Carousel

Carousel

carousel.png

Around and around a roundabout! I love it when the painted wooden horses open their mouths and rock up and down, and the little children hold out their hands to watching parents and grandparents, and big sisters and brothers hold them tight and keep them from falling off and the world passes by in a blur and open mouths are black holes in faces sucking the carousel in as it spins past in triumph.

And never forget the dodgem cars, weaving in and out, never dodging anything, but jousting like armor-clad knights of old, bumper to bumper, and ready, steady, charge! Or the old swing boats, twin-roped, non-mechanical, lifting us up to the skies and dropping us back to earth with that stomach-churning fall from stardom to the loss of innocence as the wooden break grinds, our thruppence is spent, and the ride is over.

Those days are as forgotten as one a penny, two a penny, or the tuppenny loaves that the elephants dropped, or the sing a song of sixpence where the twenty-four blackbirds descended like clothes pegs to devour the bread and honey and peck off the nose of the open-eyed innocent who never tired of the joke until the ultimate childhood squeal as his or her freckled or un-freckled nose was pinched and stolen away. So much lost, so much forgotten.

For two weeks now I have tried to photograph the hummingbirds, colibris, who visit the hollyhocks. Tonight, after a hundred or more photos, I managed to catch one in the fish-net of the camera. What joy: success after days and days searching for that delicate flash of red and green, only to find nothing there. Oh hummingbirds, I weep to see you, to capture you in the camera’s eye, to preserve you … for such a short, brief, moment of time.

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9 thoughts on “Carousel”

  1. Hello Roger, I’m a new follower.

    I had tears in my eyes reading this post. It tugged at my heart. I understood it.
    And the hummingbirds….we don’t have them here in Japan. Although we have a moth that looks very similar but it just isn’t the same. My late father adored humming birds and he used to sit outside and quietly wait for them to visit the feeder. I have his little crystal hummingbird hanging in my window. I just stole a peek at it. I always think of him whenever I see it and I just thought of him reading your post.

    best wishes from rural Japan–

    Liked by 1 person

    • So kind of you to write: much appreciated. The illustrated photo-poem comes from one of my collections written in Oaxaca, Mexico. The bottom photo comes from my garden. I find that the tears that come from poetry are very purging. If I cry at the end of writing a poem, I know I have a good one. Rural Japan, eh? You will have the World Cup of Rugby there next month and I will be hoping to visit you daily on Television. Best wishes and thanks for being here.

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      • You are welcome- I’m really enjoying the breath of fresh air. You might not think of your writing as fresh air but it’s in the eye of the beholder.

        I’ll be thinking of you when we watch the plays!

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      • I will be 60 in 2 years and my goal is to visit my best friend in Wales. Recently I did DNA testing and found I am 36% British. No surprise as in a previous lifetime I was sure that I lived in Briton somewhere…..probably in the Cotswold’s and had a lovely thatched cottage with a garden (ha).

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      • Snowdonia is indeed a beautiful area too. People in North Wales speak a slightly different version of Welsh from those in the South. I speak no Japanese, other than the names of the throws I learned when studying Judo, a long, long time ago.

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      • It was sink or swim for me. My first language is German then English. When we moved to Saipan I learned the local language and now I’m fumbling with Japanese. I think I’m doing ok as I can have conversations with strangers now. They actually understand me. 🙃 After the age of 55 learning a new language gets tricky as the eyes close very quickly while trying to study … 🙄

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