My love is at sea now, quite lost in the blue A blue funk has claimed her, she’s quite lost to me No message of love works, they do not get through My love is unmoored now, completely at sea
No pills or bright potions Can bring her to land Albatross on the ocean We don’t understand
My love is at sea now, amidst darkest waves The darkness crept up and it turned down her flame Just bring back my loved one, it’s all that I crave The mind is a mystery, that merits no blame
No pills or bright potions Can bring her to land Albatross on the ocean We don’t understand
My love is at sea now, please return her at last I fire up the lighthouse to guide her way home The dark storm that took her, is now in the past There’s still life worth living, if back here she’d come
My love is at sea now Please return her at last And pray let her see how Depression can pass
Happy the man who dreams his purpose plots his course to achieve that very goal marches to the beat of his own drum and pity one forced to follow roads laid down by parents’ aspirations but I drifted into adulthood with no pressure and no direction and took many turns along the way slowly grew into the man I am Though I am old with wandering
Love life is the companion to work the superficial couplings of youth conducted with more vigour than sense reaching the sunny uplands mid-life settling into a career I thought would last a lifetime, a love to match but people carry pasts within them like hidden rocks in a calm ocean and accidents deflect one’s passage Through hollow lands and hilly lands
To know another is a life’s work the unity of coupledom is illusion, we travel parallel at best, learning the geography of roads built across bogs of trauma always ready to gently subside and mire a person in buried past and paths are hard to find in a slough of despond and she has lost her way I will find out where she has gone
Looking back at the path I followed there is more coherence than I thought skills grown and transferred in work and life and love too, so much surer than in youth and all the scars and breaks accreted are the medals of experience and trying not to look toward the end but focus on the roadside flowers the next generations we began And kiss her lips and take her hands…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in FormForAll, Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to writa a Glosa, a Spanish poetry form in which four lines borrowed from a poem by another – the cabreza, are expanded upon over 4 ten-line stanzas… I chose lines from WB Yeats, who I have loved since studying him at school, and whose poems still resonate with me today. In 1995, I went to live in Sligo, Ireland, where Yeats is from, and is buried beneath nearby Ben Bulben mountain. I was a signwriter and painted a sign and mural of Yeats and his work, for The Winding Stair bookshop there – you can see me working on it in this news clip…
Here in Yorkshire it is not unknown for a man of my years to be addressed by a bus conductor (male) as “Love” but “Flower”is a term of endearment reserved for intimate family and friends and “Petal” is reserved for moments of real affection…
I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
This sculpture was made by ceramicist Bettina Seitz who sublet her studio to me when I first lived in Sligo, Ireland. I made the painted wooden base which has a quotation from “The Voyage” a song by Johnny Duhan but made famous by Christy Moore which you can see here…
The object I have picked to represent Love is the statue above, which I bought, mounted and gave to my partner Barbara and which is one of our favourite treasures. It encapsulates so many memories, the song “The Voyage“, a favourite even before we went to live in Ireland as it was often sung by our Irish son-in-law, the studio in Sligo and my friend Bettina, and for me it is a reminder of my signwriting and art-making days in Ireland.
Love and Hate are often designated as opposites and Love and Sex are often confused and in the following poem, previously unpublished, I consider the latter confusion…
Sex and Love…
I had a sheltered upbringing and a late start in affairs of the heart my parents love-life a secret to which their obvious love offered no clue.
A generous friend fired the starting pistol but offered first sex once but no more love in confusion mired. A Brazilian friend also bemused by sex in England told me how in Brazil girls in a friendship circle sit on any lap except the one they fancy sending a coded message to the cognoscenti coming closer by staying distant but in England, you meet at a party, say and suddenly you find you have vaulted over a wall you didn’t even notice to find yourself in bed with a stranger. There for the birth of her grandson, her mother gave me my first massage and then so much more showing that Brazilians excel at vaulting too
I became the toy of another older woman not that she was a player for we both confused sex for love and in the end became respectively frustrated and disappointed because you cannot find love in the cracks of another’s flawed marriage – there may be dirt but not the soil in which a relationship might flourish
If she was not ready or able to leave her husband I finally found the one who did and reached the sunny uplands where sex and love in true commitment bloomed not knowing that winter and the darkness of the past was waiting in the wings. After a short first act the curtain fell suddenly with seeming finality where abundant happiness had flourished in the light sex wilted in the dark but not before true love had taken root – its holdfast wrapped tight to the rock of life
And now, in later years Persephone has been drawn into the underworld and winter reigns, mostly but love leads me again and again to venture there to lead her back to the light if I may, instructed not to look back But in truth that is her affliction the past, a cast of characters who crowd her head hiding her real self asserting their various strategies to protect her from a past that is no more and yet is kept alive by the very protections and distractions that hide her truth
Those who do not deal with the past are doomed to live there but doing that deal is easier said than done.
So now I know that love is stronger than sex and though sex serves to feed the seeds of love once the tap root is driven deep into the earth the strong trunked love sustains through long Winters good Summers and bad flood and drought and for the tree of love the flowering and fruiting of sex is a bonus not the whole story…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, sanaarizvi in Poetics, invites us to write about what love means to us in light of the upcoming Valentine’s Day… In my writing group, Deborah had the same idea and presented us with Love Like Salt by Lisel Mueller so this poem is written in the shadow of that one…
My heart wanted what it wanted despite you’re seeming to leave and be lost to me but you were still there and now, don’t you see I too have remained- – all fidelity.
Those first months did my life course change. in ways I’d not believe – your true self amid so many revealed and when others hid that loving from me your truth I’d still see…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to write an Octameter for August and Sara Teasdale – it being the 8th month and the birthday of Sara Teasdale (8/8/1884). “Teasdale’s work has been characterized by its simplicity and clarity, her use of classical forms, and her passionate and romantic subject matter.” [https://poets.org/poet/sara-teasdale] and as Laura points out “Love, life, beauty and death are the hallmarks of much of Teasdale’s poetry which is unsurprising given that she lived through wartime as a young woman. Even so she avoids the maudlin in an upbeat way…” This poem is a homage to Sara Teasdale.
How can I say I thank you for the mixed bag of emotions which I will call Love for want of a better word – which I learned at your knee whilst having no inkling of even being schooled…
Love is nurturing – on a physical level of feeding at least and on the mental level of stimulation with books and ideas and even a trip around the world
Love is safety and love is the absence of danger which is not necessarily the same thing
Love is consistency which can go a long way towards making up for other deficiencies
Love is giving a sense of who you are and what your place is in the wider world – it is not sufficient to teach you to talk to anyone from a tramp to the Queen if you don’t know what you want to say.
Imposter syndrome is as transferrable as a gene for diabetes and like that disease it will be a long time before you even figure out you have it – and what “It” is there is no gene sequencer for emotional baggage…
We learn to love like layers of an onion and so much depends on the fertility of the soil which is that original family and however crooked the plant grows – be glad if you at least had a family.
Love starts with a teat your mother’s if you are lucky or perhaps a bottle freely given on demand
Love expands too if you are lucky enough to have siblings – you add another layer to your personal culture when you go to school when you expand your horizons to town, country and however much of the world you are lucky enough to encounter
If you are not lucky and your bulb grows amongst stones, is not fed good food and stimulation for the mind – if you encounter trauma by loss, violence or abuse your multilayered onion will reflect its origins…
Eventually you may break away from the family home, home town and learn of other loves but your affinity has already set by earlier lessons learned This one is never secure That one is self-centred This one is restless and That one puts up with rather than taking care of themselves
Love is as varied as the human beings who practise it and the combinations in couples as varied as the genes they may mesh together in the lottery of life
But lucky or unlucky everybody needs to know what they learned of love and work out what works for them and those they love…
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.
