Fall

Challenge

Challenge

What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?

The months change but the challenge never does. How does one stay alive? How does one survive? How does one pass the time from one minute to the next, one hour to the next, one day to the next, one week to the the next, and one month to the next?

I faced a challenge this morning. I got to the shop and could not climb over the piled up ice to reach the slippery step that led to the salted sidewalk that led to the shop’s entrance. Fortunately a kind young man took my arm, and helped me upwards, onto the sidewalk. He waited while I shopped and brought me back down to the car, arm in arm, and carrying my shopping. I gave him a poetry book, Septets for the End of Time, as a reward.

What will be the next big challenge? I honestly don’t know. Starting the snow blower at -20C, perhaps? Blowing the snow and avoiding a slip, a fall, a sit down on a snow bank from which I cannot get up? Who knows? I don’t. I need more medicine – will my biggest challenge be finding that the pharmacy has again run low on my medication and I have to wait for my renewals? I have just had a blood test – three months late – and I don’t know what the results will be? Will that be my biggest challenge – coming face to face with a negative result that demands more action? I just don’t know. Driving out the other day, I met a speeding car on my side of the road, in my lane, coming straight towards me. The driver was staring at his cell phone, one hand on the wheel, eyes down, concentrating on something that certainly wasn’t the road. I swerved aside, towards the snow bank, honked the horn, and he looked up, eyes wide with shock, and swerved away. Brown trouser time, I guess, for that unfortunate individual.

It would be so nice to have a smart answer. My biggest challenge will be to find a solution to the chess problem that has puzzled me for years – how to defend Queen side openings when Black. My biggest challenge will be to draw the cards for a perfect hand of cribbage. My biggest challenge will be to pay the grocery bills as the prices rise. My biggest challenge will be to pay the dentist’s bills when I have no dental coverage and the savings dwindle every month. My biggest challenge will be how to avoid the pain in my teeth now that I can no longer afford the dentist. My biggest challenge will be to crawl to the telephone and get help if I manage to fall in the kitchen and cannot get up.

So, what is my greatest challenge over the next six months? Living from day to day, without falling downstairs and killing myself – how about that for an answer?

Snow falls – what if we fall…

Snow falls – what if we fall…

There I was – with my trusty snow-blower blowing the snow – and I shifted gear to go backwards – and my glove caught – and the snow-blower kept on coming – straight at me – and there wasn’t room to manoeuvre -manoeuver – maneuver – aka I couldn’t get out of the way – and the snow bank behind me caught me just at the back of the knees – and I sat down in the snow – oh dear – luckily I let go of the gear lever and the throttle lever – but the machine was almost on top of me – and I couldn’t get up – so I called for help – but no help came – and I tried to pull on the machine with one hand – and I put the other on an ice patch in the snow and that hand went through – so I am sitting there – can’t stop laughing – and then my beloved appears – and she brings me my walking stick – and she moves the snow blower forward – and then she gives me the stick – in my left hand – lifts me and pushes – while I lift with the left and pull with the right – and I have pulled a cork from a champagne bottle more easily than I pulled myself out of that snow – but together we did it – and oh was I wet – I had to finish the blowing – go inside – and change my jeans – and I am still laughing at the thought of myself – sitting there in that snow – and I needed to pee so badly – as the cold and damp crept in and – what if there had been nobody there to help – or what if it had been windy and my cries had not been heard – and what if we fall – as so many others have done before – fall to rise no more – and what if – “if – if – if – if – onions climbed a cliff – potatoes would rise – with watery eyes – if it wasn’t for if -” and that’s what my grandfather always sang to me when I asked him “what if…?” – so- what if … but don’t answer – because we’ll never know –

Fall Migration

Fall Migration

Standing in the sun, watching the leaves
scuttling, skittering over the grass,
listening to the trees, their dry tongues,
chittering autumnal rumors of geese
preparing to fly, their movements,
as they gather, in accord with patterns
hard-wired genetically into their minds.

Animate, they are, and more than that
they are animated by ancestral spirits
that grace grass and water, walking,
delicate, between stark trees, calling,
always calling ‘away, away’.

We too are called, called to follow
the geese on their sky-way high-ways,
where their arrow-heads point us all
along the star paths
of their migrant nocturnal ways.

Click here for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Fall Migration

Hollyhock

Hollyhock

Is it a silken purse
made from the pig’s ear
of its seed pod,
or just a single seed
excreted by
an incontinent bird?

Its bruised
evening-sky hues
stretch their emperor’s
imperial purple all too thin.
In the late summer sun
it swallows one errant bee
in its leviathan mouth.

Sole survivor,
from a score of flowers
that once climbed
the seven foot,
eight foot stalk
to sway in the wind,
it stands on guard
against fall cold
and winter’s snow.

Click here for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Hollyhock

Comment: I didn’t like the ending to the earlier version, so, when it came to reading it, I rewrote it first instead. I much prefer this version. Apologies to those who read the earlier words.



Sisyphus

Sisyphus

Long gone, those good old days, dead and gone,
their centers collapsed in on themselves
unable to hold on to time’s hands
circling the clock of ages, that timeless rock.

Beyond these days, long days when light will fail
to enlighten, eyes will be dimmed, the burden
will grow heavier and even more heavy
with life lying in wait, to weigh us down,
always lying, and the lies themselves
more rocks added to the pile we must carry.

Carrying them is one thing. Rolling them up
this endless hill only to have them roll down,
again and again, forcing us to stoop once more,
not to conquer, but merely to live our lives,
to journey onwards, relentlessly, to endure
from the beginning of the end until the last,
and we must endure, will endure to the last.

“Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.”
Albert Camus

Click for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Sisyphus



Poetry Painting

Poetry Painting

This was a totally new experience: a poem written over a painting that linked visual to verbal. I tried several versions of the words and have come up with a better one… but, once the words are on the canvas, it’s so hard to change them. The spoken word, once loosed, can never be recalled.

Our New Brunswick leaves have gone already. We are looking at ships’ masts, sails unfurled, in an anchored harbor. Further south, Thanksgiving is here. My distant neighbors and friends are contemplating turkeys and family gatherings and all that is good about harvest festivals and the end of the productive year, the agriculturally productive year, that is. Below them, in Mexico, the land of four continuous harvests, growth continues.

The cycle of the seasons rolls on and on. In the British Isles Woodhenge has turned into Stonehenge. Four thousand five hundred years of history measured in stone circles, seasonal star and sun points, times for sowing and harvesting. Absolutely bewilderingly marvelous. More than 5,500 standing stone calendars can be found in those islands.

And here, in my painting, leaves, letters, words deliver a message of intertextuality. Change is upon us. We live with it, focus on it, describe it in words. Each letter, each word, is a leaf on the tree, falling or soon to fall.

Autumn Leaves

Catch them
if
you can.


Catch them
while
you can.

Autumn Leaves.
Don’t grieve.
Close the door
when she is gone.

Click on this link for Roger’s reading.
Autumn Leaves

Songs of Praise

Songs of Praise

Who has seen the early spring wind drifting
its thought-clouds across the grass, moving
shadows over the lawn’s green, thrusting spikes.

Sometimes, I speak my thoughts aloud, hoping
that nobody can hear or see them as they leave
migratory footsteps across my mind.

Autumn now and I watch the wind twist
leaves from the tree. Yellow and red,
they flee from me. I do not understand
their reluctance to stay, their urge to tear
away and leave. The birds must leave for they
cannot bear the cold, cannot stay without food.

At night, when I close the garage door, I sing
hymns to the trees and to him who always hears.
Each note forms like a pea in the pod of my throat
and launches itself skywards, migrating upwards,
in a feathered flock that celebrates in songs.

Words, migrant birds, their flight unplanned,
will not stay still, will neither perch, nor gather,
nor feed from the outstretched hand.

Click on link for Roger’s reading.
Songs of Praise.

Late Fall

Late Fall

Late fall with falling leaves,
trees stripped wind-blown bare,
and winter drawing close.

The huntsman, the archer,
the Cerne Abbas Giant,
Hercules and his club
walking high in the sky, a dog
forever at their heels, ever faithful,
ever true. Star-jewels line his belt,
where the star-sword swings,
the bow, and all his magnificence
displayed before us.
Bow down before him and rejoice.

The year is turning,
or has turned and we are turning
with it. Back to our pasts,
on to our futures, or else we stand
here, gazing skywards,
our feet mired in the present,
minds locked, nowhere to go.

Click on the link for Roger’s reading.
Late Fall

My First Thanksgiving

My First Thanksgiving

For the first twenty-two years of my life
Thanksgiving held no meaning, no life,
no substance, no form, nothing familiar,
nothing special to hold my attention.

When I emigrated to Canada
my cousins changed all that
with an invitation to visit them
in Kincardine for Thanksgiving.

Turkey on the table, colored
table napkins, and a family gathered,
arms outstretched, to make me welcome.

We were all surprised at how alike we looked.
“Like Cousin George, in Vancouver,” they said.
“Like Cousin Elsie in Revelstoke.”
“Like my mother’s mother, back home
in Swansea,” I said.

They told me how the Second World War
had brought the family back together
on these special holidays:
Christmas in Wales for the Canadian boys
or Thanksgiving in Winnipeg
for the Welsh boys learning to fly.

That Thanksgiving, the old family names
turned to photographs: snaps of my mother’s wedding,
my grandmother holding me, age three, on her knee.

And finally, as a special Thanksgiving gift,
a long-distance call to Britain and Clare
on the telephone saying
“Yes,” she would come to Canada,
and “yes,” she would marry me.

And I remember crying all the way
from Kincardine to Toronto,
and that was my first Thanksgiving in Canada.

Comment: A Golden Oldie, indeed. This poem is from my collection Secret Gardens. The secret love poems I write to Clare. It was published on our Silver Wedding Anniversary, 24 December 1991. It is a pleasure to re-publish it here for Thanksgiving, 2021. Now what am I going to do for 24 December 2021?

Click on the link below for Roger’s reading.

My First Thanksgiving