Shadow
“- sometimes we live in the shadows –
sometimes we live in the sun –
but even when the sun is shining –
a shadow can fall on anyone -“
Shadow
Angels
Me and My Bride!
Me and My Bride!
A friend wrote to me today and sent her greetings to ‘you and your bride’. Well, that delightful phrase set me thinking. Clare (my bride!) and I have known each other for 61 years and we have been married for 56 of them, 57 this Christmas. I often wonder how this wonderful woman has put up with me during all those years.
Mrs. Thomas Thomas, my good friend from the little village in Wales where my parents had their house, once told me about a friend of hers. That friend had been married for 35 years and had never had a quarrel or a fight with her husband. ‘There she goes,’ she told me one morning. ‘Never a fight with her husband. Bloody boring marriage, if you ask me.’
The point, I suppose, is that yes, there can be disagreements within a marriage, and doubts, and uncertainties, and questions about major decisions, and no, we don’t agree on everything? How could we? And one of the best parts about marriage, well, ours anyway, is agreeing to differ, and then making up again, as quickly as possible, after any disagreements.
Whatever, it is hard to argue against 61 years of togetherness and happiness. The secret formula? Clare’s – to learn my languages with me, to help me with my work, to lift me up when I am down. Mine – to love cooking for her, spoiling her, bringing her flowers, and trying to support her as she has supported me.
We have often led separate lives – Clare as a tennis player, a national gymnastics judge, a dedicated show secretary of the local kennel club, a show dog owner, groomer, and handler. Me – as a rugby player and coach, a researcher who has travelled frequently and visited important libraries in my field, a poet and short story writer who has taken and led workshops and writing groups.
We have also worked together at all levels. Each of my four graduate courses (MA, Toronto, 1967) demanded a paper every two weeks. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – paper #1. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday -paper #2. Saturday – rugby with U of T Blues or Toronto Irish. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – paper #3. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – paper #4.
I would sit in the kitchen and write the papers in longhand. Clare would sit at the other side of the table and type each page as I finished it. She did the editing too, when and where necessary. She also developed her computing skills faster than I did. Result: web pages, art work, design, photography, and several of my book covers. Our keys to success include team work, mutual assistance, deep caring and sharing, but separate paths, when and if we needed to take them.
So, there you have it. A swiftly-penned picture of me and my bride, or, as I call her, my better two-thirds. My life would have been very, very different without her. And don’t forget: behind every lucky man, there stands a wonderful woman.
Ghosts
Ghosts
Who are they, these ghosts
who flit into our lives
and leave us foundering
in treacherous waters
as we search for
enlightenment and meaning?
Why do they return,
revenants, to disturb
our peace and quiet,
and to trouble our sleep.
Who are they?
So deep, so distant,
we no longer know them.
Memory’s fish-hook
cannot snag them,
cannot haul them
back into daylight reality
far from night’s net
of silvery dreams.
Click here for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Ghosts
Comment: I read the poem out loud, copied it to Anchor and Spotify, then found I didn’t like the way it sounded. So, I rewrote it. That accounts for the difference between the sound recording and the revised written text. Fun and games.
Star Struck
Star Struck
Last night, when least expected,
out of nowhere, a new star
and beyond it, the Red Planet.
Light fragments, disintegrates.
I grasp at snow flakes
as they stumble, falling stars
sliding down the sky.
I stretch out my hand
to grasp the magic of the moment,
but I cannot comprehend the mystery.
I shiver – knowing I must leave
the warmth of my bed,
my comfort zone,
to walk alone in cold and dark.
Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus
Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus
Daffodils
(for my mother)
Light in dark
bright yellow stridence
shrill golden dog’s bark
to warn off death’s wolves
that freeze her blood
she dreaded night’s unease
the devil’s wintry anti-spring
life’s darkest sparks
but loved the daffodils’
sunny March cadence
of brief piercing dance
Sonnet: Angel Choir
Angel Choir
(on seeing the Northern Lights at Ste. Luce-sur-mer)
Sonnet
Listen to the choristers with their red and green voices.
Light’s counterpoint flowering across this unexpected son et lumière,
we tremble with the sky fire’s crackle and roar.
Once upon another time, twinned with our heavenly wings,
we surely flew to those great heights and hovered in wonderment.
Now, wingless, our earthbound feet are rooted to the concrete.
If only our hearts could sprout new wings and soar upwards together.
The moon’s phosphorescent wake swims shimmering before us.
The lighthouse’s finger tingles up and down our spines.
Our bodies flow fire and blood till we crave light, and yet more light.
We fall silent, overwhelmed by the celestial response.
When the lights go out, hearts and souls are left empty.
Leaving the divine presence is a gut-wrenching misery.
Abandoned, hurt and grieving, we are left in darkness.
Comment: The Spanish mystics, St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Avila, wrote, in the sixteenth-century, about the ‘dark night of the soul’. That dark night also arrives when the communion with the spiritual finishes and the communicants are left alone, in their loneliness, abandoned to their earthly selves. To leave the divine presence is a heart-breaking, gut-wrenching misery. To turn from the marvels of nature can produce lesser, but still deeply moving feelings of grief and sadness. The secret is to preserve that joy and to carry it with us always, warm, in our hearts. Doing so makes the pain of separation much more bearable.
55 Years Married
55 Years Married
White Flame
in praise of my beloved
White flame, her hair, emerging from shadows,
lighting her path downhill toward water’s edge.
Wind-driven waves splash lake-side where she
will wander. I watch her footsteps, not now
as firm as once they were. Burgeoning age
grips hip and joint. Toes and heels no longer
lift in the same old way. Component parts
break down, arteries clog, arthritis worms,
painful, into fingers, wrists, and knees. I
recall nursery rhymes: “Jack be nimble, Jack
be quick,” but she isn’t anymore and
neither of us could jump over candles.
Candlelight, inner light, outer light, her
hair, so pure, so white, her voice clear as a
bell, soft yet luminous, as she picks her
way on a perilous path through wayward
woods, not stumbling yet, nor lumbering,
and still she lives, as I still live, in hopes
to see each other, until earth stops our eyes
and we can see, sense, touch, hear no more …
Comment: Yes, we got married 55 years ago today. This poem, written for Clare, appears on page 120 of The Nature of Art and the Art of Nature in the section entitled The Nature of Human Nature. I have written several very personal poems about Clare and our relationship and they can be found in Secret Gardens the chapbook I published in 1991 on the occasion of our 25th wedding anniversary. Several poems from that collection also appear in Stars at Elbow and Foot. Selected Poems, 1979-2009. (Cyberwit, 2021). The painting that decorates this page is also by Clare. She is a talented multi-media designer and several of my book covers were designed by her. This is one of her rare paintings. We have three of them on the wall, and they are all exceptional.
Lorca’s Duende
Lorca’s Duende
Duende
“Todo lo que tiene sonidos oscuros tiene duende.”
“All that has dark sounds has duende.”
Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)
It starts in the soles of your feet, moves up
to your stomach, sends butterflies stamping
through your guts. Heart trapped by chattering
teeth, you stand there, silent, wondering: can I?
will I? … what if I can’t? … then a voice
breaks the silence, but it’s not your voice.
The Duende holds you in its grip as you
hold the room, eyes wide, possessed,
taken over like you by earth’s dark powers
volcanic within you, spewing forth their
lava of living words. The room is alive
with soul magic, with this dark, glorious
spark that devours the audience, soul
and heart. It’s all over. The magic ends.
Abandoned, you stand empty, a hollow shell.
The Duende has left you. Your God is dead. Deep
your soul’s black starless night. Exhausted,
you sink to deepest depths searching for that
one last drop at the bottom of the bottle to save
your soul and permit you a temporary peace.
Click on this link for Roger’s reading.
Lorca’s Duende
Comment:
I guess the secret is to have infinite trust and to hand yourself over to those higher powers during the performance. Some can do it individually, others need to be part of a team. It works differently for each one of us. But when the lower element surrenders to the soul-fulfilling higher element, miracles happen. And when they are over, we are left bereft. It’s the same, in many ways, with mystical experiences. After we venture into the beyond, Messiaen’s Au-dela, upon our return to our earth-bound existence, we are left stunned and stranded by our former voyage into absolute beauty.
Time Beyond Time
Meditations on Messiaen
Quartet for the End of Time
7
Time Beyond Time
Time beyond time and the eternal
ever-present in the quotidian.
When the Seventh Angel sounds his trumpet,
time will be no more and this earth
will be pulped, like an orange,
in an almighty hand, clenched into a fist.
Thus it is writ, and sundry have read the words.
repetitive forms cycle and recycle themselves,
diatonic chords disassociated by duration.
Laud, bless and praise always the vivid joy,
light and color lighting up the skies
in an aurora borealis seldom seen.
Indefectible light, unalterable peace,
rhythmic repetition, time’s serpent
circling around itself and devouring its tail
in assonance and dissonance, the utmost beauty
of raindrop birdsong, its liquid forever decanted.
Infinitely slow, ecstatic is the message.
“Laud, bless, and praise him all thy days
for it is seemly so to do.”
Old One Hundredth.
Click on the link below for Roger’s reading.
Crystal Liturgy
Meditations on Messiaen
Quartet for the End of Time
6
Crystal Liturgy
Here, in the abyss,
where song-birds pluck their notes
and send them, feather-light,
floating through the air,
here there are no tears,
no fear of shadow-hawks,
for all blackness is abandoned
in the interests of sunlight and song.
Here, the crystal liturgy surges,
upwards from the rejoicing heart,
ever upwards, into the realms of light,
where color and sound alike
brim over with the joy that, yes,
brings tears of release to head and heart.
Here, the seven trumpets will sound
their furious dance that will announce
the end of this singer, the end of time,
but not the end of song itself.
Here, seven-stringed rainbows reign.
Here, the harp is tuned and plucked.
Here, the everlasting music
cements the foundations of earth and sky.
Here, the master musician conducts
his eternal choir, their voices rising,
higher and higher, until they reach
the highest sphere, and song and voice
inspire, then expire, passing from our eyes
and ears into the realms of everlasting light.
Click on the link below for Roger’s reading
rogermoorepoet 