Month: March 2023

Dissolution

Dissolution

When I am no more myself,
will I know what I have become?
What last breath in the mirror
will reflect my passing from this self
to the next, if there be another one?
Does it matter? No, to most of us,
yes, to the lusting soul that seeks,
but what does it seek, I ask myself?

I watch the deer crossing the yard.
Muted, dark against winter trees,
I can scarcely make them out,
let alone understand their wanderings.
If they scare, they raise white flags of tails,
then run, dancing down their tracks,
as light as thistle-down, though the snow
be deep beyond their walk-ways.

I want to see them as they really are,
the original inhabitants of this land that
a scrap of paper, drawn up by a lawyer,
says I own. Nobody owns this land.
It was here before me and will be here
long after me and mine are gone.

Only the deer truly belong, passing
through, each generation similar
to the one before, knowing no lawyers,
holding no legal papers, but aware
instinctively that we are the intruders,
that the forest is their heart and home,
and that they are sole owners of this land.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

Comment: from a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire: “I am no more myself. I have become the fifth of the twelfth.” I bought a book of his poetry (Livre de Poche) from les bouquinistes in September, 1962, when I started the school year in Paris. I picked it up last night, and started reading it again. The result – this little poem and a host of memories that came flooding back as the deer walked through the garden and all was right with the world.

Spider Web

Spider Web

for
Ginger and Michael Marcinkowski

I do love long and complicated sentences,
stuffed with clauses and dependent clauses,
 and all strung together like a spider’s web,
an enormous web with silvery threads that glisten
 with dew drops in the early morning sun that
blanches them, turning them white, and look,
there’s a little fly caught in this one, trapped
by his own struggles, and struggling even more
as the spider emerges, advances towards his prey,
soon to be his breakfast, or lunch, if he lets his victim
stew in the poisons soon to be injected, and look,
dew drops are falling as web shakes, and threads
tremble, and the dark and seamier side of life
emerges with its stark, black lines, from beneath
the advertising mask of glorious beauty that distorts
reality, as the spider turns into an assassin and the fly
into his victim, and yes, each of us must choose whether
to be an assassin or a victim, meurtrier ou victime,
as Camus phrases it in one of his books, L’Étranger,
though I read it so long ago, when I was a teenager,
studying French in school, and that was one of the books
I chose to read, but I was never labelled, meurtrier or
victime, just trouble-maker, first class, because I didn’t,
wouldn’t, couldn’t tow the official line and kow-tow
to a rigid authority, that walked set lines, like this spider,
the meurtrier, who turned that fly into his victime, and I,
I who could so easily become either, became neither,
but merely the observer, who stands on the outside,
looking in, and watching as the show goes on and on,
year after year, seculae seculorum, world without end,
and yes, the English Master told me never to mix
metaphors, nor to add foreign languages to my poems,
but what if they are not foreign to me, but a part of my being,
as part of the spider’s being is to be a meurtrier, and as for
that fly, well, he is the victime, in whichever language you use,
and yes, this poem is only one sentence, and I love it, amen.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

The Rover’s Return

The Rover’s Return

The eternal return to The Rover’s Return,
renovated, again and again, but filled
with the ghosts of Ena Sharples and others
who walked this cobbled street before,
and every episode more or less the same,
though décor, characters, accents change
and life becomes ever more complicated
from episode to episode, the street slang
changing slightly, and ageing characters
ageing more and more as time goes by,
and yet the trumpet’s martial sound,
the rhythms of the northern brass bands,
the first of those accents to break the plum
in the mouth snobbery of Oxford English
and the BBC’s domination of the language,
and ‘hey, Mr. Oxford Don, me no graduate,
me immigrate,’ echoing round the abandoned
buildings where the working class once worked,
and the elderly were cared for by their friends
and neighbors, not tossed into care homes,
and abandoned to their fate, as they have been
so often of late, and all things change, in time
with the clocks that tick-tock forward, their clock
work everlasting, and the pigeons still there,
and those crazy chimney pots, and that cat,
slithering down the roof, and the rovers still roving,
then returning, once again to the Rover’s Return.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

Comment: For more than sixty years I have listened to Coronation Street and some things have never changed, the trumpeter from the Brass Band, the rain on the cobbles, the memories and ghosts that linger among brickwork and paint. It takes me back to my childhood, when ITV was the upstart channel that dared to challenge the might of the mighty, one might almost say, the almighty BBC. And now, here in Island View, I turn away from the color and recall the old black and white sets, with their selection of two channels, one of them advert free, and their scheduled times of programs, not the TV blaring twenty four hours a day and two hundred channels available at the touch of a button.

It’s all one sentence, though I had to stop and take a couple of breaths while reading it. My good friend and fellow poet, Jane Tims, has called me ‘the master of the long sentence,” and I do love long sentences, especially when I am in rant mode, like now. But I am also very much aware of other friends that warn me that “your sentences are too long. They are too complicated. I don’t understand them. Write shorter sentences.” OMG, FFS. LMA* – 4 – UAW** – IMHO.

Translation of unusual terms: LMA* = Leave Me Alone. UAW** = You aRe Wrong.

Acknowledgements: My quote from the poem, inaccurate, and from memory, is from John Agard, whose poetry I love. I acknowledge now his poem and its influence upon me. I too am no Oxford don, and I too am an immigrant. His wonderful reading of the full poem can be found here. John Agard, Oxford Don.

Ides of March

Ides of March

Sometimes, as the sun goes down, the shadows close in.
You can sense real people, half-hidden in the mists
rising up from the ground. You shiver in their presence.

They fought a battle here, according to legend.
Legends never lie, though they hide away the facts,
as these mists hide those fallen warriors, brought
back to life, in the half-light, and thirsting for warm blood.

In the distance, blood flows staining the evening sky.
When the hairs on your neck rise up as wraiths, you take
to your heels and run to the place where you left your car.

Westbury White Horse, Badbury Rings, Maiden Castle –
such places are haunted with those whose spirits never left,
never moved on. They stayed here, defending the defenseless,
spirited warriors, never saying die, not even when dead.

Close by, at the hill’s foot, someone has built an altar
crowned by a small, carved cross. Who put those flowers on it?
Who came to bless the peace of those who dream and wait?

The Ides of March have come once more. Now they have gone.
Like all those other Ides before them, like all those years,
those seasons, those warriors. Come and gone. Or not gone,
as you stand there, sensing their spirits, living on and on.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

Comment: The Ides of March – March 15 this year, two days before St. Patrick’s Day. “The Ides of March are come.” “Ay, Caesar. Come but not gone.” William Shakespeare. Julius Caesar. The Ides always seem such a precious time. Sandwiched between St. David (Wales) on March 1 and St. Patrick (Ireland) on March 17, and all so close to the Equinox and the start of spring. It is snowing outside my window as I type. About four inches / ten centimeters down and more to come. But, with the lengthening of the daylight hours and the arrival of spring, we hope the snow won’t last too long.

Landscape

Landscape

Your face: a landscape
luminous in the darkness,
a mapa mundi in the light,
your heart spread out.

My eyes trace the contours,
follow the ups and downs
of your existence, track crows’
feet, crinkling by your eyes.

Time has carved, molded,
sculptured your features.
Wind, snow, wet weather,
sunlight, each has left its mark,
a wrinkle when you frown,
a dimple when you smile.

My eyes want to rest here
for a while, take in the tracks,
pause at the passes, climb hills,
descend into valleys and dales.

Such beauty spread before me.
Such a joy to contemplate
the way you are able to show
the paths I have walked of late.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

“It [landscape] is the most ancient presence in the world, though it needs a human presence to acknowledge it.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 37.

Blessings

Blessings

I wish I could bless you
as you have blessed me,
with gifts of love and life.

Together, we have walked
this world, wandered its shores,
scaled rocks, seen rich tapestries
of land painted beneath us.

Only you know me as I am,
know what I want to say,
the difficulty I have in saying it.

You know why words trip
on my teeth and lip, and exit
with those little slips
that make me hesitate to speak.

Do tree roots speak? Does
the yucca, blossoming each
spring, share words with
the hollyhock growing beside it?

Do the birds and the bees
silently commune, as we
so often do, sitting together,
peaceful in our silence,
and doubly blessed?

I wish such blessings to fall
on all who need this verse.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

“When you feel love for your beloved and the beloved’s love for you, now and again you should offer the warmth of your love as a blessing for those who are damaged and unloved.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 35.

Comment: I changed read [sound reading] to need in the last line, because most people who need such blessings will probably be unable to access this blog. My apologies for my initial short-sightedness. My thanks for being allowed to make the correction.

Erratic

Erratic
Four Elements pp. 156-159

Plucked before my time
by some glacial hand,
that tore me from my land
and deposited me on
this foreign shore.

Long did I languish,
worn slowly down
by wind, rain, ice, snow.
Now I am carved anew
and learning to grow.

The old land rejected me,
wouldn’t let me back.
This land had no choice,
but I found I had lost all
notion of a distinctive voice.

Now I belong nowhere, a stranded
immigrant, I cannot return.
Neither can I call this place home,
and yet I have sent my roots
deep into its landscape.

I have grown into it,
become one with its seasons,
accepting its long hours
of silence, with white snow
falling upon darkening trees.

World Within

World Within
Anam Cara, p. 15

I have rediscovered a world within me,
a secret world where I walked as a child,
a world that nobody else has ever seen.

When I was young, that world absorbed me.
In it, I went round and round on roundabouts,
and travelled high and low on swings and
swing boats, with their rough ropes.

Alas, as always, there were rainy days.
Then the sun would wear his hat but I knew
he would come out later and join my play.

Sometimes, in the summer, thunderstorms
would roll around and rattle our corrugated roof.
Dai Jones’ cows would rush through the field,
seeking shelter from the wind and rain.

In those days, every cloud had a silver lining.
I weathered tough times, waiting patiently
for the sun to return and light up the world.

One day, I don’t remember when, someone,
I don’t know who, slammed the door and shut
me out from that world. I spent my whole life
searching for it. At last, I have found it again.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

Sound of Silence

Sound of Silence
Cara Anam, p. xv

Where do the deer go
when they leave their tracks
behind them and pass out of our sight?

We lose them when, like school children,
they scale the snow bank,
stop at the roadside, and look left,
right, and left again, then walk sedately,
one by one, across the road, and blend
into the dark woods opposite our house.

Too many friends have walked a similar way,
crossed the great divide, and lost themselves
in the unknown that lies there, out of sight.

All too soon, we will be faced by that same
decision, whether or not to cross.
Our paths already tell us where we’ll go,
but the hands of our body clocks don’t yet
point to how, or when.

Click here to listen to Roger’s reading.

White Wolf

White Wolf

The white wolf of winter
exits her den-warmth and
shakes snow from her coat. Flakes
fly, whitening the world.

She points her nose skywards,
clears her throat, howls until
cold winds blow their chorus
of crystals, crunchy crisp.

We cower behind wooden walls,
peer out through frosted glass.
The white wolf draws near and she huffs
and she puffs until door frames rattle.

The snow drifts climb higher,
blotting out the light. Night
falls, an all-embracing
Arctic night of endless
snow snakes slithering on
ice-bound, frost-glass highways,
side roads and city streets.

Outside, in the street lights’
flicker, snow flies gather.
Thicker than summer moths,
they drop to the ground, form
ever-deepening drifts.

Our dreams become nightmares:
endless, sleepless nights, filled
with the white wolf’s winter
call for snow and even more snow.

Click here to hear Roger’s reading.