rule.
Ideally, each line is two to four beats, or stressed syllable (not total syllables). Williams disliked iambic pentameter, but others have written Triversen poems with more beats.
Here are some additional points that are often mentioned.
*Alliteration—it contributes to the stress syllables
*Imagist

As Ain commented on my last poem, I seem to be going through a phase of poetry memoir…

A Lifetime Love

August 21, 2024August 22, 2024humanist55

My father loved to cook a little but
gender roles made him the breadwinner
and not the bread baker.
My mother was a pre-feminist gal
refusing to teach her son to cook
unlike his sisters with someday
husbands and families to feed
I watched secretly –
absorbed the gist anyway.

On going to university
and facing the inevitability
of student self-sufficiency
they gave me a carbon steel Sabatier
a knife that sharpens beautifully
but must be cleaned immediately
else it soon goes rusty
I have worn it down every day of fifty-one years
– two food businesses and cooking daily
– now so thin it pares perfectly.

They also gave two books of recipes
The Paupers Cookbook and Catherine Whitehorn’s
classic Cooking in a Bedsit
sectioned One Ring, Two Rings and slimly
a Cooker for the very lucky…
I read and dutifully cooked a few
but though a lifelong love was born
yet who with a world of food to explore
would base their style on paucity

I added a book on Chinese cookery
whole, diced, steamed and stir fried
bought a wok and never looked back
spiced it up with the Penguin Indian cookery
And last but by no means least
found Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David

Seduced by the sensual celebratory
rather than precisely noted quantities
Elizabeth David liberated me
as well as, I later learned
the married man she ran off with
travelling Europe and living on a boat
My mother would not have approved

To these three parents chosen
Chinese, Indian and Mediterranean
I must mention the American professor
of studies West African
she taught my roomie and I
Palaver Sauce and Jollof Rice
suffered our inept experiments with nicety
so when I moved near Brixton Market
I fell into a world of ingredients
from bitter, Cypriot, taste-acquired
lemon and coriander brined olives.
to stinky, dried, West African fish in baskets
– I never came up for air

My culinary philosophy –
read recipes with a pinch of salt
absorb, ferment, reuse, infuse
resist encouragement to cull your larder
treat every meal as an adventure
feed strangers, friends and family
and you will never lose.

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, sanaarizvi in Poetics invites us to explore the senses in Food Poetry.
I should add, to contextualise the above poem, that my Mother’s maiden name was Cook and my partner’s Mother’s maiden name was Larder – go figure…

Famous or Infamous…

August 16, 2024August 16, 2024humanist55

It’s a thin line between famous and infamous
yet curiously they mean
much the same thing.

I was famous firstly to my parents
with no effort on my part.

My first sister, Carol, was infamous
for having sat on my rubber ball
and refusing to give it back
duly recorded on a coloured slide by my father
and ritually recalled at family slideshows.

My second sister, Helen, was famous at birth
the birthing bed attended by a whole team
of Canadian doctors, midwives and nurses
there to witness the miracle of home birth
– did they ever know her name?

Was our generation less famous
for want of social media
did Myspace, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter
produce more fame or infamy?
Never has human conflict been fought
by the many, on so many platforms
to achieve legacy for a few…

If we “Like” someone famous
is it a projection, saying more about us
than it does about the famous?

My claim to fame – to walk into a concert
with Vera Lynn on my arm,
embarrassingly dressed as a beefeater –
– someone thought that a good idea at the time

I came near to the famous
helping to prepare the first concert of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”
– rumour had it a band member’s wife
was wearing a diamond necklace with T-shirt and jeans
but I wasn’t that near…

My mural of WB Yeats on a shop in Sligo
was famous – more than I
but it helped me find work
until a new shop owner painted over it –
fame rescinded

I would rather be famous to a select few
than infamous – which is famous in a bad way,
to a whole load of people

If you are famous to other people
for say -keeping to a strict routine
on your morning perambulations
but you are unaware of the fame
– does it still count?

Florence Nightingale is, to this day
famously, the Victorian founder
of nursing as we know it
but nobody who knew her
just as a person
is now left alive
– is history fame?

Fame cannot last past memories or histories
and infamy, though more garish,
is no more permanent…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, lillian is hosting, OpenLinkNight where you may post a poem of your choice. This now was the product of my writing group in the shadow of the poem “Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye…

Breaking News and Hearts…

August 14, 2024August 14, 2024humanist55

Breaking news and hearts…
he’d waited all his life to see the Northern Lights
and when they finally shimmered – he slept through it

Breaking news and hearts…
he was her Pole Star
and without him she lost all direction

Breaking news and hearts…
the last Polar bear had
no Arctic ice to hunt upon

Breaking news and hearts…
she broke the mirror her grandmother
smuggled beyond the reach of the Holocaust

Breaking news and hearts…
the baby drove the boy away
and not surely into her arms

Breaking news and hearts…
a premmie did not heroically make it
as the movies teach us to expect

Breaking news and hearts…
the dead in Gaza top forty thousand
and Zion still hasn’t had its pound of flesh

Breaking news and hearts…
another little babe is born
somewhere under the stars…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Uncategorized invites us to write Zeugmatically. The word zeugma is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses”.

Moss

August 13, 2024August 13, 2024humanist55

My mind is pot-bound, it’s soil once fertile, exhausted and moss-covered, but in my heyday, I was sought out by women who wanted a sharp wit as well as a handsome body beside them in bed – though I say it myself.
A photographer, I charted my voyages of love, capturing moments from first landfall through exploration and charting to the encirclement of each new island, and then shallowly, I moved on, recording last looks of disappointment.
Island-hopping became a habit, the search for a permanent home for the heart ever elusive till looks went and reputation warded off new discoveries.
I maundered into old age holed up in a rural backwater, photographing literal landscapes instead of those glorious, metaphorical islands of love. My days are nearly done and I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there and the moss…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, kim881 in Prosery challenges us to write a story with a beginning, middle and end in exactly 144 words using two lines from the Leonard Cohen poem Take This Waltz “And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook, – with the photographs there and the moss.”

Lost in Action

August 9, 2024August 9, 2024humanist55

My heart wanted what
it wanted despite
you’re seeming to leave
and be lost to me
but you were still there
and now, don’t you see
I too have remained-
– all fidelity.

Those first months did
my life course change.
in ways I’d not believe
– your true self amid
so many revealed
and when others hid
that loving from me
your truth I’d still see…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to write an Octameter for August and Sara Teasdale – it being the 8th month and the birthday of Sara Teasdale (8/8/1884). “Teasdale’s work has been characterized by its simplicity and clarity, her use of classical forms, and her passionate and romantic subject matter.” [https://poets.org/poet/sara-teasdale] and as Laura points out “Love, life, beauty and death are the hallmarks of much of Teasdale’s poetry which is unsurprising given that she lived through wartime as a young woman. Even so she avoids the maudlin in an upbeat way…”
This poem is a homage to Sara Teasdale.

Dreamlands

August 7, 2024August 7, 2024humanist55

I used to spend my dreams
     the ones you wake remembering
being pursued relentlessly
by an unknown enemy
like Buchan’s hero in The 39 Steps
and in The Hero’s Journey
just when you think you’re in the clear
     the antagonist is once more there

More often, recently
I find myself lost
     in a big city I should know
flavour of London perhaps
but away from shiny landmarks
yet central – not suburbs
busily, chaotically urban
I search for the familiar
     always nearing – never succeeding

Occasionally, I am rehashing
past jobs – of which I’ve had many
seeking an elusive
key to success
and waking then, I feel
dreams might indeed
be the arena in which
our unconscious attempts
to sort the business of the day

Rarely, too, I find myself
in a dwelling I used nearly to know
the character of rooms
I used to share with friends
and yet they’re not quite right
     somehow…
a building sprawling
through the dream without end
and I wake with only the feeling of
a place once known…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Grace in Poetics, invites us to write about Dreams…

How would you know…

Author: humanist55