Grief

What makes you laugh?

Daily writing prompt
What makes you laugh?
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What makes you laugh?

The current state that the world is in. Seems like a strange answer, doesn’t it? Wars, famine, plagues, diseases, fire, flood, earthquakes, drought, what is there to laugh at? All of it, of course. Because if I didn’t laugh at it, I would cry. And crying – well, there just aren’t enough tears, are there? Anyway, as the Reader’s Digest used to say “Laughter is the best medicine.” So, if we want to heal the world, we must first learn to laugh at it.

In fact, there are many things we should be laughing at – politics and politicians, for one. Or is that two? Chuckling away – it’s hard to tell them apart nowadays. In fact, if we laughed right out loud at the folies bergeres who masquerade as wise men, can-can dancers who actually can’t-can’t, and decision makers who really can’t decide, then that laughter would be the last straw that would break the camel’s back and dump them all on their backsides in the desert where they belong. There, they would be voices ‘crying in the wilderness’, crying indeed, for deprived of their privileges, none of them would be laughing. But we would. And we’d probably be a great deal better off.

New words also make me laugh. Homicide, femicide, domicide, ecocide, countrycide – tell me, who makes up these names? Who keeps popping them into the dictionary? And if they mean what I think they mean, we should all be on our knees, praying and weeping. It’s like fake suicide. That happens when push comes to shove, and the subsequent defenestration is deemed a suicide.

Look at Moo’s painting, Burning Birbi. Now that is something to really make you cry. Moo tells me he was going to call it Burning Bush, but then he remembered all the poor birbis who were burned to death in the Australian Bush Fires. They ascended the eucalyptus trees for safety, and there, of course, they met their sad and tragic fate, while trying to escape the conflagration. I can laugh many things off. But not the fate of those cuddly little Koalas, brought to the edge of destruction by our treatment of their natural habitat.

Welsh proverb – “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone.” So, I am laughing at it all. I have to – or else I will suffer a break down. So, laugh with me, and let the real losers cry in the wilderness, hermits all, abandoned to their lonesome own-somes.

Kipper Kapers

Kipper Kapers

Old Welsh Intelligence Test Question: “Does a kipper swim folded or flat?”

5-4-3-2-1 –
Time’s up, Ladies and Gentlemen.
So – what’s your answer?

Yes? No? Maybe? I don’t know?
It’s a trick question of course / wrth gwrs. And Kippers can play tricks on you too as they flipper and flapper, and flip and flop. Especially if you eat them late at night.

So this is a painting of a midnight Kipper Kaper Attack, when you want to sleep, but can’t, because you don’t know the answer to the kipper IQ test and all those little kippers are capering around and making fun of you and mocking you.

How do you avoid a Kipper Kaper Attack when the bad dreams start and the Kippers Kaper? Well, you answer this next Welsh IQ test question. “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me when down to the river to swim. Adam and Eve got drowned. Who do you think was saved?”

And if you answer “Pinch Me!” Then I will, and when I do, you’ll wake up, and you’ll be safe from another Kipper Kaper attack until the next time you eat them.

There – simple isn’t it?

What makes you feel nostalgic?

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What makes you feel nostalgic?
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What makes you feel nostalgic?

I am not sure that nostalgic is the right word. I think of Robbie Burns with his “man’s inhumanity to man” and I realize that “the war to end all wars” never ended anything. It only started a series of new cycles. I am certainly not nostalgic for these endless cycles of violence and inhumanities. I am though nostalgic for man’s humanity to man, that spark of kindness and good will that seems, on the last day of the old year, with the new year about to come in, to have vanished. Could it be forever? I certainly hope not. May the new year (2024) bring peace, happiness, love, and understanding, to all the human beings on this tiny planet we, of necessity, share.

My friend Moo’s painting (above, thank you Moo), has for its title Fiat Lux – Let There Be Light. I am nostalgic for that light. May it soon return to our world.

Remembrance Day
11 November 2023

I wasn’t there
I never saw the gas clouds
            rolling over our positions
            never felt the barbed wire’s bite
            nor the bayonet’s jab

I never hung out my washing
            on the Siegfreid Line
            (“Have you any dirty washing, mother dear?”)
            never broke out of barracks
            never did spud bashing
            nor feasted on bread and water
            nor heard the rifle’s rapid rattle

I wasn’t there
            to see them carried away in carts
            coughing spluttering vomiting
            or bandages over their eyes
            walking slowly to triage a hand on
            the shoulder of the man ahead
            the sighted leading the blind

I wasn’t there
            but both my grandfathers were
            both decorated
            one mentioned in dispatches
            signed by Winston Churchill
            that one uninjured
            the other one gassed
            coughing up his lungs
            bit by bit for forty years

I am here now
    to remember
    and to honor them
           though so much
    has been lost

Change

1

Change

Waters rise, tides get higher,
streams wash roads away.
grey, rainy skies, day after day.

Temperatures drop down at night.
Water turns to ice. Northern Lights
burn bright, set the sky alight.

I forget my gloves. Fingers, cold,
fumble at buttons, and my zip
is not the easy zip of old.

My life cries out for change,
but change is out of reach.
I change the things I can arrange.

Some days I’m weary and sore.
Most days I can do no more.

2

Change

Waters rise, tides get higher,
streams wash roads away.
Grey, rainy skies, day after day.

Temperatures drop down at night.
Water turns to ice. Northern Lights
burn bright, setting the sky alight.

I forget my gloves. Fingers, cold,
fumble at buttons, and my zip
is not the easy zipper of old.

Some days I’m weary and sore.
Most days I can do no more.

My life cries out for change,
but most changes are out of reach.
I change the things I can arrange.

Comment:

I decided to change my format today and go back to the left margin alignment, rather than the central alignment that I usually use for poetry. Your comments on the adjustment would be welcome. I have included both formats so you can see how the poem flows in each one. As for this poem – a rhyming sonnet, wow!

Moo’s painting, executed late last night, is his way of showing how rage can suddenly build and, like a runaway river, suddenly and unstoppably break out. It is extraordinary how his paintings so often mirror my moods and word flows.

Tell us about your first day at something — school

Daily writing prompt
Tell us about your first day at something — school, work, as a parent, etc.
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Tell us about your first day at something — school

My father held my hand all the way to the convent. I wiggled, squirmed, dug in my heels, but it did me no good. Too firm, his grip, too determined his grim, muscled chin. When we arrived, he dragged me up the gravel path leading to the stark, red-brick building, and jangled the bell that hung from an iron clasp. He kept a tight hold of my hand as the bell’s echoes faded away into the interior corridors. A tapping of feet, and the wooden door opened just enough to let a small, four-year old boy in. My father pushed me through that gap. I turned to wave good-bye, only to see his back as he walked rapidly down the drive.
            “Come along, child, we’ve been expecting you,” a figure in flowing black robes with a white wimple framing her face emerged from the shadows.     The nun closed the door and banished the sunlight. “Welcome,” she said. “Wipe your feet.”
            “It’s not raining. My shoes are clean.”
            “When you enter this convent, you do as you are told. Wipe your feet. Blow your nose and dry your eyes. You should be ashamed: crying at your age.”
            A rough brown coconut mat lay by the door. I stood on it and moved my feet backwards and forwards, sniveling as I did so.
            “Now follow me.”
            The nun walked down the shadowy corridor, her leather sandals flip-flapping against the polished wood floor. The scent from the highly waxed boards rose up and flooded my nostrils. I looked down to see my face distorted by the floor’s polished woodgrains.
            We approached a classroom from which a babble of young voices echoed down the corridor. The nun opened the door and all chatter stopped. She led me to an empty seat on a wooden bench and there I sat. The nun went to the teacher’s desk in front of the class.
            “Class: you will all stand. I ordered you to be silent in my absence. You were talking when I opened the door. Who started the talking?”
            My new classmates stared silently at their feet.
            “I heard voices, many voices. Who started talking? Was it you? You? You?” She stabbed her finger at the class. Nobody said a word and nobody moved. “Will someone tell me who was the first to disobey my orders?”
            Silence.
            “Then I shall punish you all. You will kneel on the floor. You will raise your arms to shoulder height. Like this.” The nun imitated the arms of Christ as he hung from the Cross. “You will recite ten Hail Mary’s,” she turned to me. “Your new classmate will count them. His name will now be Joseph, a good Catholic name that will help him establish his convent identity. Joseph: you may stand, not kneel. Class, begin.”
            The piping of shrill voices chorusing a prayer filled the room.

I looked at the girls as they knelt there, arms out, all dressed alike, and I realized that I was the only boy in this particular class.

What could you do less of?

Daily writing prompt
What could you do less of?
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What could you do less of?
I shall deliberately misinterpret that prompt / question and answer it my way. I could do less of listening to stupid adverts, repeated ad nauseam, sometimes with gimmicky tunes – one to two lines maximum – again and again, all day, every day. Surf the channels to escape an ad, and what do you get? A synchronized set up where almost every channel is blasting out the same, or similar, ads at the same time. Have you noticed that when you leave the TV room, and retreat to the kitchen to get some limited peace, the ads follow you because the volume is turned up at ad time so you just can’t escape.

I remember my grandfather, back in the sixties, with the advent of ITV in Wales – the Independent TV channel that used ads – sitting before the TV set, his foot up before the screen and his fingers in his ears so he would not be able to see or hear those ads. Alas, once heard, seldom forgotten, and I can still sing most of those meaningless jingles heard back in my childhood. How it I hate when I go shopping in the supermarket and shoppers tunelessly whistle a TV ad as they shuffle along behind their carts. Alas, ad free programming, all too often, is either expensive or non-existent.

And what about those telephone calls when they put you on hold until the next agent is free to attend to you? I won’t mention names, because I don’t want to get sued, but I guess we have all had the same experience. I had a ninety minute online wait one day, with horrible music, an exhortation to stay on the line so I wouldn’t lose my place in the queue aka line-up, and a 90 second ad that glorified the joys of the company’s product, repeated once every five minutes. I suffered through that ad 18 times on that one call alone. Another local firm gave me the similar treatment, except that it was a one minute ad, repeated once every ninety seconds. I suffered through 10 repetitions in a wait of 15 minutes, got fed up, and hung up the phone.

Look at the peaceful scene above. That’s the view from my bedroom window in Island View. Even the crows are absent, and the early morning silence, like the sun, is golden. Two birds with one stone – a morning person or an evening person? A morning person with dawns like this, but an evening person when a sunset like this one miraculously occurs.

Old Wounds

Old Wounds


“The slow wound
deepens with the years
and brings no healing.”

The Minister. R. S. Thomas

How deep time’s wounds
have cut and carved,
not just in flesh and bone,
but in the embers
of that slow-burn fire
 they call the heart.

Memory and mind
have also played their part.

Some days, those wounds
don’t ache at all.

But there’s no real healing,
and a moment of madness,
a knife-edged finger nail,
careless, in the dark,
opens them up again
to bleed afresh
and remind us
of the frailty of the flesh.

Comment:
The opening quote, from the Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas, made me aware of so many sad things that have happened in my life. Usually they lie dormant, asleep like an ancient volcano. Occasionally they erupt, and memory’s hot lava breaks through to the surface and spills like blood. Hard as I may try to control those moments, they are, in essence, uncontrollable. The scars itch. I scratch them with sharp finger-nails, and the old wounds open and bleed again.

Bay of Santander – 1963

Bay of Santander
1963

I stood there
on the sea wall
calling out to the dark
“Help!” “Save me!”

Moon hid her face
behind veiled clouds.
All hope denied
I called out to the tide,

outgoing, to take me
with it, out to sea,
past the island
and the lighthouse,

out to where the waves,
stronger than anything
I ever knew, would thrust
strong fingers under my arms

and lift me up,
then drag me down,
so I could finally rest
in peace, and drown.

Comment:
This painting is called Picking at Scars. Some scars run so deep that they are always there. When they itch, you scratch them, and they bleed afresh. The scar of loneliness is one such scar. Alone, in a foreign land, learning their language, the culture, their customs, feeling not just unaccepted, but unacceptable, and the moon at night shining on a land, a bay, a city, to which you know, deep in your heart, you will never belong. That loneliness walks with me still and, sixty years later, it still leaves me desolate.

Limbo

Limbo

I live with my head in the clouds.
What clouds you ask – Alto-Stratus,
Nimbus, Cumuli-Nimbus?

No, I reply, none of those.
At one level I build cloud castles,
in Spain, as they say in French.

But, at another level,
I find myself lost in the medieval
cloud of unknowing, this mental limbo.

Here, grey mists weave spider-webs
of doubt that glisten with dew, and sparkle
with the two-edged sword of thought.

Here, I feel my life-web tremble
and I realize that I alone can walk
this way and try to understand

how frail threads catch small flies,
how words tell stories, but not the story
of all I know, nor where my world will go.

Comment:
Once more I have linked verbal and visual images. Moo’s painting above – thank you, Moo, – called Limbo, depicts a limbo dancer while my poem expresses the reality of that internal space in which creative spirits sometimes find themselves. It is a sort of Limbo of the mind, in which thoughts appear, dance along the frail threads of the mind’s web, yet never really materialize into formal verse or poetic patterns. This is also the lost world of the dreamer. But remember, the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, because sometimes they make their dreams come true.

What will your life be like in three years?

Daily writing prompt
What will your life be like in three years?
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What will your life be like in three years?
Well now, that depends on several things. I love the fall. Who doesn’t love the fall in New Brunswick? The trees changing color, warm by day and cool at night, then the leaves falling off the trees and blowing here and there with the wind. I stood in the garage yesterday and listened as the north wind herded rustling, complaining Maple leaves down the roadway past my house. The sound of dry leaves bouncing and skittering. Pure fall magic.

But when I fell on Thursday night, it was a different kind of fall. One moment I was a tree, standing free on my own two feet, the next I was a sawn-off log, tumbled to the ground. When trees fall, they often bleed bark or sawdust, if they are sawed. I just bled blood. On the floor boards, on the carpet, on my shirt. I had just painted the painting above – Prelapsarian – and there I was, lying on the floor, having fallen myself.

And there I lay, fulfilling my own prophecy – Postlapsarian – lying bleeding on the ground. The fall was stunning and I was stunned. I managed first to roll over onto my tummy. Next I managed to get into the push-up position and from there I was able to draw my knees up. Kneeling, I reached out to the spare bed and started to try and haul myself to my feet. But I was spent and exhausted and drained.

I called out and Clare, dear woman, came to my rescue. She helped me to my feet, staunched the bleeding, mopped up the floor, and the carpets, and me. Then she went to the medical chest and bandaged me up so I would heal and wouldn’t bleed all over the bed and my pajamas. What a mess. What a bloody mess – and no, I am not swearing, I am only telling you what I saw. Blood everywhere.

So, what will my life be like in three years? I hesitate to think about it. Maybe I’ll be in a garden somewhere, helping the trees to grow their leaves, so that the life cycle may continue. And maybe not. Right now, I feel very, very fragile. I just don’t want to think beyond the current moment.