Grief

Revisionism

Revisionism

Chalk on a blackboard.
Black, red, blue, green markers
on a white board.

Here comes the eraser.
The board is wiped clean,
or almost clean, figures,
letters, blurred, just about
ready for the next class.
This happens again and again.

What remains?
Notes in a student’s book?
Memories of a lesson
in tedious boredom,
the teacher droning on and on.

“Knowledge:
that which passes from my notes
to your notes,
without going through anyone’s head.”

Yesterday’s lessons:
dry dust of a doctoral thesis.

Revisionism:
“What color is the blackboard?”
“Last year, it was green, but
this year, the blackboard is white.”

Click here for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Revisionism

Gilt Trip

Gilt Trip

A walking gilt trip
and the woes of the journey
packed into the old kit bag
that bends your back
and weighs down your shoulders.

Take care lest you stumble,
for if you stumble
you will surely fall, and every fall
is a precipice that will never allow you
to get back up again.

Where is the stranger, the faceless one,
the as-yet-unknown one who will care
just because he cares and will help you
stand up once more on your own two feet?

Take root where you stand.
Plant your feet solidly into the ground.
The winds of change will blow,
but they will not topple you.

Raise your eyes to the sunrise.
Strive upwards, ever upwards,
turn towards the light,
that fragile lightness
of everlasting light.

Click on this link for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Gilt Trip

Outreach

Outreach

It’s so easy to cast the tiniest
pebble into the tranquil pond.

Sit and watch the ripples spreading,
flowing outwards, touching unknown
shores with a smidgen of warmth,
a lapping of love.

Reaching out, from the center
to the periphery, not knowing
where the outreach is going,
but knowing that the effort is
never in vain if it helps someone’s
suffering, reduces their loneliness,
brings light to their lives,
and relieves their pain.

Bread cast upon the waters,
returned in great store,
three, five, seven, ten times
more than what you cast.

Your spider-web lines
thrown inwards and outwards
in a gesture of faith, hope,
and a charity chest of tenderness
to lighten a burden, to remove
the dark from another’s heart.

It’s so easy to select a pebble,
but who will throw that first stone?

Click here to hear Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Outreach

Teeth WFNB 5 March 2022

Teeth WFNB
5 March 2022
This is the story I was reading last night when Island View suffered its brief power outage and I was cut off from the WFNB Zoom reading. My apologies for the break in communications. First the text and then the live reading.

Lunchtime.
            I open a can of tom8to soup and heat it on the stove. I slice the remains of yesterday’s loaf of bread into one-inch cubes and fry them in olive oil and garlic. Tom8to soup with croutons. Then I put two slices of bread in the toaster. My father will only eat toast soaked in butter and layered with Marmite when he eats tomahto soup.
            “Lunch is ready,” I call out.
            The black American Cocker Spaniel, bought by my mother in a moment of madness, by telephone, unseen, camps in the kitchen. It nests at the far end of the table, by the stove, and defends its territory with warning growls and a snapping of yellowed teeth. I do my best to avoid the dog.
            “Dad, your lunch is ready,” I call out, a little bit louder. Dog, as my father calls it, growls and clatters its teeth. It has hidden a treasure in the folds of its old, gray comfort blanket, and guards it with the fierce, loving worry of a dragon protecting its golden hoard.
            My father enters the kitchen just as I place the soup on the table.
            “I’m not ready to eat,” my father growls. Put it back in the pot.”
            “What’s wrong, dad? I thought you were hungry.”
            “My teeth,” my father mumbles through a mouthful of pink gums. “I can’t find my teeth.”
            “Where on earth did you put them?”
            “I don’t know. If I knew where I’d put them, I wouldn’t have lost them.”
            My father circulates round the kitchen opening drawers, lifting saucepan lids, and shaking empty yogurt pots to see if they’ll offer up the rattling sound of lost teeth.
            “I can’t find them anywhere. I can’t eat lunch without my teeth.”
            “But it’s only soup, dad, tom8to soup.”
            “I don’t like tom8to soup. Your mother always made tomahto soup. Why can’t you be more like your mother?”
            “Sorry, dad. I’ll call it tomahto soup, if that will make you feel better. But it’s still made out of tom8toes.”
            “Don’t be so sarcastic. Help me find my teeth,” my father stomps towards the stove and Dog growls fiercely from its blanket as it guards its treasure.
            “Take that, you dirty dog,” my father pokes Dog in the ribs with his stick and Dog howls and spits out what it is chewing.
            “There they are,” my father’s voice trembles with excitement. He bends down, picks up his teeth, still hairy from the blanket and bubbly from Dog’s saliva, and pops them into his mouth. “That’s better,” he says, sitting down at the table. “Now I can enjoy my lunch.”

Click on this link for a ‘live’ reading of the story,
complete with Welsh accent.

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

Click here for Roger’s reading.
Daffodils

Forget Me Knot

Forget Me Knot

so easy to forget
the troubled times
when the lines of life
did not align
with what we thought
we wanted even if
we didn’t really want it
and it wasn’t any good
for us anyway but we did it
in spite of knowing all the time
the harm it would do
short term long term
and the results of that one
false step walk with us still
and we wish we could wash away
the stains on our hearts
souls minds memories underwear
but the strings are knotted and tied
and we can forget them knot

Click on this link for Roger’s reading.
Forget Me Knot


Pocket Paintings

Pocket Paintings
Peintures de Poche

My usual discipline has deserted me and, as a result, I have deserted my blog, abandoned it, gone absent without leave. It’s not that I am not creating: I am. I am just not posting. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I thought that, for a change, I would post some of my Pocket Paintings / Peintures de Poches. Maybe I will be inspired to write verse about them. Maybe not. We’ll see.

Supplication

I raise my hand to heaven
in fervent supplication:
you sever it at the wrist.

I spread out my arms in despair:
you take out a tape and measure me
for a tailor-made, hand-crafted cross.

I step on my bathroom scales
only to find that they have become
the scales of your justice:
I mourn every pound I have put on.

Where can I turn for solace
when all around I see
nothing but sorrow and tears?

Covid bears us all down.
An albatross, it hangs around our necks
and when we raise a hand,
your knife is there to cut it off.

Who are you? What are you?
Where are you when we need you?
Why are you there judging us like this?

I look up at the sky.
By day, a great cyclopean eye
winks and blinks and tells me nothing.
I look at the sky at night:
a silver moon slides silently by.

Orion stalks away to the west.
He leaves me restless, breathless,
agape at all this beauty
that I dare not reach out and grasp.


My Father in Oaxaca

My Father in Oaxaca

I saw my father this evening. 
I walked through the zócalo,
opened the main cathedral doors,
looked up, and there he stood,
motionless. 

Light shone through stained glass
and gifted him a halo,
as if he were some long dead
saint come back to visit me. 

We stared at each other.
The hairs on my neck
stood on end.

My hands shook. 
When I forced my mouth open,
words stuck in my throat. 

He wore his best grey suit
over a light blue shirt
and a dark blue,
hand woven tie: 
the outfit in which
I had buried him.

Click on this link for Roger’s reading.
My Father in Oaxaca

Survivors

Survivors
Chuck Bowie
(KIRA, June, 2019)

We met at St. Andrews, at low tide, on
the underwater road. In secret we
shared the closed, coded envelopes of thought,
running fresh ideas through open minds.

Our words, brief vapor trails, gathered for
a moment over Passamaquoddy,
before drifting silently away. Canvas sails
flapped white seagulls across the bay.

All seven seas rose before our eyes, brought
in on a breeze’s wing. The flow of cold
waters over warm sand cocooned us
in a cloak-and-dagger mystery of mist.

We spun our spider-web dreams word by word,
decking them out with the silver dew drops
proximity brings. Characters’ voices,
unattached to real people, floated by.

Verbal ghosts, shape-shifting, emerging from
shadows, revealed new attitudes and twists,
spoke briefly, filled us with visions of book-
lives, unforgettable, but doomed, swift to fail.

Soft waves ascended rock, sand, mud, to wash
away footprints, clues, all the sandcastle
dreams we had constructed that afternoon,
though a few still survive upon the printed page.

Comment: We, like the words we leave on the printed page, are survivors. Sometimes, when the seas rise high and our paths grow rough and hard to travel, we need a friend to reach out to us in our time of need. That friendship extends across differences and distances. Here, on the shores of time, we can meet and greet and share. Patos de diciembre, we can paddle together and give each other strength and comfort.

This poem appears on pages 64-65 of The Nature of Art and the Art of Nature, soon to be available at Cyberwit and Amazon. More details later.

Click on this link for Roger’s reading.
Survivors