Giving Thanks

Voices

Voices

I forced my characters
into the roles that I chose for them.
Sometimes they complained
and refused to obey me.

Late one night, they came
and knocked on the window
that opens in my head when I dream.

They started to complain
about how I was treating them
and demanded that I change my ways.

I listened as they yapped, and yammered,
and strewed their growing pains
on the counterpane before me.

When I woke up, I remembered
what they had told me and I wrote
down their stories in their words, not mine.
Then they came to life and spoke through me.

Comment:
This poem and the next one both came from yesterday’s prompt – what do you listen to? The act of ranting, based on a prompt, often generates imagery that can then be used in either poetry or prose. The secret is to cut away the dross and find the gems that are often hidden within the rant. This leads, in my opinion, to enhanced creativity.

What do you listen to while you work?

Daily writing prompt
What do you listen to while you work?
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What do you listen to while you work?

While I was actually working, although I never called it work, because I thought of it as a vocation, I listened to the complaints of the administration (often about my way of work). I also listened to my students (all too often their complaints about the system and the way they were being taught and treated). And then I listened to the problems that were daily laid before me in my office by these same students. These, problems and students, were many and varied. One day, I designed a label for my door that announced: Office of Creative Solutions. And yes, I provided many innovative and creative solutions to problems that, to young people, especially my students, seemed almost impossible to resolve.

Then I retired. At least, like an ageing horse, or an unwanted donkey, I was put out to grass. And in that clover-filled meadow, I grazed at leisure and worked no more. But I did have time to write and so I became a creative writer. At first, when I started creative writing, I forced my characters into the roles that I had chosen for them. Sometimes they complained. Then, one day, or maybe it was one night when I was dreaming, a host of my characters, minor and major, came knocking on my door. They carried a big arrow that had, written upon it, Office of Creative Solutions. They pointed it at me and began to complain about how I was treating them. I remembered the poem I had memorized as a child – The owl, he was a wise old bird, the more he spoke, the less he heard. The less he spoke, the more he heard. There never was such a wise old bird.

I remembered how I had listened to my students and how, by listening, I managed to find creative solutions to their problems. So, I listened to those characters as they yammered away. One by one, they told me their woes, and their problems. Then, the following day, I rewrote everything I had written previously and wrote the stories down in their own words, instead of mine. When I listened to them, I allowed my characters to tell their own stories, and to speak for me and through me.

Sometimes, when I run out of voices that come in the night and tell me what to say, I cannot write. Then I take a paint brush, and I start to paint. What do I listen to when I paint? I listen to the brush as it moves itself over the canvas. I listen to the colors as they demand attention and tell me where to place them. I listen to the paint as it says ‘just here, not too thick, not too thin, a swirl please, gently now.”

Now, when I am not working, I listen to flowers, trees, the wind in the willows, the songs of the falling leaves, and the voices of birds.

What’s your favorite [card] game?

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?
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What’s your favorite [card] game?

Well, it’s so easy to get bored with board games, so my favorite card game is sending and receiving e-cards for all sorts of occasions. Costs nothing, other than the initial membership / subscription fee, arrives almost instantly, often elicits an unexpected response, keeps me in touch with my friends all over the world, no quarreling over who is winning or losing, because when card and reply arrive, we are all winners, and there is very little lost in the post, like those letters that are still turning up from the WWI trenches. Missing, believed lost in action, didn’t refer only to those poor souls who strayed into no man’s land and never returned.

And let’s go back to counting the costs for a moment. While I love real cards sent by mail, and I just love opening them and reading well-known hand-writing, there is something incredibly sapping about the rising cost of stamps. the ever-longer delivery delays, the enormous rise in the cost of the card itself.

And the delivery delays? Well, I sent myself a card, the other day, by the old-fashioned method. It took nearly ten days to arrive. I think that it was sent by a slow sled driven by half-starved, rebellious huskies, to the north pole, and back, possibly via one or all of the -lands – Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, or Newfoundland. Two of those places I have visited, which, by a simple sum of subtraction, means that there is at least one that I haven’t. Oh dear. I was never very good at maths or math or mathematics, or spelling either by the look of it.

And the one really unbeatable thing about playing the game of sending e-cards by e-mail: you never have to lick the banana flavoured gum on those horrible envelopes. Remember that taste? Now gone forever, though the taste lingers on in my memory.

One Small Corner

One Small Corner

 And this is the good thing,
to find your one small corner
and to have your one small candle,
then to light it, and leave it burning
its sharp bright hole in the night.

 Around you, the walls you constructed;
inside, the reduced space, the secret garden,
the Holy of Holies where roses grow
and no cold wind disturbs you.

 “Is it over here?” you ask: “Or over here?”
If you do not know, I cannot tell you.

But I will say this: turning a corner one day
you will suddenly know
that you have found a perfection
that you will seek again, in vain,
for the rest of your life.

Comment: This is the title poem of the book One Small Corner – A Kingsbrae Chronicle, written at the first Kingsbrae International Residences for Artists (July, 2017), and published on Amazon – Kindle that same year. This is the video that accompanies the poem. https://www.kingsbraeartscentre.com/ – turn up your sound. My thanks to all those involved in that first residency and especially to Mrs. Lucinda Flemer, Geoff Slater, and my fellow resident artists, Ruby Allan, Carlos Carty, Elise Muller, and Ann Wright. One Small Corner, along with some other publications, can be found by clicking here. Special thanks for the making of the video itself go out to Geoff Slater, Jeff Lively, and Cameron Lively.

Ghost Train

Ghost Train

I remember the little electric railway
that ran on a single loop around
the kitchen table, diddly-da-diddly-da,
just like a real train, except no smoke,
no puff the magic dragon, no sense
of a schedule or arriving and departing
when circular time is meaningless,
as are the numbers on the sundial
when the sun isn’t shining,
or the hands on the clock’s blank face
when the numbers are missing,
and you don’t know whether you are
looking in time’s distorting mirror
or are standing on your head
in the Antipodes, and all the while
the clock hands are marching round
and round, tick-tock, and there is
no track by which time can be tracked.

And the runaway hands go round the track,
and the electric train goes round the table,
 and the ghost train hoots whoo-hoo,
as it vanishes into the timeless tunnel,
then exits, the engineer, like Rip Van Winkle,
grown old with a long beard, and the carriages
all covered with cobwebs, and skeletons
leaping out of the compartments,
then sitting beside the travellers
as they snore on their seats.

Comment: Another poem based on a prose prompt. What a great source for poetry those prompts can be, when you don’t take them too seriously and allow your imagination to run riot and your memories to flow. Not automatic writing, but writing that springs from an absurd, surrealist approach to the crazy world that surrounds us. Rain that causes the yucca plant to grow, then falls so hard that it is battered to the ground by the very thing that gave it life. And so it is with my memories of the many trains on which I have travelled and with which I have played. Once upon a time, I couldn’t conceive of life without the railway. Where is it now? I haven’t been on a train for more than fifteen years. Strange how their ghosts flit through my dreams at night: fast trains, slow trains, the wrong train at the wrong time taking me to the wrong place in time. Ah, the poetry of trains yet, “ni temps passés ni les trains reviennent.” And you can give yourself a glow of satisfaction – thank you Tommy Reed – if you recognize the quote, and two more if you know who Tommy Reed is. I use the present tense because, although long gone, he is ever-present in my mind.

Today’s painting – another gift from my friend Moo.

Past Times

Past Times

When I was young, I used to watch
my fox terrier chasing his tail,
running round and round in circles,
never quite catching it,
but never giving up his high hopes
 of catching that little rag-tag of a bobtail
that dangles there behind.
 
Round about and out and in and out
all day that silly dog did spin,
spinning in prose and then in rhyme,
until I lost all track of time.

Comment: I loved a part of one of my prompts, so I turned it into a personal poem. The second stanza is based on a poem by Thackeray. I learned it in my youth. Learning poetry and remembering it, another past time from past times. I also love playing on words. Imitatio is one of the rhetorical devices used traditionally by poets. To imitate, is to express one’s admiration of another person’s work. It should not be confused with plagiary / plagiarism, which is something entirely different. Anyone who has followed my writing, on this blog and elsewhere, will know that I echo the words of other poets and that I do so deliberately, to praise them and acknowledge their creativity and their continuing influence upon my own poetic world.

Today’s Cartoon – A Time Apart – by my friend Moo who is very generous with his art..

A Game of Chance

A Game of Chance

You make me think of the road not walked,
the path untaken, the bay around the headland
where we never swam, the cliffs on the Gower
that we never had the time to climb.

Who knows which path is right or wrong
when we throw the dice and stake our future
on a single moment of time when, thinking done,
we come to a decision and take that first step.

The more I know, the more I realize that I know
so little and am surrounded by a world
not only unknown, but totally unknowable,
and me with my life dangling from a frail thread.

Sometimes, I dig deep into bottled sunshine,
But find no answers there, just the same questions
swirling round the glass, and the glass filled with
the same uncertainties and lack of knowledge.

I really don’t know where to go, or how to get there.
And then I remember that, if I don’t know where to go,
any path I take will lead me there. That is when I shuffle
the cards, breathe deep, and give the dice a throw.

Patience

Patience


“Patience achieves everything.”
St. Theresa wrote this in Spanish,
back in the old days, when patience
was a virtue that few possessed.
Patience has vanished nowadays.

It is as dead as a doornail,
as dead as the proverbial dodo,
as dead as whatever cliché
springs to mind in the laziness
of the instant possession of each
passing cloud, each new slogan
marketed madly on the TV.

Turn off the TV. Go out, barefoot,
and walk on rain-wet grass
or walk on sea-wrinkled sand
out into the sun-warmed waves,
there where the sandpipers
stitch their secret messages
and the crows walk barefoot too.

Learn the secrets sown there,
decipher the ancient wisdom
left on the beach by wandering gulls.

There, in the tide-mark you will find,
among the sand-papered bones
and skulls, the secrets that will solve
the mysteries that you seek.

“If you try to force the soul, you never succeed.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 147.

“La paziencia, todo lo alcanza.” St. Theresa of Avila.

A Place Eternal

A Place Eternal

When sunshine floods my body
it leads me down into a secret,
sacred space that I know exists
even though, all too often,
I am unable to locate it,
search as I may, but then,
when I no longer seek it,
it is with me, and I know
that I am no longer alone,
but wrapped in the comfort
of an angel’s protective wings.

That haunting presence lingers,
plays melodies within my mind,
invites me to return, keeps me warm
when chill winds blow.

I depart from that place,
a fingernail torn from the flesh.

“There is a place in the soul that neither space, nor time, nor flesh can touch. This is the eternal place within us.”

“You represent an unknown world that begs you to bring it to voice.”
John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 105.

Painting: Sky Wound by Moo.

Sacred Moment

Sacred Moment


Evening falls, leads into night.
I search darkening skies
for the moon’s bright circle,
so meaningful, that light.

The moon, a thin wedding ring,
encircling a gilded cradle,
wherein five planets float.

Aligned, their circular lights
create such longing
in the observer’s heart.

The magic moment has come,
a moment forever sacred.
Whatever happens now
will be correct and right.