Second-hand is restyled pre-loved Second-hand gives way to Charity Shops Pre-loved is the new height of fashion Pre-loved is pre-valued…
To the ardent de-clutterer The professional house-clearer Disposer of parents’ schmutter Second-hand is reborn pre-loved
Where once such clearance Activities gleaned a pittance High Street donation is now the way Second-hand gives way to Charity Shops
But for those prepared to make the effort The internet offers a third commercial vision And Charity Shops are mined for Vintage Pre-loved is the new height of fashion
Is a lover to be devalued Because they have been In previous relationships? Pre-loved is pre-valued…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, merrildsmith in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to write a Cascade poem – You will use each line from your first stanza in subsequent stanzas. For example, if your first stanza is three lines, your will have four stanzas. The first line of your first stanza becomes the last line of the second stanza. The second line of the first stanza becomes the last line of your second stanza, and so on.
This poem is also written for the Keighley Library [IRL] Group whose prompt for this month is Pre-loved…
2 – My daughter, Beverley, is coming round later to do some housework. I say my daughter, but step-daughter, strictly speaking, but after being in her life for 43 years out of 56, I go with daughter. She comes round every Tuesday to spend time with her mother but has gone by the time I get back from work, so I regard this as my time with her and we will sit down to tea and a chat as well as the cleaning…
3 – I can confirm that signs of Spring abound…
These bulbs have been planted for a few years…/
Whereas these ones, and the ones below, were newly planted last Autumn…
And these straggly strugglers, must have self-seeded in a pot of mighty Stargazer Lillies that just get bigger every year…
Shrubs too are preparing their blossom…
And as testament to how little frost we have had (so far – fingers crossed), the Nemetia has survived the Winter outside – which is as well since we have nowhere indoors for them…
4 – I still have a job! Work is calming down – a bit – as I wrestle the details of labelling product under control…
5 – I have stopped beating myself up for not progressing the novel and have decided to stimulate my writing by undertaking the 12 Short Stories in 12 Months challenge. The January prompt was Glow and I uploaded on the prescribed day and have received one positive comment so far. You have to comment on at least 4 stories… My Writing Critique Partner, Nik, in troubled Minnesota (troubled by Trump and not the alleged crime wave) but I haven’t been able to find his story yet amongst the 510 other stories…
6 – This group of supportive people
7 – I have managed to spend some time writing for my April A to Z – I am midway through “C” – who knew there were so many fabrics beginning with “C”…
8 I have been trying out a Continuous Blood Sugar Monitor – a free sample from a company who hope to get me hooked on their product, and indeed, I have ordered a month’s supply to follow on, but at £30/10 days usage, it is too expensive to carry on permanently, and my doctor’s practice refuse to fund it instead of the finger-pricking tests that risk neuropathy of the finger tips at £30/month. So I am trying to learn what I can in a month + and may or may not carry on after that. Here’s what I have learned so far – its very convenient to beable to check my blood sugar, 5 minute by 5 minute, on my phone, if slightly addictive. The experiment has incentivised me to make a spreadsheet of all the carbs I eat and between the monitor and my monitor, I have been able to see what effect carbs have on my body. So not only have I reduced my daily intake to 168 grams per day, but I have been able to hone my meals to slower acting carbs thus avoiding big spikes. I advise anyone who is type 2 Diabetic, to give these sensors a go, even if, like me, it is only for a month – to gain insight…
9 – Weekly washing done and in the dryer or hanging up to dry…
You write a novel lickety-split the words pour out upon the page the word count rising like a fountain scenes fill chapters – chapters parts That’s when the fun starts
What you have is just a first draft send it to an agent, they would just laugh assuming you even made it off the slush pile rejection letters bring you down for a while but you must pick yourself up dust off your writing tool of choice and launch your second, third and even fourth draft polishing your bon mots, refine your voice, flesh out your characters, channel your craft That’s when the fun starts
Recruit a critique buddy bully your friends and family into reading confess to your partner you fear it needs a professional count your pennies into tottering piles it’s unlikely they will reach an editor ceiling What the Dickens! Release your Kraken in blog-size bites fret not at savage comments don’t get into fights enough opinions to make your head spin That’s when the fun begins
At last your manuscript is done but you must face one last and monumental question to publish yourself or on great houses wait or look for small and independent publishers but are you sufficiently niche, do you fit a genre and if you forge heroically through this labyrinth That’s where the fun starts
Editors and graphic artists are but a few wait till the sensitivity readers get their hooks in you blurbs written by the great and good all these hurdles you should reckon to jump and clear if write you would and getting published… That’s when the fun starts
Interviews and promotional tours signing your book so much it bores and after many hotels bland your royalties pay for holiday sands but just as you lie back sipping a drink your editor ringtone and phone start to blink No rest for the weary – up and at ‘em dearie Success means your public seek for seconds strike while the iron is hot she reckons You face a blank screen… That’s when the fun starts
Over at dVerse Poets Pub,Grace in OpenLinkNight invtes us to submit a poem of our choice! This poem, tongue in cheek, is not from personal experience but pure wishful thinking, and were it to come true, it would be, as somebody once said “A lovely problem to have…”
Happy the man who dreams his purpose plots his course to achieve that very goal marches to the beat of his own drum and pity one forced to follow roads laid down by parents’ aspirations but I drifted into adulthood with no pressure and no direction and took many turns along the way slowly grew into the man I am Though I am old with wandering
Love life is the companion to work the superficial couplings of youth conducted with more vigour than sense reaching the sunny uplands mid-life settling into a career I thought would last a lifetime, a love to match but people carry pasts within them like hidden rocks in a calm ocean and accidents deflect one’s passage Through hollow lands and hilly lands
To know another is a life’s work the unity of coupledom is illusion, we travel parallel at best, learning the geography of roads built across bogs of trauma always ready to gently subside and mire a person in buried past and paths are hard to find in a slough of despond and she has lost her way I will find out where she has gone
Looking back at the path I followed there is more coherence than I thought skills grown and transferred in work and life and love too, so much surer than in youth and all the scars and breaks accreted are the medals of experience and trying not to look toward the end but focus on the roadside flowers the next generations we began And kiss her lips and take her hands…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in FormForAll, Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to writa a Glosa, a Spanish poetry form in which four lines borrowed from a poem by another – the cabreza, are expanded upon over 4 ten-line stanzas… I chose lines from WB Yeats, who I have loved since studying him at school, and whose poems still resonate with me today. In 1995, I went to live in Sligo, Ireland, where Yeats is from, and is buried beneath nearby Ben Bulben mountain. I was a signwriter and painted a sign and mural of Yeats and his work, for The Winding Stair bookshop there – you can see me working on it in this news clip…
The light filtering through the shutters picks up a little of their blue on its predawn passage into the white-walled beige, marbled floor bedroom sun rises swifter than at home not quite the tropics but tantalisingly close to Africa
The sun rises scarlet and all-consuming of the sky – silhouetting the island dark purple across the bay Red sky in the morning doesn’t translate to Crete where most days in this lockdown Winter that is not like our Winter begin with a red curtain raiser. Soon blinding light floods the sky, the Bay the mountains delicately bluing their shadows and highlighting their tops before the rising heat filters everything with glimmering heat haze.
We sit in the shade of the terrace beneath the deep green leaves of the carob tree and count the millipedes that have climbed the delicately off-white walls in the night dash, reaching for who knows what insectile heaven… A fallen comrade dark brown in desiccation is moving sideways in unlikely reanimation until we see that his body is being carried back to the nest by a tiny black ant a tenth his size we sit astounded by this feat but don’t forget to film it for posterity or a rainy day reminder when we are one day returned to England.
I walk down to town for market day mixing with brightly dressed younger women and black wrapped older ones in widows weeds with only an occasional male to keep me company. The azure sea is only feet away
The couple who live on the yacht just out in the bay are here, and we chat in the shade of a vegetable stall loaded with piles of black glossy aubergines and ripe red tomatoes next to bunches of wild greens, picked from among the hundred or so Crete proffers – if you know what you are looking for. Cyrille’s once blonde hair is salt and pepper tied back in a ponytail their clothes too, faded with exposure to sun and saltwater.
I spend some time chatting with the banana man who sells nothing else and whose English is good enough for a conversation. I am English and so not averse to discuss the weather – he talks of the recent thunderstorms whose hailstones devastated his neighbours’ crops but divinely spared his while Barbara and I had been enjoying the night of sturm und drang from the safety of our covered balcony the crackle and crash of it ricocheting and rambling around the mountains and – the ultraviolet flashes turned into dark sound.
Walking back up the long hill to the village, I pass the white and ochre, black and grey patchwork trunks of the group of gum trees foreigners too – all the way from Australia these strangers who fit in so well people believe them to be native.
Home again in the cool of the flat and after a siesta I pick a bright yellow lemon from the tree within reach of our balcony and squeeze it into dark green olive oil to dress the salad of tomatoes and cucumbers I hauled up from the market – dot it with tiny Cretan olives – mostly grown for oil and look out on the bonfires ranged around in the olive groves as farmers burn the prunings of their trees.
A poet is a person whose language Becomes a special form of Communication, a message – Directed words with meaning for Everyman in their world of “things” Flinging out new ideas for the times, Gestating a better way to grasp for Hope that births a movement from Individual to friends, to groups that Jump to join a movement with Kinetic energy that enjoins all to Love, not hate, the poet sings Metaphor, alliteration and rhythm and No style or form is unsuitable to carry Out the mission sacred, the Poet’s role from print to poetry slam Questioning, commenting, highlighting Rights denied, inequity amplified So the message – at first a pretence Trickles, seeps, runs like a stream Underground, which nobody can dam Violence cannot hold back the flow of Waves of awareness, rejection of the Xenophobic in favour of the xenogogue Young and old align in the new Zeitgeist and the poet seeks new inspiration.
Danger is not always found in dark places and on a sunny, sparkling water day I nearly lost my life sailing a dinghy a day after the storm swept the Mediterranean the only sign of its passing, the long lazy undulating swell that swished almost silently up the slipway where my friends helped me position the tiny boat with its single sail brought on a roof rack, their part played, they departed for our rendezvous down the coast
Out round the headland and turn right was my plan, it seemed feasible mast stepped and rigged, I pushed off down the concrete slipway, which, slippery with slime, shot me downwards into the clear water of the corner of the coast the cliffs stretching out to the headland on my right, and behind me to the left a rocky stretch, broken only by the slipway enclosed between concrete walls where nobody watched my sudden progress into deep water
I pushed the daggerboard down into it’s slot, tightened the sail, and gripped the tiller to set my course – a series of alternating tacks left to open sea and right, towards the cliffs, then a couple of tacks into the wind should do it I thought, then around the headland and a straight run down the coast the wind behind me and a peaceful glide to the rendezvous beach but soon I realised that every tack away from the cliffs – broadside on to the greasy swells, rolled me strongly, spilling the wind from my sail, slowing my progress and each tack into the wind, was not making the progress I hoped, and each time I found myself back at the cliff, faster than seemed right, and then I saw the cave beneath the headland a lazy wave suddenly smashing tons of water into its maw and I realised my efforts were only bringing me closer to being sucked into that awful mouth and crunched and nobody would ever know what became of me and so discretion, the better part of valour I turned around and with the wind behind me, I headed back to the slipway
But danger was not yet passed as I remembered the slippery slope I would have to negotiate, and speed seemed the only way to reach the top and with no regard to the bottom of the boat, I urged it on pulling up the dagger board at the last minute and trusting my aim I shot up the slime, sail still straining and tumbled out near enough to the safe ground to make it up with just one slip and pulled the dinghy after me before a following swell should pluck it back…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Dora in Poetics, invites us to write in the manner of Elizabeth Bishop, paying particular attention to consciously incorporating accuracy (detail), spontaneity (immediacy), and mystery (revelation) in writing the poem.
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to paint a poetic tableau using a fixed poetry style entitled The Tableau – created by Emily Romano in October of 2008
Two crowds of demonstrators facing off across double lines of harassed, interfacing riot police each crowd spouting the bias of whichever media feed dogs have been pushing their buttons there is much darning (and worse) as the police struggle to keep them hemmed in whilst a journo darts in and tries to buttonhole some talking heads for the news needles his victims to say something outrageous but the crowd gathers round and rips into the man with the microphone, who wishes he was home this Saturday afternoon taking a nap instead of mining this admittedly rich seam of newsworthy division – newsworthy though hardly novel – politicians of both sides have been dog-whistling immigration to whip up votes for decades – a pattern that no amount of careful work with a seam picker – will undo and ease the tensions…
The granites and schists of my dark and stubborn country form the bedrock of woe that has lasted a lifetime, just waiting to poke through the drift that was built up in more active days. The strata built of depositing a family, laying down a career, the metamorphosis from one relationship to another and the occasional intrusion or outflow of molten anger or passion, built a land that seemed impregnable. But tears are relentless and oceans rise and fall, cutting into the margins and then came the ice age of retirement, the weight of ice depressing the whole and stripping all away except that bedrock and leaving even that, scarred and scratched, rounded into the low hills of the bed where I lay and even the black dog has no energy to venture out on the soggy moors that cover the degraded granite hills.
“The granites and schists Of my dark and stubborn country.”
–Nan Shepherd, “The Hill Burns” from In the Cairngorms (Edinburgh: The Moray Press, 1934)
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, merrildsmith in Prosery, invites us to write a piece of prose poetry in no more than 144 words and using the given quote above. I should say that the subject of this piece is not my experience but that of someone close to me. As a student of Geology (and Geography) I am aware that Scotland, which is where you find the Cairngorms, has had a remarkable persistence through many geological ages and each age has added layers which may subsequently been removed in another geological age – I am not sure whether this does not give an ultimately optimistic view of things even if it requires a timescale in which we humans may turn out to be but a flash in the pan. Anyway, a metaphor suggested itself with this prompt… I hope it does not bring anyone down…
