Here and there life clusters amidst the random Brownian motion of atoms and molecules drawing them into an order all it’s own combating entropy for their allotted lifespan they dance defiance like whirling dervishes celebrating passionately their moments in the light poignant in the knowledge that entropy will win in the end their parts deliquescing into the dark lucky if they leave a tiny trail to mark their passage…
Over at the Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Poetics invites us to riff on the paintings of Alma Thomas – I chose: Scarlet Sage Dancing a Whirling Dervish (1976), acrylic on canvas, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York
At five, I wake with the false dawn the call of nature at three an hour of chasing Morpheus two hours of fitful sleep haunted by the illusion of wakefulness the battle is lost to the new day and I rise before backache sets in who needs more than six hours sleep anyway
Seen from space the line between night and day looks sharp enough but on the ground the scattered rays of the coming sun diffuse through the atmosphere gradually dissolving the dark and banishing ancient and childhood fears
Finally the buildings opposite lose their grey and acquire a yellow tinge that brightens to ruddy Welsh gold as the sun peeps over the horizon and for a moment, filtered by atmosphere we can behold the true god whose gravity rules the solar system sustaining life through the burning up of its body
Children may sleep through the transition from night to day but as we age, the need for sleep diminished the penumbra of consciousness and light attune and though we may lie next to another we awaken alone in the liminal space that exists between false dawn and sunrise before we rise – another day to face…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, kim881 in Poetics was interviewing Sarah Connor a long-time member of the Pub. I never had the privilege of writing to one of Sarah’s prompts but it is clear from the interview and from the fragments of Sarah’s poems chosen by Kim, that it would indeed have been a privilege and so I hope to honour her with this poem… The italicised lines are from Sarah Connor’s poems “Apple” and “ ‘No mail – no post’“
There is a wholesomeness to apples I used to say I could live on bread and apples alone but diabetes now rules my diet – fruit sugar is still sugar nevertheless and most bread, though staff of life creates a sugar spike for which I must later atone.
If weather be kind, apples fill out from flower-size fruit the white flesh crisp, fine-grained though Discovery surprises – the flesh by red skin stained the taste a fizz of champagne I must now sip one by one no longer scoff by the pound.
Sourdough is the only bread eaten in moderation some secret from its magic starter’s generation baton passed from batch to batch less sugar, less spike it’s said and there is more flavour too yeast fed on the flour itself.
And as a poet, I hope, just this blank space – this white page will be fleshed out with words – the starter of my poesy will slowly feed on today’s thoughts and swell the dough, my loaf which baked on the page will raise a wholesome, healthy poem.
Willing! You think me willing? And that my soul transpires… T’were nearer the mark to assert my body glows with rage
At every pore with instant fires,
Blushes at first when I your base desires didst early espy but soon ‘twas anger coloured my face
Now let us sport us while we may
Sport you say with you the hunter and no doubt I the prey but you have made me furious
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
I refer you to my previous stanza furious not amorous – we or I at least – are not animals forever chasing food or mating
Rather at once our time devour
You see you even now confuse the act of mating with that of eating but I will not join you at your table
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
An age at least would be too long to tarry in your lascivious presence in fact I will not waste another hour
Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball,
My strength will henceforth be employed in resisting your siren call and enjoying sweet silence when you are gone
And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life
Oh snake I see you now taking my maidenhood with rough strife no thought to later make me your wife…
Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run…
Enough! Begone you tiresome poet you can’t try your wiles on a Yorkshire girl, a girl from Hull – and you should know it and yet… when you are gone… you will leave a lacuna…
We studied the poet Andrew Marvell at school and I suspect that more than one of us callow youths committed the poem “To His Coy Mistress” to heart in case these lines of seduction might someday prove useful in our own future seduction attempts… Having just watched Bridgerton, Season 3, I was perhaps channelling the feisty women challenging the rather weaker men in reframing this response to lines from the poem.
Driving up the hill through the village a ten second drama plays out to my right – a baby boy comfortable in the crook of his grandmother’s arm receives a hurried kiss from his mother as she turns to walk down the hill to the bus stop the baby stretches out his arm towards his departing mother once more going to work more bewildered than upset but his grandmother steps back indoors before possible tears leaving the pavement empty…
Over at the dVerse Poets Pub, dorahak is hosting Poetics and invites us to write about Liminal spaces using one of the following senses of the phrase.
In general, a liminal space can be looked at in three ways:
1) as an empty structural space (an overgrown, ruined fairground, shuttered department store once familiar like K-Marts here in the U.S., an abandoned shopping center or mall, a silent nighttime hotel corridor); OR
2) as a place of transit (a hotel lobby, an airport terminal, or a parking garage, gas/petrol station or a city street at night); OR
3) a passage in a more abstract sense, e.g., New Year’s Eve, a decade’s close, a birthday, anniversary, or holi(holy)day.
People talk about writer’s block – about being over-faced by the blank page but to sit down with a blank page and pick up your pen is to dive into the liminal space through the portal of the page breaking the smooth surface making a splash wearing the threads of previous thoughts oft rehearsed but still essentially, feeling naked
We swam in the waters of Mahon harbour on a night when the little side bay was filled with phosphorescence took a hand full of water and slowly released it back into the main and in our hands and in the falling water individual creatures gave forth a tiny burst of light. but swimming through their midst the lights coalesced into a ghostly glow around our bodies all semblance of individual creatures, words or events subsumed into the glow
Later rowing our cockleshell boat we traced our path with pools of light left in our wake where the oars had dipped in and disturbed the creatures distributed in the depth beneath motion was transformed into light pale radium green, glowing under the Mediterranean sky – and to think these motions are always present the glow – the pools of light even when we can’t see them – blinded by the greater light of day.
The light of luminescence lives in my mind as a memory fixed by processes still unfathomable to the very minds that try to comprehend – axons and nuclei and who knows what – as ungraspable as those tiny light-emitting creatures like words on a page they appear unpredictably have their moment and disappear into the stream of time into the past as we authors swim across the portal climb out on the other side of the pool and only then turn and look at the patches of light we have left in our wake astounded at the words filling the blank page…
Tonight is Open Link Night over at dVerse Poets Pub and msjadeli is our hostess. I wrote this in my AWA writing group a few weeks ago and it seems to follow on from my post before last – contemplating the process of poesie…
Tonight, our host over at dVerse Poets Pub is lillian in Poetics who, feeling nostalgic on the occasion of her 8th anniversary hosting at the bar, has resurrected for the third time, an ekphrastic prompt provided by the artist Catrin Welz-Stein. Catrin has enjoyed providing the inspiration for the pub-goers twice before and enjoys the interaction. I picked one of the four pictures which Catrin kindly allowed us to use…
I like to read out loud to turn tiny marks regimented on the page from text to sound filtered through eyes that read brain to comprehend a mouth that shapes my voice. Poetry or prose the writer laid words down wrapped round meanings all their own but which we readers too may catch and breathe out into space between mouth and ear reader and listener. Even reading aloud alone brings out meaning, makes it clear and once peeled from the page I sit and let the words hang there…
Tonight, our host over at dVerse Poets Pub is lillian in Poetics who, feeling nostalgic on the occasion of her 8th anniversary hosting at the bar, has resurrected for the third time, an ekphrastic prompt provided by the artist Catrin Welz-Stein. Catrin has enjoyed providing the inspiration for the pub-goers twice before and enjoys the interaction. I picked one of the four pictures which Catrin kindly allowed us to use…
I fell in love with Alice no, not Alice in Wonderland nor through the looking glass though this Alice famously admired her reflection in shop windows as she walked down the town.
She was not the girl next door eponymous heroine of the bereft Smokie who could not face a life without her nor the Alice in the driving White Rabbit pounded out by Jefferson Airplane – rather it was the plaintive harmonies of the McGarrigle sisters reviving a parlour song about a young girl wearing her favourite blue gown for the first time.
Little did I know that this Alice was no homely teenager but an American Princess daughter of a President denied her name for the tragic loss of her mother due to childbirth her father, Teddy, unable to bear his newborn daughter’s namesake she was condemned to be called Baby Lee until years later her father soothed by a new wife and five more children.
A feisty girl and woman Alice Roosevelt smoked and shot at Telegraph poles from moving trains but I prefer to think of the gentler image of the girl in the song in her Alice Blue Gown “Till wilted I wore it I’ll always adore it My sweet little Alice blue gown…”
