Hiraeth

September Song

September Song

In the gathering autumn shadows
summer flares as bright as the berries
adorning the Mountain Ash.

Beads of blood,
they hold late evening light,
as do the Black-eyed Susans
growing wild beneath my window.

Rain wet, wind swept some nights,
yet still they glow
with their bottled sunshine.

Fairy lights, Christmas garlands,
ash rosaries will circle another tree,
enlightening wrapped presents,
lighting up the vacant crib
waiting for that little child,
soon to be still-born.

Comment: Poetry is where you find it. The inspiration for today’s poem came from the Poem of the Week in The Guardian. Inspiration, I found it in two places – 1. the photograph at the head of this blog and 2. in the analysis of the poem, not in the poem itself. The twilight of this autumn world is indeed wonderful.

Why do you blog?

Daily writing prompt
Why do you blog?
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Why do you blog?

I blog to make the world a brighter, healthier, happier place. I also blog to keep my readers aware of the existence of poetry, beauty, truth, love, and creativity. If I didn’t blog, those readers might never see the painting that I have attached above, painted by my friend Moo, of course – wrth gwrs. In fact, if I didn’t blog, you might never know that Moo is my friend, as is Sparkle. And if I didn’t blog you would never read the interview I had with Sparkle.

Who are you?
I am Sparkle.

What are you?
I am a fairy.

What???
I am a fairy. More important, I am your house fairy.

What on earth is a house fairy?
Well, when your granddaughter built a little fairy house and placed it where I could find it, and when I saw it and entered it, at her invitation, I became your house fairy.

Why did you choose that particular house?
Because it was built by a kind, loving young lady who didn’t want you to be alone. She built the house and outside the door she wrote Welcome Fairies. So I knew I’d be welcome. More important, perhaps, she built another fairy house in her own home and my friend Crystal lives there. Crystal told me there was a fairy home vacant, and she also told me where to find it. And she said that her human had told her that you might need a fairy friend to keep you company and stop you from being lonely. So, here I am.

I didn’t know that fairies could talk to humans.
They can’t, normally. But you are not a normal human being.

What do you mean by that?
You are a poet and a dreamer. Both poets and dreamers already have one foot in fairy land. Sometimes we call it la-la-land. It is a very special place and the people who can go into it are, in many ways, almost fairies. These are the ones we can talk to.

How do you know I am part-fairy?
Because I can see your wings.

But I don’t have any wings, not that I can see.
Quite. “Ah would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as the fairies see us.” That poem was written by a friend of mine, a long time ago. He was a poet and I could talk to him too. When the time comes for poets and dreamers to cross the rainbow bridge, their wings become visible and their spirits can fly again. That’s when they are able to return to fairy land.
Socrates was another friend of mine. He too was a poet and a dreamer. He dreamed that humans originally had one wing in the middle of their backs. When they found their soul-mates, they could join together and then, with two joined wings, they could fly to the heights of the spirit world.

Socrates? What did he know? He thought the world was flat.
He didn’t know everything, of course. But he was right about some people having a single wing and needing a partner to fly. You are very special – you have found one of those. Socrates just didn’t know that other people could have two wings, although they couldn’t be seen here, on earth, in this dream world where they dreamed they were wingless people.

So, am I dreaming that I am a wingless person?
Of course you are. But you will wake up to the truth one day. My task here, as your house fairy, in this house built for me by that cute young lady, is to help you realize your dreams. I will help you release the poet within and I will help you to reach out and make the world a brighter, kinder, more loving space, for other people who lack what you have – the power to dream and to create.

Oh dear. This is a little bit too much for me, Sparkle. I’ll have to sit down and think about it. It’s too much to take in all at once.
I know. But I have been chosen and I have been given the power to choose you. I have done so and I am here. And remember – I will never leave you nor forsake you.

Thank you so much, Sparkle. And thank Crystal and that little girl for me.
I will. Now I must go. It’s September and I have some fall sparkling to do. But don’t worry – I am here. I’ll be back. We’ll talk again.

Pilgrim

Pilgrim

“We think in eternity
but we move slowly through time.”

My daily duties nibble and gnaw.
I slowly shrink beneath their onslaught.
I feel myself diminishing, gradually,
hour by hour, disappearing into myself.

Even sunshine and silver-lined clouds
weigh heavily upon me, some days, when
my legs grow weak, my strength fails,
and my frail and feeble mind seeks out
a simpler way to continue my journey.

I favor those paths that gently slope,
downhill, preferably, and I avoid
rough, stony ground. Pilgrim through
this barren land, close to my journey’s
end, where footsteps are perilous,
stumbles lead to tumbles, I cannot risk
 a fall, for if I fall, like many who have gone
before, I may fall to rise no more.

Souvenirs

Souvenirs

Where have they gone,
the old days, the old folk,
the old ways of doing things?

I search for them, day after day,
but my cell phone isn’t
the old-fashioned circular dial,
nor the pick-up phone
with the shared party line,
when everybody listens in.

The garage is a mad hatter’s
maze of a workshop,
in which things grow legs
and walk this way, that way
every way to Sunday,
constantly getting lost.

I think I can hear them.
chittering, chattering.
but I cannot see them
nor hold them,
even though I would like
to clutch them tight.

Bats in the belfry,
and in the attic
mislaid items,
pens, ink, paints,
a tuck box, with keys,
a cricket bat,
cracked and yellow,
abandoned,
and forgotten.

What does your ideal home look like?

Daily writing prompt
What does your ideal home look like?
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What does your ideal home look like?

My ideal home looks exactly like the one I am living in right now. In the country, surrounded by trees, with blossoming crab apples in the front garden and a mountain ash in full view from the kitchen window, what more could I ask for? Blossoms in the spring, a gradual flowering throughout the summer, and now, as fall approaches, the fruit ripening.

Verde, que te quiero verde. – Green, for I love you green. But what exactly is green? I sit on the front porch in the cool of summer, and look out on a sea of greens – green grass, green leaves, light green, medium green, dark green, and all kinds of shades and hues as the sunlight filters a subtle dance of colors through the leaves. The eye distinguishes so many different shades of green. Alas, I do not have the vocabulary to distinguish verbally what I see visually. Ah, poor poet, linguistically damaged, and writing with one hand tied behind my back, I suffer from an ability to feel and an inability to express. Terminological inexactitudes, Winston Churchill called them. But in my case, they are the lies I must create when the truth overwhelms me with its beauty.

And in winter, when the cold winds blow, and the leaves lose the safety of their trees to be blown hither and thither at the wind’s will, what then? A blanket of whiteness, shadows shifting beneath the moon by night, and a million brilliant sparkles beneath the sun by day. And the visitors, every night the deer come, stay awhile, then vanish, only to reappear the next day. At midnight, in the moonlight, I watch them from my window as they dance on their hind legs and nibble the hanging fruit that the mountain ash reserves, just for them, so that they will survive, as they have done for millennia, in this paradise that surrounds my ideal home.

Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek

Pictures and memories play hide and seek.
They hunt the slipper that hides in the words
that slither and slide across my page.

They long to emerge, fully formed, and to step,
without effort, into your mind. They want
to linger there, to baffle, taunt, and haunt you.

Digging through the verbiage, a thought,
a metaphor, a grouping of words will join and
rejoin. This is the grit that the oyster slowly shapes
into the pearl of great price that glows so bright.

Consider the opal. Plain at first sight, yet changing
color, shimmering in sunlight, a chameleon
adapting to mood and shadow, its moon dance
hovering, a butterfly over burgeoning blossoms.

Who could ever forget, once seen, star light
illuminating the bay, the moon gilding the sea,
those summer nights, our secret love flowering.

The veiled will unveil itself and tease its way,
its path over the sparkling waters of the bay.
Knock and it will open. Seek and you will find.

Comment: I had a specific, named place in mind when I first wrote this poem. Then I realized that my secret place was not necessarily the remembered place of other people who had undergone similar experiences. So, I removed the specific and made it generic.

I know you have been there, to your own special place. A warm summer night. Star light over a bay. Or maybe it was an estuary, or perhaps a river bank? The moon appearing, lighting up the waters. Walking, perhaps, hand in hand. Or sitting, as I remember it so well, in a late-night café, watching the night lights on the fishing boats, as the moon spread its golden carpet over the bay.

Coal Face

And Every Valley

And every valley shall be filled with coal.
And the miners will mine, growing old
before their time, with pneumoconiosis
a constant companion, and that dark spot
on the grey slide of the sidewalk a mining
souvenir coughed up from the depths
of lungs that so seldom saw the sun
and soaked themselves in the black dust
that cluttered, clogged, bent and twisted
those beautiful young bodies into ageing,
pipe-cleaner shapes, yellowed and inked
with nicotine and sorrows buried so deep,
a thousand, two thousand feet down,
and often so far out to sea that loved ones
knew their loved ones would never see
the white handkerchiefs waved, never
in surrender, but in a butterfly prayer,
an offering, and a blessing that their men
would survive the shift and come back
to the surface and live again amidst family
and friends, and always the fear, the pinched
-face, livid, living fear that such an ending
might never be the one on offer, but rather
the grimmer end of gas, or flame, or collapse,
with the pit wheels stopped, and the sirens
blaring, and the black crowds gathering, and
no canaries, no miners, singing in their cages.

Comment: A friend wrote to me about the closing of the pits in Nottinghamshire and how the mining communities had suffered, were still suffering, and might never recover. This poem is the first one in a sequence on the mine closures in South Wales and other mining communities. Poems For the End of Time – the book is available here.

What do you enjoy most about writing?

Daily writing prompt
What do you enjoy most about writing?
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What do you enjoy most about writing?

I love it when a special friend reads one of my books and then takes it to the place where it was composed, and sends me a wonderful photograph of the book cover and the exact spot, at Hopewell Cape, where the cover was drawn. Wow! That is so special. Thank you, Sara, my friend and accomplice, for making even more art out of art and involving nature in the process.

Other friends have done similar things. Here is a collection of my books on the sea shore at Holt’s Point. And yes, Fundy Lines is in there as well. Can you spot it? Another very good friend, Geoff, contributed this very meaningful photo. So much of my life, there, upon the sea shore, waiting for the tide to come in.

This book, and its cover, are also very special indeed. And here’s why.

Still Life with Hollyhock
Geoff Slater

How do you frame this beaver pond,
those paths, those woods? How do you
know what to leave, what to choose?
Where does light begin and darkness end?

Up and down: two dimensions. Easy.
But where does depth come from?
Or the tactility, the energy, water’s
flow, that rush of breathless movement
that transcends the painting’s stillness?

So many questions, so few answers.
The hollyhock that blooms in my kitchen
is not a real hollyhock. Intertextuality,
visible and verbal: this is a poem about
a painting of a digital photograph of a
hollyhock, a genuine flower that once
upon a time flourished in my garden.

A still life, naturaleza muerta in Spanish,
a nature morte in French, a dead nature,
then, portrayed in paint and hung alive,
on display, in this coffin’s wooden frame.

So, what do I enjoy most about writing? Everything – for whenever creative people create they draw in others into a web of intertextuality that spins its way from mind to mind and, especially in Canada, links shore to shore to shore.

Janus

Janus

I walked backwards into my childhood
a step at a time. I failed to find it
where I thought I had left it.

I opened cupboards, doors, drawers,
searched beneath beds, went outside,
rummaged through garden and garage,
and found absolutely nothing at all.

 My past was as dry as a squeezed orange
when the juice has gone and long days
left on the window ledge has dried it up.

I looked in the mirror, and the man
I saw was not the boy I had seen
the day before. How could he be?

Janus, two-faced, looks forwards and back.
I will no longer seek the self that was

I shall accept the self that is, the one that grew
outwards and upwards from the one
that was before. Acceptance. I can do no more.

Crossing the Bridge

Crossing the Bridge

When I got to there, I couldn’t cross it.
I sat in the coffee shop, over-looking
the River Severn and ordered a cup
of cafeteria tea. Time limped slowly by
and I let my untasted tea grow cold.

What was there for me on the other side?
Empty stood the house where I was born.
Sold, the bungalow, built by my father
and his father, the summer home I loved
so much. Lost the kitchens I remembered
so well, kitchens in which I had come of age.

I tried to picture the ghosts of Christmases
past walking the logs that flamed in the fire.
Ghosts? They inhabit my mind, share my life,
dwell in my days, dream with me most nights
when a golden moon sails past my window,
and silver stars fill my dreams with light.