Out of the court up the street the roofs all shining grey in the grey dawn plodding along the black dusty road the groaning of the pit-engine
Soon the road grew white at the wall’s foot grew long grass and gay flowers drenched with dew the skylark saying his matins the pit-bird warbling in the sedges
This is a found poem with words derived from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. 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…
This is a found poem with words derived from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. 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…
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 23 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it… Before I post the last poem I sent but whose sender was the first I received – the next eight cards, two at a time, are ones on the list that I sent but didn’t receive from, – given what happened to the 23rd to arrive by way of Trinidad – I have not given up hope – so if you recognise a card you received and you know you sent one – please let me know in the comments and we shall presume it travelling still, the backwaters of the postal system…
Dear Albert I wish to report a crime! On a recent visit to Blackheath, London, I came across this Jane Doe – provisionally identified as Barbie. The naked body dumped on a wall evidence of torture with a cigarette lighter to the breasts – otherwise no obvious sign of fatal injury no witnesses, no motive. Who would abandon such a doll? Who can fathom the workings of the human heart…
In Washington State great trees abound but Olive trees are not, I think there found these are the flowers of the Cretan Olive grown more for oil than eating olives now are threatened by global warming. Pray for the farmer’s harvest when next year comes around I am guessing from your name that your family is no stranger to olives…
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 23 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it… Before I post the last poem I sent but whose sender was the first I received – the next eight cards, two at a time, are ones on the list that I sent but didn’t receive from, – given what happened to the 23rd to arrive by way of Trinidad – I have not given up hope – so if you recognise a card you received and you know you sent one – please let me know in the comments and we shall presume it travelling still, the backwaters of the postal system…
Dear Lisanne Like so many places in America I knew the name of Berkeley but I had to look at the map to know exactly where it was. Can you see the Pacific framed by the Golden Gate Bridge do waves cross the bay to wash up on a Berkeley beach? I first saw Dianne Arbus’ work in a Sunday supplement and I had my own Dianne Arbus moment on the beach at Clacton this lady pushing not a baby in a pram but a poodle…
I will not say Wish You Were Here since this moment in time was frozen digitally a good few years ago pre-Covid, pre-Trump, pre-War and if we could have stood there then it was a wet and windy day not like the sunshine eternally associated in the imagination as shining down on Stearns Pier, your pier. Of course I know the Pacific is not always peaceful any more than the North Sea splashing Blackpool is always stormy…
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Karen
I should like to say this painting is my own work and in a small part it is. I prompted an AI to make four pictures in sixty second “Village beside lake style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh “La Rue de Soleil” palette knife oil painting” – it obeyed! I am still trying to wrap my head around it perhaps I will copy it into real oil paint on canvas pondering with each brush stroke how an AI went from 0- 60 in sixty second times x 4…
Due to an error in reading my meticulous recording of what card was sent when and which arrived when, I posted Karen’s beautiful handpainted watercolour trees a few days ago when it should have been the equally beautiful ink colour sketch of Paul Klee’s “Conqueror” with an Ekphrastic poem to match – my apologies to Caren and Karen for the mix up…
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
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Allison
I see you live on a hill perhaps on a road that encircles it there are many Chapel Roads in England, more still in Wales where you are CHAPEL rather than Church. Writing to a stranger in Epistolary form there is little enough to go on so I send you the view from another hill looking towards Wuthering Heights where I snooze for an hour during Barbara’s Reiki session…
Allison’s card was the 23rd and last card I received – not that Allison was tardy in posting it – she posted on 5th of July and it arrived 3rd of October having been “Missent to Jamaica” (as rubber stamped on the back!) Who doesn’t love a well-travelled card!” And on the back of this angelic card was a Haiku on the subject of the relationship between music and angels.
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…
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Caren
No street photographer I no Cartier-Bresson but I do sometimes seize a moment as with this elderly couple reviewing their garden and a lifetime of closeness I imagine – in Upwhey where the River Whey comes up before plunging its short course down to Weymouth with my late mother I snapped them…
As you can see from Caren’s postcard to me, which from the relative dates, I calculate means she had received my card to her and has responded in kind with a painting of trees and a poem to match (which I wish I could show you).
