If I could choose a day to relive in your company out of forty years give or take when and where would I set the dials of the time machine to take us
To the first night we met in magical massage engaged diving deep despite the presence of strangers in a one time embassy
To our time in Ireland walking down to the Atlantic ten minutes from our cottage door where fossil “serpents” writhed across the rocks and we just stood and breathed it in…
I treasure the winter nights I slipped sleepless out the front door wrapped warm sitting head back gazing at the myriad stars threaded through with man-made satellites steadily traversing from the sun-catching to the dark side of the sky your warm body waiting gently protesting my cold one slipping back in beside you
The first Christmas in this then new house – scarcely moved in turning a building project into a home
I think I would settle and I believe you would be happy too for the covid deserted coffee bar by a beach in Crete playing hookey from the lockdown though no police ever stopped us…
The ceiling woven from palm-fronds dappling the light on your face while the ocean lapped just yards away on that hot, bright Cretan winter’s day
Even in winter this café would normally be thronged for Sunday lunch serving fryer-fresh chunky chips and Greek sausages with children running round and people swimming out over the sandy bottomed bay the beach frosted with stones and shells where the waves kissed the land
But we had the beach and café To ourselves – brought our own coffee or was it tea – I don’t remember but I remember sneaking looks at you over the top of my book as we read in companionable silence as only long-lived love makes truly possible
I do not need to go there again it wouldn’t be the same even if there were chips because I hold the treasure of that day safe in my heart and sometimes I take you there anyway
Lisa (Posted by msjadeli in Poetics) is our host tonight over at dVerse Poets Pub where she invites us to use a time machine to fulfil something on our fantasy time travel bucket list…
A detective contemplates a corpse stabbed so many times that he concludes – this was personal so I am called an evil terrorist as if the zombies in a first person shoot-’em up were suddenly weighted to win I don’t want to witness my crime by seeing the enemy as people so I remember my X-box shooting down Nazis whose Holocaust ironically helped justify our Palestinian “displacement” between the bullets and the bombs
I press the button which drops the bomb but I don’t see the blast blossom the seven stories pancake down all in my rearview mirror I don’t even see the confirmation back at base – nothing to learn about smart bombs and our TV does not show the dead children or traumatised living amongst the rubble an angel of death my hands are clean only the world seeing the blood dripping from them between the bullets and the bombs
I am an old woman whose heart has just given out on the refugee road to elsewhere surrounded, shelled we took the only road they left open my children will go to Kuwait via camps in Lebanon where they will be displaced again by Saddam Hussain and die in England they will call this The Disaster but my great-grandchildren will have a good life far from the bullets and the bombs
I am an old woman from Poland I escaped the Holocaust of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and the less-than-perfect of mind or body only to find myself taken to another prison camp where the Jews are outside the wire my husband and I helped the inmates driving them to hospital and I learned their language so they have scheduled me for early release and I will not die between the bullets and the bombs
I am a baby who died as the grossest provocation the loudest shout-out to a world that has long since stopped listening and covered its eyes whilst I am a baby crushed into my mother’s breast my grave a concrete sandwich but we two babies separated by bullets and bombs whose ancestors lived here side by side in peace for millennia if tested genetically cannot be told apart brothers and sisters under the skin…
This post by Di on Pandamoniumcat’s Blog, is in response to the No vote in the recent Australian Referendum on the issue of Constitutional recognition of Australia’s indigenous people. Failure to recognise the existence of people who already lived in the land you took can never end well and hopefully, this is not the end of the road for this cause… It was posted in response to For Dverse Poets Meeting the Bar: A Collective Point of View
You planted me two years ago myself and my sister casserole dish gardens – you who have always been fascinated by the miniature worlds of Bottle Gardens and Bonsai.
Bottle gardens grew too lush in the sweet-jar worlds of your teenage window sill Pennywort and Maidenhair ferns an unruly tangled jungle and Bonsai you studied and realised you needed a Master not just to teach the art but from whom you could inherit because a hundred-year-old tree needs a hundred years to grow no matter how small it is kept by tortuous processes…
Coming back from Covid lockdown Crete you smuggled fragments of plants to create me – a miniature garden! In Crete, Jade trees the size of bushes a plant you didn’t even know had flowers now grace us gardens as tiny trees planted next to choice rocks a nod to the Bonsai plantings of your dreams
We are mostly filled with succulents which flowered this year in ways which surprised and delighted you reaching a flower-tipped tendril towards the light but then shrivelling and dying – perhaps not to return…
One of us you inherited from your late sister in Ireland whose partner delighted her by planting a pink-dyed spiky phallus of a cactus along with succulent friends in the lopsided glass of a washing machine door – the self-seeded Shamrocks came along for the ride the tiny Mexican-hatted miniature of Tequila – “For Emergencies” redundant, since she had already encountered her final life emergency.
You took us to work where there were wider window-sills than your open-plan hayloft conversion and you see us and celebrate us whilst weekly watering us. People think we succulents can survive without water but in truth like most plants – we like it weekly
Meanwhile, as your eye wanders through we miniature worlds do you feel in control of your creations or are we in your life a living reminder of mortality and fragility. Do you wonder if we will outlive you and carry on, watered by another – inherited by another? Do you wonder whether anyone has even thought to water us these weeks you’ve been consumed by covid when, head full of cotton wool you forgot to ask anyone to fill in for the gardener?
Don’t worry – we can manage the occasional drought! Can we say the same for you…
Trauma is nowadays seen as implicated in almost all ways in which people are derailed in their mental health.
Addiction to drugs or alcohol sex or over neatness – these are the symptoms and not the diagnosis – whichever label eventually applied
Those who are traumatised are often complex souls and doctors often feel challenged and give up on their role to get to the bottom of things
Borderline personality disorder is a favourite soubriquet for those that cannot be rendered silent about the roles their trauma plays and refuse all other labels
Some disorders may respond to the doctors’ pharmacopoeia hardest is the slough of despond a symptom so common it’s hardly seen as mental health but just a frequent human condition
Bipolar is stabilised with lithium yet patients constantly reject its spell preferring the rush of manic fun and whilst the black dog they would quell prefer half a life than all life levelled and flat
Vincent van Gogh would today be told he was bipolar and given lithium not talk He said “Normality is a paved road – It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.” And we would be deprived of his flowers…
Westward a bunch of flowers adorns the table in the living room upstairs sent by kind neighbours after person(s) unknown threw an empty bottle through a downstairs bedroom window
Northly I sit in the yard garden smiling wearing a new shirt and waistcoat bought by my love finally getting a photo I like for all my online avatars
A Buddha sits on the window sill South view over his shoulder sheltered beneath a tree size avocado final success after countless failures to grow from a pit
A Buddha head sits among plants on a garden shelf, contemplating fossils garnered on English beaches and brought East by our son from Mexico but not from its yellow hills
Clematis blooms pink against the impossible blue of the May sky fluffed with clouds each year the Montana climbs to such height
Photos call us home in a sixth dimension of the heart
The three poems by dead poets I have chosen to read for last night’s Dead Poets Society challenge by kim881 in Poetics, Uncategorized over at the dVerse Poets Pub are all from poets I studied at school and have continued to love all my life – great teachers have a lot to answer for…
Andrew Marvell 1621–1678
Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress‘ is surely one of the most famous poems of attempted seduction ever written. I live within a day-out’s journey from Marvell’s birthplace, Hull where the muddy tide of Humber is about as wide as the Ganges and I wonder whether sailor’s tales informed Marvell’s poem. The last time I visited Hull, I met two young lovers sitting on the plinth of Andrew Marvell’s lifesize statue and acquainted them with the poem…
WB Yeats was also a favourite at school and later, when I moved to Sligo in the west of Ireland and Yeats’ home town, I was commissioned to paint a mural of the poet and his work and you can see a much younger me from 1995 being interviewed on television whilst up a ladder painting the mural. Searching for a poem suitable for this challenge, I came across The Mask, an unusual (for Yeats) Question and Response format with an ABABA rhyme scheme
Hughes in 1986. PHOTO: NILS JORGENSEN/REX SHUTTERSTOCK
Lastly, I chose ‘A Grin‘ from Ted Hughes’ wonderful collection of poems ‘Crow’ although this is not one of the poems referencing the scurrilous Crow. If I had to keep one volume of poetry it would be this…
Having read these three dead poets, I’m afraid I could not write a poem based on just one of them and so my offering below channels all three, Yeats for the form, Ted Hughes for the title and theme and Marvell for the intimations of mortality and perhaps the poetic shot at immortality…
A Grin
‘Centre stage on the birthing bed Did you grin for your role through the pain?’ ‘I thought how easily I could end up dead And grinned to think you’d never touch me again Don’t fucking touch me! I shouted!
‘Did you grin at the banality of death by car crash You who imagined yourself great and with longevity?’ ‘I thought of my wife who always thought me rash And my secretary always seasoning work with levity Urging me to slow down – but I had to dash…’
‘I watched your grin, my eyes open, yours closed And wondered, coming together, if we really were?’ ‘You were so deep the thought never arose That we were two, a separate him and her I never thought at all as into me you flowed…’
‘Whatever before death caused your rictus grin Will be replaced in time by the skull’s secret smile’ ‘What tales within my skull locked in Now deliquescing, bodily integrity defiled In the game of Life, none of us can win.’
‘Your poetic attempt at seduction Already lived three hundred and fifty years Is poetry the way – immortality to win?’ ‘I never won that girl nor any like her But it makes me grin – the onward admiration…’
P.S. I realise now that we were supposed to write based on one of Kim’s chosen three poems but when I saw the challenge last night, my Covid head was stuffed with cotton wool and it is only this morning that I was feeling better sufficiently to write something and by then, the idea that we choose our own three poems had settled in… Sorry Kim! And so below is a response to one of your poem choices Dylan Thomas’ ‘Once It Was the Colour of Saying’.
Once It Was the Colour of Saying
Once a year at least, I listen to Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas and steep myself in the poetry of his play the play of his poetry as he carries us around the small Welsh town of his imagination borne into the night and through the waking day revisiting the cast of characters until we love their foibled ways and wish like the Reverend Eli Jenkins in his poem within a poem “To stroll among our trees and stray In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down, And hear the Dewi sing all day, And never, never leave the town.”
