Consider this – you go to your local supermarket to buy, among other things, some orange juice. You find the right section where there are several brands to choose from, fresh in the chiller and long-life too – perhaps a hundred-litre packets all told. That’s just your local shop, imagine how many shops there are in your town or city each with a hundred litres of orange juice on sale at any particular time – and remember, this stock is turning over all the time – being bought and then replaced with stock from the store room. Multiply by the number of cities in your country and then by the number of orange juice-drinking countries in the world and you have imagined an ocean of orange juice! Where does it all come from – especially considering it takes eight oranges to make a litre of juice? Are there enough orange trees in the world to account for all this juice?
Of course, if you believe in Solipsism – then you will think that the world only exists because you imagine it into being and of course, you want to have plenty of orange juice wherever you go, so you imagine it into being present in all those thousands of shops worldwide. I am more of a realist and so I know that there must be enough orange trees to provide the juice – I just have no idea where!
Most people have no idea whereall that orange juice comes from either and what about dried mint in all those expensive little jars – you may have holidayed in some sunny spot and seen oranges growing, but when did you ever see a mint farm? These things are Commodities – Soft Commodities in fact – which means they are commodities which are grown as opposed to Hard Commodities like metals which are mined. So this year, I am going to explore the world of Commodities!
Of course, to some people, Commodities as a term, means a form of investment and apparently, if you belong to the stocks and share-owning class, you should, apparently, diversify your share portfolio with commodities for greater stability – though this is well above my pay grade so don’t be expecting any tips! But the essential difference between gambling on stocks and shares and gambling on commodities is that they are subject to different forces of fluctuation – a company might invent a new product and its share value rocket or it might have a product superseded by a rival and plummet. Commodities also go up and down – soft commodities are susceptible to the weather, even shellac – the product of the Lac Fly has good and bad years whilst hard commodities are more predictable.
In case you think that commodities sound rather dry, I am going to include a poem – also with an A to Z progression about each commodity as the last nine months, I have taken to writing poetry in a big way – so a double whammy! A few commodities are missing in the Abercadarian and I will double up on one of the letters and poetry forms.
Whether you come for the poems or the commodities, trust me, there will be amazing facts about gold, amber, pork bellies and yes shellac…
This is my 5th A -Z Challenge and you can find the previous years via the Menu at the top of the page – starting in the fateful year of Covid 2020… 2020 – personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis 2021 – I was trying to complete a sci-fi novel and it advanced me greatly and I finished it shortly afterwards 2022 – I wrote about foods which can be used as an ingredient 2023 – I wrote about phrases we know the meaning of but often, not the origin of – and a s a bonus Cant languages
Over at dVerse Poets PubLaura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft is our host and has asked us to write Ghazal using at least one of the lines by Pablo Neruda from his book of poetry – “The Book of Questions” in which he poses 320 questions and answers in couplet form, and she has asked us to use at least one of the six question lines she has selected. I found all six questions stimulating and linked them in this poem.
Why was I not born mysterious? – Sorrowful Then nations would smite down my enemy furious – angry
Why did I grow up without companions – lonely compadres and friends in this world so curious? – and unloved
And do unshed tears wait in little lakes – weeping lurking to ambush we unwary and drown us? – vulnerable
And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes – landless springing up in the rubble of our homes mocking us? – homeless
How long do others speak if we have already spoken – quashed one hundred years, pleading, crying and dying in the dust? – and denied
Even hope itself may eventually die – we should be hopeless Isn’t it better never than too late for us? – flattened too.
How long do others speak if we have already spoken? – We still As long as it takes for you to hear us – cry out
And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes? – bear children Because life must triumph, improbable, delirious – all we can
And do unshed tears wait in little lakes? – don’t hold back Yes but cry them, use them, water the dust – start again
Why did I grow up without companions? – seek new friends Because the world heard only another victim’s fuss – in a world of oppressed
Why was I not born mysterious? – we find other victims in common See the wonderful in the ordinary which is us – our voices raised together
There are no especially deserving winners – give us all our due no one deserves our land over us – “Equality now!”
Equal status and our own statehood – “Never Again!” with nobody ruling over us – “Give us Our Due!”
Borrowing these six Neruda questions – “Now!” the poet, Andrew, seeks to give voice to us…
Dublin to Manchester Once on a plane I found a pair of sunglasses a polarising pair with circular lenses of Matrix cool left by the last occupant missed between flights by the cabin clean up crew I have those glasses still more than twenty years later I’m a keeper.
Teneriffe to Gatwick Once on a plane I had the last moments with my first great love then she asked me to hang back at the checkout because her husband was meeting her and thought she was holidaying alone.
Stanstead to Dublin Once on a plane I contemplated flying to meet a woman I had known only for one chaste night of intimations who then sent me a ticket for a weekend in County Leitrim
Manchester to Heraklion Once on a plane fleeing the pandemic one step ahead of lockdown I looked down on the Alps a wilderness of mountains as far as the eye could see from thirty-five thousand feet and saw not a trace of human life, no villages no roads, no smoke as if already we never existed
A Flight to Anywhere More than once on a plane I wonder about the lives of Air Hostesses or Hosts or Stewards as they are now called whether they joined to see the world and whether they did whether it’s true about the crew parties the god-like officers marriage material or just better advantaged the ordinariness of Ryanair crew the haughty select of Air Aegean each one as from the pages of a 50’s fashion magazine do the ordinary despise the haughty meeting en passant in some airport corridor or do they share a common bond of brother and sisterhood is it just another flight from one take off to another landing once on a plane…
How can I say I thank you for the mixed bag of emotions which I will call Love for want of a better word – which I learned at your knee whilst having no inkling of even being schooled…
Love is nurturing – on a physical level of feeding at least and on the mental level of stimulation with books and ideas and even a trip around the world
Love is safety and love is the absence of danger which is not necessarily the same thing
Love is consistency which can go a long way towards making up for other deficiencies
Love is giving a sense of who you are and what your place is in the wider world – it is not sufficient to teach you to talk to anyone from a tramp to the Queen if you don’t know what you want to say.
Imposter syndrome is as transferrable as a gene for diabetes and like that disease it will be a long time before you even figure out you have it – and what “It” is there is no gene sequencer for emotional baggage…
We learn to love like layers of an onion and so much depends on the fertility of the soil which is that original family and however crooked the plant grows – be glad if you at least had a family.
Love starts with a teat your mother’s if you are lucky or perhaps a bottle freely given on demand
Love expands too if you are lucky enough to have siblings – you add another layer to your personal culture when you go to school when you expand your horizons to town, country and however much of the world you are lucky enough to encounter
If you are not lucky and your bulb grows amongst stones, is not fed good food and stimulation for the mind – if you encounter trauma by loss, violence or abuse your multilayered onion will reflect its origins…
Eventually you may break away from the family home, home town and learn of other loves but your affinity has already set by earlier lessons learned This one is never secure That one is self-centred This one is restless and That one puts up with rather than taking care of themselves
Love is as varied as the human beings who practise it and the combinations in couples as varied as the genes they may mesh together in the lottery of life
But lucky or unlucky everybody needs to know what they learned of love and work out what works for them and those they love…
For goodness sake grant me the bucket-list wish of a boat any boat will do a picayune pram to potter on a large pond better still a proper rowboat on a large lake to drift down the wind lanes a dry fly bobbing alluringly on the ripple, gently retrieving with the dream of a trout rising
A daysailer – better still ducking the boom on a dinghy is dodgy at my age so day trips on a Summer suitable sea would fit the bill delightfully sailing out and back with the sea breeze sometimes sleeping in the cabin after stargazing at anchor in some sheltering bay
And in the Winter I would cherish my little vessel drawn up on the shore cleaning and caulking and laying on varnish let me leave alliteration behind and voyage forth on real wavy waters – so for goodness sake one day grant me a boat
Half my sister’s ashes sit on my bookshelf the thought flashes regularly that I must fulfil her wishes and bury her with our parents let her out of the camel-shaped teapot my favourite of her collection and which bore her back from Ireland disguising the grey substance which is, unbelievably, half of her remains.
I think it is the distance to Dorset which has held me back from letting the once genial out of the teapot. The teapot will remain ornamentally on my bookshelf to use my sister’s sometime sepulchre to make tea might be a step too far for a brother though it would have made his sister laugh like a drain…
There was no father gorilla to take his part scratch out the gardener’s insides toss the dairymaid into a tree wrench off Sir John’s head crack the keeper’s skull with his teeth as if a coconut
Tom did not remember ever having a father
He might hide in a bush swarm up a tree had he not known it a very different place boughs laid hold of his legs poked his face and stomach birches birched him soundly as if a nobleman at Eton lawyers tripped him up as if they had shark’s teeth which lawyers likely have
A cunning little fellow but ten years old lived longer than most stags had more wits to start with
The old grouse came back to his wife and family the end of the world is not quite come it is coming the day after tomorrow
This is a found poem with words derived from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. The title – Evolution, is because Kingsley was a naturalist around the exciting time when the work of Wallage and Darwin were revolutionising the worlds of science, geology and biology and there will be found poems that reference this aspect of the tale. But so far, the finding of poems has been more like the method for refining poems since Kingsley writes very lyrical passages anyway… The image is derived in Midjourney. This series was inspired by my friend Misky over at It’s Still Life who has been producing a series of Found Poems…
Frequently the wood sare pink wrote Emily Dickinson, fairly described as transcendental romantic, I think was she referencing blossom-time when gaudy pinks and whites to win the bees attention fight that time when we remember trees are but giant flowering plants dependent on the tiny pollinator to close life’s circle with their aerial dance flowers followed in short order by the clichéd thousand shades of green my own favourite time to see the thin veil delicately drawn across the Winter-wakened trees and as the leaves thicken and take on Summer shades each tree can be read from a distance picked out from its companions in the glade
But wait – in Winter too a palette of subtle colours also distinguish each species one from another colours hard to pin down from mauves and greys to blues and nearly brown and never black except in solitary silhouette and frequently the woods are pink