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
dVerse Poets Pub
Casserole Dish Gardens
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…
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
This poem is posted in response to Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft over at dVerse Poets Pub
Sunflowers
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…
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
This poem is posted in response to Haunted – Tuesday Poetics over at dVerse Poets Pub hosted by Melissa Lemay in Uncategorized
A Nice Little Soup…
“A nice little soup for a nice little face”
is a colloquial expression from Menorca
Menorca has the third-largest harbour in the world
and supplied the Royal Navy with portable soup
A soup is a collection of ingredients easily portable
until combined with liquid to form a broth
Scotch Broth, Mulligatawny, Phở and Minestrone
soups to take you around the world
To each their own world of culinary tradition
ingredients, flavours and cooking methods
Methods passed down the generations
soup is the starter or can be the main dish
And who the heck knows what they mean in Menorca
by “A nice little soup for a nice little face…”
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, merrildsmith in Poetics has been cooking up Soup as a prompt…
Five Photos Leading Me Home
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
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
Today’s post is written for Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft over at the dVerse Poets Pub.
The prompt is based on “Five Directions to my house” by the poet Juan Filipe Herrera.
A Grin
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’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
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…’
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
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.”
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
Promethean Autumn
Time has flown from May to September
the Winter of my days heralded by Autumn
no Indian summer like some I remember
but odd flashes of heat returned
in the rollercoaster from May to September
floods, fires, heatwaves what a year it’s been
a metaphor for my own life’s glowing ember,
an ember stolen from the gods wrapped in a leaf
and whose life is not by fickle fate encumbered
he chained to a rock in punishment for gifting man
we tortured or triumphant from May to September.
Written in response to Melissa Lemay in Poetics over at dVerse Poets Pub.
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
Love Is In the Air…
Love is in the air
and is intoxicating
as the fumes
of brandy in a glass balloon
it wafts beyond the
happy pairs of lovers
rekindling memories
of a younger age
re-living and reeling
with heady recall
Three grandsons now perhaps
have found their matches
and you know when
talk turns to children
and which football tribe
they should be raised in
that these are keepers
I have never been to a match
and been drunk on shared
passion in a huge crowd
but watching a film
whilst waiting to meet
the latest and last to
join the set, we shared
the intimacy of lovers in
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
A camera takes us
to the heart of an orchestra in concert
with a closeness to each player’s
breath and movement
as they embrace their instruments
to pull on our heartstrings
and film likewise grants us
close-ups of couples
we would never see in real life
our neighbours love lives
hidden in semi-detached suburban rooms
separate, unknowable, ineffable
no matter how openly
the rest of our proximate lives
are lived
was it different in the
warm fug of tribal longhouses
lovemaking couples as close
as the next cocooning hammock?
Children don’t care to imagine
their parents making love
imagining they are beyond all that
however deep the love they daily show
and parents don’t dare to imagine
their children either
the perils of the heart
the baton passed
but when love is in the air
for those lucky enough to have
roots deep in the rich soil
of happy parents
there is the hope of
templating happy families to come
Such open-hearted boys
have not escaped without
venturing up blind alleys
at least two have had
songs of heartbreak
loss and bewilderment
plucked painfully
on their heartstrings
before finding their way
safely to harbour in
calmer but still deep water
after storm-tossed seas
I held those boys as babies
drew or close-up photographed
their sleeping faces
turned their living-room
into a fort, cave, nest
or whatever their imagination
could conjure from the
jumble of throws and giant cushions
taught them the love of the pun
witnessed tantrums and triumphs
watched football from the sidelines,
school and scout uniforms
gowns and mortarboards
how could I not be
drawn along in the
wake of their love lives
dropping away like the pilot boat
waving up to the after-deck
as I slow down
and they gather pace
on their own voyages of love
The calmness and Giaconda smile
of one, the bubbling enthusiasm of another
perfume from Morrocco the first impression
throwing one off the scent
of the depths of a doctor
the brightness and humanity
of all of them
grandsons and girlfriends alike
mingling as a family
dancing in ever closer union
my head spins and
my heartstrings resonate
simply on the fumes
as love is in the air.
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
Written unprompted and posted for Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Live, OpenLinkNight over at dVerse Poets Pub
To Be Pretty For You…
Dear Diary – As a last resort, to be pretty for you I have dropped two seeds of turnsole in the dark of both eyes – I heard it was a natural eye make-up but since my eyes are now red-rimmed from the gritty foreign bodies I discover I was wrong. Turnsole is a naturopathic remedy for conjunctivitis and in failing to prepare it properly I now look like a rabbit with myxomatosis!
To catch your eye I have tried Kohl – which really is an ancient beauty aide, I replaced my L’Oréal eye shadow with a more expensive brand because I felt attracting you was worth more – today I must go to work with naked eyes till they heal up…
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
Dear Diary – Today he looked at me, asked if I had been crying – he couldn’t bear it! Then he asked me out!!!
Today’s piece is a response to Sanaa‘s Prosery Prompt over on dVerse Poets Pub to write a story in any genre using just 144 words and including the line “to be pretty for you I have dropped two seeds of turnsole in the dark of both eyes”
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
Time Shelter
I try to ration myself for prompts, perturbed by the idea that I will be swallowed in an endless cycle of call and response, but one that I will not miss each month, is 6 Degrees of Separation. Starting from a given title, each reader of books – no matter when they read them, summons six links to form a chain that finally links from and back to the beginning book.
I confess I do not make enough time for reading books, words bound between covers on paper as opposed to screens, though I always have one novel and at least one non-fiction on the go – however slow. I confess that the Poets Pub is often the guilty party in keeping me from the books though I do not blame or object because beautiful, moving or informative as books are, the pleasure of company and connection are better still.
I’m afraid my To Be Read list rarely coincides with the 6 Degrees prompt and only sometimes am I moved to purchase the recommendation, but recently I fell hook line and sinker for Time Shelter. The book is a metaphorical creation of memory clinics where sufferers from certain kinds of memory loss may steep themselves – full-immersion – in a room recreating an era from their past and get the backroads to their lost memories cleared of debris. A few weeks or months in which a loved one comes to life again is worth so much to relatives grieving the loss of someone who is still alive…
Dear Readers – I bought the book! I have no regrets and I recommend it even to poets – no! especially to poets so they may dive into a novel length metaphorical fiction that explores memory and loss, health and sickness and if that sounds depressing, I assure you that Time Shelter, by Georgi Gospodinov is most entertainingly told – and now your turn to confess – when is the last time you read a fiction by a Bulgarian?
This Prose Poem was written for Laura Bloomsbury‘s prompt for National Buy a Book day over at dVerse Poets Pub…
© Andrew Wilson, 2023