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.”
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.
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.
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…
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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”
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?
Landscapes were always my preserve lying in my third-hand bath each night the water clouded by soap opaque as certain seas I raised my knees to tower over the fjord of water between my legs I didn’t have my later geographer’s vocabulary of fjords, rias and alps the drowned and the truncated alps – shoulders bulldozed by the ice flanked by hanging valleys pouring high waterfalls into space but what’s in a name I conjured the landscape anyway Trapped in bed, off school for weeks bronchitis, chronic my dappled woolen blanket (whatever became of that favourite) also stood in for the freedom to explore. Raising my knees again from foothills to mountains at will and sometimes with toys to hand I marshalled my ill-assorted troops into commanding positions directing wars in my lap with my fevered bed-bound brain Before there was watercolour before there was travel before I could drive or even ride a bike Landscapes were always my preserve…
Posted for lillian in Poetics over on dVerse Poets Pub who set the challenge of taking you on a walk – well not exactly a walk but…
Halfway between Charmouth and Lyme Regis the tumbled rocks from the crumbling cliffs above bring to a close the beach that you follow eyes down searching from Charmouth they mark the point beyond which you will be cut off by a rising tide and face a choice between pressing on to Lyme Regis or struggling back over the hump of sticky Liassic blue-grey clay and braving falling rocks to regain the beach.
Though we did not know it as such back then this is the so-called Jurassic Coast one of them at least because the rocks curve up through the country like a spine with scoliosis to emerge again in Yorkshire with its counterclaim to tourists seeking fossils and imagining a dinosaur-infested past.
But Charmouth was made famous for fossils by Mary Anning, a glorious amateur who walked this beach every day especially after winter storms threw down hidden treasures from the cliffs. Mary found the first complete Ichthyosaur and too, found fame clawing it from begrudging academics of the day.
But back to the rocks midway along the route from tiny Charmouth to bustling Lyme Regis once graced by royalty. These rocks entrap in sheltered pockets miraculous casts of eons dead shells the gold of iron pyrites fools gold gleaming in the dross of sand and tiny pebbles
Find them if you can before the next storm crashes into the rocks and sweeps the treasure out to sea.
It was my mother on childhood holidays eschewing the search for larger, showier fossils despite the joy of splitting rocks thwacking them just so with her specially purchased geologist’s hammer she settled down to search among the rocks and finding the tiny, perfect overlooked treasures.
The last time I went there seeking out this secret trove hoping against hope that I remembered still where X marked the spot this secret trove which most people pass by in their search for bigger things I was summoned away for half-an-hour whilst a scene for “Ammonite” about the life of Mary Anning was filmed a few feet from my treasure seeking and when, months later I watched the finished film I recognised my absent self just out of shot.
I have been on that beach my whole life just out of shot in my mind’s eye a treasured memory of times past fossilised in fools gold.
