Buy a proper bread roll and it will have flat, crustless sides where it swelled during baking touched and melded with its neighbour though not so hard that it could not be separated – bakers call this the “Kiss Point”
Do partners’ bums whose owners both turned their backs to sleep from argument or mild estrangement – softly reach out to gently flatten and warmly kiss their loves behind baking a fresh start into each beautiful new morning…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Grace in Poetics invites us to post a poem of our choice. As a salve to all the bad news and hatred in the world at present, which even we poets must do our bit to suppress, I offer you this gentle poem of coming togetherness…
1 – Glad we found the perfect spot for these carved Elephants in a corner of our winding stair – we bought it last year in the market in Dieppe whislt on holiday…
2 – This week’s harvest/scrumped apples and plums plus Blackberry and Apple jam and Apple sauce. – I say scrumped but the apples and plums were eithe wild or hanging over a wall into the public domain…
3 – Grateful that the fern I placed in this lovely Macramé plant holder, is finding sufficient light to thrive. The Macramé was a gift from our son’s crafty girlfriend – Yayyy the 70’s…
4 – Grateful for the cards I have received through the Postcard Poetry Festival – the ones on the left are from my list – List 4 and on the right are the bonus cards from the International list. Everyone wants to send to a person outside the USA so they publish an International List – there is no obligation on recipients to respond to these but most include their address so I gues they are hopeful of a return card and I will not disappoint…
5 – Glad that I finished and sent the last of my official PoPoFest cards – this one to a lady in Dublin, so I decided to paint Ben Bulben in Sligo where we lived for 10 years for which I am also grateful…
6 – After a week without rain and with watering by hand at 100litres a pop, I was glad to see a little drizzle today (manifested on my windscreen) – enough to moisten the leave though I had to do a proper watering testerday…
7 – Can you guess the texture I spotted this week (useful for backgrounds in graphic work)? It’s a towel drying on the washing line…
8 – Glad that my partner has managed to get up and see her best friend locally, followed by a haircut in advance of our holoday njext month
9 – Glad that my working week is over but grateful to still have a job 2.5 days a week…
10 – Glad to have found this list to do each week…
I am new to this – my second week but in these difficult times it seems an excellent thing to have to focus on Ten Things of Thankful each week…
Speaking truth to power can be frightening that’s the whole idea of all those big men in black uniforms all leather and shoulder pads masks and dark glasses and of course scary looking guns… (Where do they find such types you wonder ready to do the dirty work) Imagine if you dare this sorry lot in the changing room at the end of their shift – they will certainly look a lot smaller out of uniform and you will then recognise the usual suspects of High School bullies
And you may feel yourself to be too small a number knowing as you do that the one in power pays no heed to Polls and if he chanced to think of you at all he would imagine a very small number “So very, very small!” But numbers add up and if you can share the secret password – K1ndness# to find like-minded souls with whom you can conjugate – like times tables and become the very thing that fascists fear “We the People!”
Hani Mahmoud is starving his face has presented the afflictions of Gaza on Al Jazeera throughout the conflict but now, shrinking like a prune his face tells its own story
Today he covers the shortage of blood blood is life and however much iron Gazans fortified their souls with there is not enough iron in their blood for it to be usable and besides they are too weak to be able to give blood without fainting
Israel calls a special meeting of the UN Security Council to complain about the starvation – the starvation of hostages and calls it an act of propaganda! No doubt there was a time when hostages were looked after as the bargaining chips they are but now there is not enough food even for the captors whatever sympathy he may feel for the family member who voices the complaint and pleads for the return of his relative, the Palestinian Ambassador ripostes that Israel is starving a whole people
In other news today it is eighty years since the destruction of Hiroshima by a bomb so small that some today dare to classify it as merely tactical and threaten to use such on their enemies
So much for the “War to end all wars” and we are come to live in the moral wasteland…
Hani Mahmoud screenshot from a broadcast of Al Jazeera
I had not watched Al Jazeera news for a month or so, partly because the news about Gaza was moving more into the area of political and world people’s awareness and response, but also I confess to emotional overload. Yesterday, also the anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, I watched Newshour on the station and was shocked and upset to the point of tears, to see how Hani Mahmood’s face reflects his own malnutrition as well as the ongoing stress of reporting from Gaza for Al Jazeera. The screenshot above is from a while back, but I urge you to view Al Jazeerah news, not only for its coverage of the genocide in Gaza, but for a different perspective (non-American/Eurocentric) – even their weather forecasts cover all areas of the world…
would you like to play with me says one grubby clothed sticky fingered toddler to another – no question of race or status entertained a playmate is a playmate to be shunned only if they won’t share and play fair
playmates with fluffy tails stride statuesquely on stilettos around the Playboy Mansion of one who either likes to play the field or has commitment issues or perhaps just has a thing for bunnies
my mother gave us no pets to play with – carriers of disease she reckoned – except once she did allow a tortoise but you can’t play fetch with a tortoise nor even give them a squeeze
I ache in the places that I used to play sang Leonard Cohen – he was definitely a player play us a song play with your hair wrap it round your fingers like you mean to wrap me too play with your fan and send secret signals play me like a harp with playful fingers plucking at heart strings gently please for I am still bruised from previous playtimes play all night and play all day play chess like a warrior play Monopoly to practise world domination flirt play sport play game play cos-play and don’t come home if you’ve dared to play away
life is not a rehearsal but they don’t tell toddlers that, when you grow up they’re not playing any more but try to make room for playing somehow some day just to keep you supple keep on playing…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, sanaarizvi in OpenLinkNight invites us to post a poem of our choice. This poem was written to the monthly theme of my local library group – a small group of poets almost none of whom have an online presence. Keighly Library is one of many in the UK which were funded by Andrew Carnegie the Scottish-born (in poverty) US Steel magnate from the Gilded Age, which presents me with an awkward feeling – he was typically, for the times, exploitative of his workers but then donated huge amounts of money to foster literacy in Britain – grey areas, not black and white.
Anyway, I resolved to try and write about subjects other than the current appalling state of the world and so this topic fitted right in…
Is it a crime to sup on a Sleeper Shark Genus: Somniosus microcephalus the solitary fish swimming in the dark waters beneath the Arctic ice so few and far between this shark is seldom seen but in the photographs captured the curves confirm this clearly is a shark but unlike its cousins – sleek Silvertips the Greenland Shark is no beauty it’s skin blotchy and rough…
On an exchange visit to an Icelandic ladies’ choir did I commit that crime? Our own ladies, scandalised at the first stop on our itinerary a swim in the Blue Lagoon – by naked women brazenly European walking around in the changing room were equally horrified in Reykjavik’s covered market to be offered seagull’s eggs and Rotten Shark – kæstur hákarl a national delicacy but foodie as I am I agreed to give it a go… “Best hold your nose” our host’s advice but not before I’d caught a whiff like ammonia I took a small white cube upon a toothpick and ate nose pinched it was not as bad as some wimpy celebrity chefs have claimed…
I was not told that this was Greenland Shark nor that it is now known to be the longest lived vertebrate thought perhaps to live as long as four to five hundred years one hundred and fifty before the poor creature is ready to breed imagine then it’s lonely search for a mate deep in the Arctic dark and the secret of this shark’s longevity – slow living – snail’s pace metabolism which is why, flesh full of bodily toxins the freshly caught Sleeper is poisonous but the peoples of the Arctic are not ones to waste a food opportunity and so they figured out to bury the shark for six to twelve weeks weighted to press out fluids whereby fermentation detoxifies to feed the nation it’s infamous dish at the midwinter festival þorrablót
Now that the Methuselah nature of the Greenland Shark is known it is not legal to hunt or kill this oldest of fish but fishermen’s bycatch provides sufficient specimens to feed the Icelandic appetite for Rotten Shark – so it was no crime to taste this long-lived being whatever my fellow singers said of the smell, but now that I know of what I ate, I carry the thought swimming in my imagination of this patient, slow-living denizen of the dark depths the Greenland Shark…
…turn up for the books turn the country, no – the world upside down turn the law. no,-the constitution on its head turn pawns into knights to do your bidding but turn tail and run when pictures of you and him speak truly…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, where the various customers are celebrating the 14th birthday of the pub, Lisa or Li challenges us to write a Quadrille, the pub’s own special poetry form – a poem in exactly 44 words…
Driving home along City Road an ambulance dashes by with” blues and twos” screaming its way towards the hospital – do we all wonder whether its cargo is of death or life another human being on the way out or a baby on the brink of being born? Does anybody learn indifference to this question of “for whom the bell tolls?” The blue lights illuminate the faces and bare arms of the sex workers leaning against the old warehouse building – soon to be apartments and if they were looking for their veins right now, they wouldn’t find them but that will come later… One girl lurches across the pavement as a familiar car pulls up and as she departs, another slips into pole position, eyes peeled… A few hours earlier, or come tomorrow this street junction will belong to office workers or shopgirls some in the sanctity of hair concealing hijab with no knowledge of their having traversed the red light district of another temporal place. The patient in the ambulance will hopefully be settled in a bed recovering, or perhaps a bed beside a cot with mother and baby also recovering, and adjusting to the new place, respectively. At home I make two suppers to meet our different needs – one soft and forgiving on dentures that no longer fit well and tastebuds stripped of efficacy by smoking secondly the most creative that cooking for one can get and I remember cooking for different tastes in our early reconstructed family – one diabetic, one vegetarian two for meat and two veg, and the two of us then just wanting something interesting to eat… Now only Christmas dinner brings the whole family together and still there are different varied requirements to further complicate that logistical nightmare but catering to all is the measure of care…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, lillian in Live, OpenLinkNight, invites us to post a poem of our choice and hopefully read it at the live session. This poem references a time when I lived in the centre of Bradford, and unwittingly (since I viewed it in the daytime) lived in an apartment adjacent to the heart of the red light district, also a busy route to the Bradford Royal Infirmary and rarely, I still traverse this road on my way home, to my present address…
Our first bedroom was a work of art where I bought my profession and my painting to bear like a Bower Bird building a nest to attract and cement a relationship with a mate. I always preferred to make my own Valentine cards Christmas and birthday offerings and even the gifts if possible and that room was my gift to you – on the ceiling a giant Chinese prawn painted paper parasol which I surprised you with on a date in London and as we walked, giddy along Oxford Street we gathered a crowd of people seeking shelter from the torrential rain the painted prawns in their element stopped from swimming off only by varnish.
The wall at the head of the bed swam with myriad shoals of tiny fishes gleaming like Neon Tetras where I over sprayed the stencil with spatters of silver and the other wall moved subtly from undersea azure to misty morning blue where an undergrowth of real plants pressed and stencilled emerged from the mist at the foot of the wall a perpetual daybreak to greet us each morning.
I will not say that all our intimacies took place in that love nest for in those days, any room would do for us before the clouds settled down on us dampening ardour except for brilliant sunbeams occasionally breaking through that bedroom was always but our happy place beneath the prawns amongst the fishes and flowering weeds of late summer.
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Dora in Poetics invetes us to “write a poem that conjures a view (whether from our travels or everyday life, whether from desire or experience) that is colored by the emotion of the moment“
