Hope

Star Field & Brush Fire

Star Field
&
Brush Fire

The evening and my mind
both slipping away
into the grey mesh of twilight
that bids farewell to day
and brings on night

Words no longer link
solitary stars they blink
and I no longer think
the way I used to
logic buried deep
no longer rules

Who am I who writes
these words each letter
a shooting star
trailing bright light
across night’s page

I hesitate confused
and know not what I write
what I want to write
hides out of sight
will not soar upwards
into starry fields of light

Commentary:

Brush Fire – that’s what Moo calls this painting. It wasn’t his idea to call it that. He didn’t have a clue what to call it. However, he explained to KTJ that the reason why he didn’t know what he had painted was because he had finished painting what he had wanted to paint but had some paint left on the paper saucer he uses for a palette, and he didn’t want to waste it. So, he pepper sprayed what you see above. “You mean you were just cleaning your brushes,” KTJ asked. “Yes, ” he replied. “I thought I might call it Sky Fire or Fire Storm or something like that.” “Brush Fire,” said KTJ. “You just burnt your brushes.”

Well, you don’t argue with someone who makes the world’s best peanut butter balls, not to mention superb devilled eggs. So Brush Fire it is. I think Moo is a bit ashamed of himself because he hid his signature on this painting, and you have to look really, really hard if you want to find it. In fact, you might have to borrow my new glasses and use a magnifying glass to spot those three tiny letters among all those sparks and flames – Brush Fire, indeed!!!!

In Praise of The Other

In Praise of the Other

I have lived with the Other.
He treated me well.

To him I was the Other,
yet he fed me when I hungered,
gave water when I ran dry.

I fell ill and he cared for me,
nursed me back to health.

He taught me his language,
culture, history, and skills.

He loved me, never forced me
to forget myself and become
something I could never be.

He made me what I am today:
a believer in humanity,
not man’s inhumanity to man.

Commentary:

Words for a divided world where man’s inhumanity to man sometimes seems to over-ride man’s humanity. Sometimes I am afraid to publish poems like these. Self-censorship is the worst form of censorship because it bottles things up until they rot inside you. Somebody has to speak out. Somebody has to stand up. So many, myself included, are afraid to do so.

Moo asked me to use his painting for this one. “Yours,” he told me, “is a cri de coeur, a cry from the heart. It must be heard. I’ll stand by you, side by side, and support you with this painting. It’s a Golden Oldie, but it’s good.”

I turned to thank Moo, but when I looked, he had gone. So much for shoulder to shoulder and side by side. Never mind. The poem’s not mine really. It belongs to others, many others. The start is from the Bible – The Good Samaritan. The ending is from Robbie Burns, changed slightly. There – now I have people who will stand beside me and echo my cri de coeur. And wow, look, here’s Moo, back again.

Wonderful. Now we can stand together. Should to shoulder. Side by Side. With no walls to divide us (Billy Bragg).

No, Moo. Sorry. I don’t have twenty dollars to lend you. Oh dear. There he goes again. Once more I am the monarch of all I survey and shoulder to shoulder with Alexander Selkirk I ask that other question – “Oh solitude, where are thy charms?” He ought to know if anyone did for he too made his cri de coeur from another horrible place.

Neighbors

Neighbors

lights in the new house
we haven’t met them yet
we’ve seen them clearing the lot
digging basement and well
setting up the tile field

children playing riding bikes
bouncing on a trampoline
swinging on swings
their shrill voices breaking
the brooding silence of trees

sooner or later we’ll meet
it will be neat to put names
to faces and decipher
the stick shadows seen
in the distance shifting
dancing changing shape

a new generation of hope
turned into neighbors

Commentary:

“The olde order changeth, lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” Idylls of the King – Tennyson.

We have been here in this house for 37 years. We planted trees, and watched them grow. We watched lots being sold, developed, turned into houses. Many of those who were here when we arrived downsized, moved away, or in some cases, simply passed away and died.

We have seen families move in, and then move on. Some became very good friends, and we miss them dearly. Others were mere nodding acquaintances. Some spoke our language, others didn’t. We met many of them and their children at Hallowe’en until Covid arrived and spooked even the spooks. As an event, it ghosted out of our lives.

Soon it will be our turn to move. Our house will belong to somebody else. Our house? We are restless souls inhabiting a changing planet. We own nothing. We merely borrow, use, and pass it on to someone else who, in their own turn, will eventually pass it on.

So – what exactly do I own? What do I control? Only this single moment of time, this tiny particle of time when I raise my fingers, choose which keys I will type and in what order. And sometimes, even that is incorect / incorrect, for i / I make misteaks / mistakes, fale / fail to corekt / correct them, place the wrng wrong finger on the wrong key. A single slip of the finger – a bright red button – sometimes I wonder how it will all end.

Sun Bird

Sun Bird

You fill a hole in my life
with a strange unfamiliar
super glue
that bonds me to you

ties unseen unknown
bind us and stop me
from being alone

we neither touch
nor hug
yet a secret stream
links us joining us
mind to mind

manna from heaven
descends on the desert
more powerful
than mortal love

All About Angels

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I first saw the Black Angel in Aldebarán’s cultural store in Ávila (2006). She sat there, in the shop window, along with several other angels, and I worshiped her from the distance of the street. Her image was taken from an original painting from Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400-1464). This was turned into a 3-D image and then converted into the statue I saw in the shop window.

I brought the statue back to Island View, placed it on the shelf above the fireplace, where it still rests, and wrote several poems on the theme of Angels. I gathered them together in a chapbook entitled All About Angels that I self-published in Fredericton in 2009. The chapbook was dedicated to Clare’s great-aunt, D. E. Witcombe who departed this world on October 15, 2008.

All About Angels was also based on a book of a similar title, Sobre los Ángeles, written by Rafael Albertí, one of the poets of Spain’s Generation of 1927. I avoided the ambiguity of the Spanish title — Sobre (in Spanish) can mean Above or Beyond as well as About — by limiting my own title to All About Angels.

All About Angels
Paperback edition

All About Angels
Kindle Edition

For Carl Jung, angels are the messengers sent to inform people of the state of their world. For me, they are also the wild creatures that inhabit the world around me and often take the form of birds and other spiritual creatures. They can be best seen in those moments of solitude when we are most open to the natural world around us. Then, and sometimes only then, we can hear the urgent messages they bring.

Black Angel

You cannot hide
when the black angel comes
and knocks on your door.

“Wait a minute,” you say,
“While I change my clothes
and comb my hair.”

But she is there before you,
in the clothes closet,
pulling your arm.
You move to the bathroom
to brush your teeth.

“Now,” says the angel.
Your eyes mist over.

You know you are there,
but you can no longer see
your reflection in the mirror.

Angel Choir

(on seeing the Northern Lights at Ste. Luce-sur-mer)

listen to the choristers with their red and green voices
light’s counterpoint flowering across this unexpected son et lumière
we tremble with the sky fire’s crackle and roar

once upon another time twinned in our heavenly prisons
we surely flew to those great heights and hovered in wonderment
now our earthbound feet are rooted to the concrete
if only our hearts could sprout new wings and soar upwards together

the moon’s phosphorescent wake swims shimmering before us
the lighthouse’s fingers tingle up and down our spines
our bodies flow fire and blood till we crave light and yet more light
yet when the lights go out we are left in darkness

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 Croaking Angels

Their tunes are one note symphonies,
croaks of joy
moving their fellows to ecstasy,
exhorting them to share
the splendors of ditch life,
in a springtime bonding
that will loft them to the skies.

There’s an ancient magic in this calling:
love and laughter,
moonlight and water,
all the joyous things
one links with spring.

Moonlight swings its cheerful love lamp.
New leaves and buds are also known to sing.

In a country garden …

Each day sees another spark of brightness in the grass, in the trees, or at the feeder. Where, I wonder, have they been? In whose back yard did they winter?  Some, stray thoughts perched for a moment on a branch in the mind, fluttered last fall in the falling snow and melted away. Others, I know, stayed here with us and we fed them throughout the short cold days.

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The robins, even though they are not my English robins, are my favorites, perhaps because they remind me of my childhood home. Less bold than those of my youth, they fly when we draw near and do not sit on the spade handle watching for worms as we turn the early earth and shake the garden back to life.

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Sentry duty: and they march up and down the lawn pacing their quicksteps, then standing to attention. They strut their stuff, turn their heads, listen, and look like guardsmen on parade outside our pastoral palace.

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With the guardsmen come the workmen, the busy birds, the ones who tap on the trees in search of insects or to set the juices running. Shy, they turn away and hide behind the trunk. But if we are quick, we can catch them, heads turned, when absorbed in their work, they forget to fear us.

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And the song-birds, shiest of all, often heard, their melodies, but their quicksilver spirits seldom seen except by chance and the artist’s luck and speed of finger. But listen: other songs throb their melodies on the wind and most days now we wake to music. A calling in the trees in the evening’s glow also tells us the world has turned once more and the birds, the glorious birds, the dwindling flocks of endangered birds, less this year than last year or the year before, are back. We must welcome them and cheer them while they are still with us.  Neither we nor they may  endure much more.

Sometimes

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Sometimes the road seems uphill all the way. Lungs burn. Breath comes hot and hard and chunky in the throat. Legs hang heavy, muscles will not obey the owner’s instructions.

Consult the operating manual: “Take a break,” it says. “Rest now. Don’t push too hard.” But to rest is to give in, to come to an abrupt halt, or to drift backwards down the hill.

What stubborn streak is painted so deep in us that it shouts ‘never surrender’ when our most urgent need seems to be to throw in the towel? Is it the urge to get to the top, to see the lower lands stretched out below us? Or is it the mantra of fight the good fight?

Many things can drive us on: a need, a desire, a whim, an urge, or merely a refusal to stop fighting. Some of us will never give up. We will never lie down and curl up in a corner, a dead leaf to be blown hither and thither by the cold night wind.

Look carefully: there are no drugs, no needles, in the biker’s uniform. There is no small accessory motor hidden in the back wheel to help when times get hard.

The mouth is open, the eyes are set on the target, the legs still move, the sun still shines, and three smiling heart-shaped faces cheer the cyclist on.

Who can they be, these three angels at the road side, who can they be? Yet they are there and we are here and the bike is there and the hill is there and sometimes … yes, sometimes, the road IS uphill all the way.

But we keep the pedals turning and we don’t get off our bikes … and that’s life.

Rain Stick

Rain Stick

The bruja tilts her rain stick.
Rain drops patter one by one,
then fall and faster until
her bamboo sky world fills
with the sound of rushing water.

Sun-dried cactus thorns beat
against wooden prison walls.

Above me, heavy black clouds
release their pent-up rain

Scales fall from my eyes.
They land on the marimbas,
dry beneath the arches
where wild music sounds.

Its half-tamed rhythms,
sympathetic music
drawn by this rainstorm
unleashed by the bruja‘s dream.

(bruja: witch, witch doctor)

Dreams

Dreams

Dreams are important in Oaxacan mythology. Do we create them ourselves? Or do they come to us as celestial messages? Can they exist without us? Or do we form a symbiotic relationship each dependent on the other?

Eight Deer or Tiger Claw / Ocho Venado or Garra de Tigre is a Mixtec Hero; his name is composed of two parts: (1) day name (ie the name of the day on which he was born) Eight Deer and (2) nickname Tiger Claw. His symbol in the códices is a small circle with a comma like a tiger claw. Nuttall is the twentieth century editor of the Zouche Nuttall Codex in which Eight Deer’s history of conquest is recounted. Nine Wind / Nueve Viento is another Mixtec Hero and the founding father of the race, according to some códices.

Once I stole the nose from a sacred statue;
today I watch it cross the square attached to a face.

Eight Deer walks past with a fanfare of conches:
you can tell him by his donut with its little tail.

A shadow moves as zopilote wings his way across the square.
I caught him once on a midnight bus;
he begged me to fold his wings and let him sleep forever.

A gringa called Nuttall sells tins of watery soap.
Her children fill my days with enchantments:
bubbles born from a magic ring.

Eight Deer, eight years old, sets out on his conquests.
Nine Wind births his people from a flint,
or was it the magic tree in Apoala?

The voices in my head slip slowly into silence.
Sometimes I think they have no need of me,
these dreams that come at midnight, and knock at my window.

Waist Land

Wind-sculpted tree on rocky coastline with turbulent ocean and cloudy sky
A lone, wind-shaped tree stands on rugged coastal rocks under a cloudy sky

Image generated
not by Big Brother
but by Little Brother
who left the Frying Squad
to become a painter
and mind-reader

Waist Land

Jack Pine Sonnet

living in a waste land
surrounded by books
he writes in his journal
things false and true
in memory of the old days
when the world seemed so new

a life built on sand
slips through his fingers
wouldn’t it be grand
if the sand stays and lingers
refusing to pass through
the hour glass’ waist
so time stops to flow

then he could say no
leave me alone
there’s more sand to fall
I don’t want to go

Comment:

It’s a bit like a cliff-hanger, isn’t it? Hanging on by our fingertips and not daring to look at the depths down below. We know they are there, but look, there’s a tiny fossil in the fissure in the rock, so much older than us, we’ve got a long time to go to catch that up. And remember – 80 is not old, if you are a stone!

Treading air – great fun. Not as good as treading warm water in the local YMCA. Just a lovely sense of balance, floating there in the warmth, no weight on arthritic joints, and the world around us amniotic, as it was in the beginning. Ah, those original waters, we have all swum in them, the rich and the poor, the black and the white, and all shades in between. Even King Charles and the late Queen. And remember, they may speak of blue bloods, but all blood is red -and, if you cut us, do we not bleed.

Speaking of bleeding – blood-thinners – my favorite doctor’s latest joke. I cut my arm the other night, getting into bed. Didn’t even notice. Pillows and sheets soaked in blood when I woke up and my scalloped arm, stuck to the sheet, opened itself up and started to bleed again. Feels like seventeenth century Spain, the wounds of the dead man re-open and start to bleed when the assassin appears before him. Certain truth. Obviously 100% guilty.

And they tell me that in South Wales people are adding cooking oil to gasoline to make the petrol go further. Scotland Yard sent the Flying Squad to South Wales to sniff people’s exhaust pipes to see if they were cheating the tax man. I asked my friend – “Is this true?” “Ah, yes,” he said in his lovely Welsh lilt, “and we call them the Frying Squad!”