I have rediscovered a world within me, a secret world where I walked as a child, a world that nobody else has ever seen.
When I was young, that world absorbed me. In it, I went round and round on roundabouts, and travelled high and low on swings and swing boats, with their rough ropes.
Alas, as always, there were rainy days. Then the sun would wear his hat but I knew he would come out later and join my play.
Sometimes, in the summer, thunderstorms would roll around and rattle our corrugated roof. Dai Jones’ cows would rush through the field, seeking shelter from the wind and rain.
In those days, every cloud had a silver lining. I weathered tough times, waiting patiently for the sun to return and light up the world.
One day, I don’t remember when, someone, I don’t know who, slammed the door and shut me out from that world. I spent my whole life searching for it. At last, I have found it again.
After my mother died, I lit a candle in every church, a real bees’ wax candle, not those tiny electric lights that glow for a little while, when you insert money in the insatiable slot.
Like the minuterie on each landing of a Parisian staircase, it gives enough light for a quick prayer, or a very short moment or two of silence.
Where does the light go when the electricity switches off? Where does the flame go when the candle is snuffed? Where did my mother go when her light went out?
One day, but not too soon, I hope, I will have to follow her and find the answers to all of my questions.
Sitting, waiting patiently for whatever may come along, that is all I have left, save for impatience, anger, and frustration.
These canes that help me walk will sometimes slide on the ice, or catch in a crack and tumble me forwards, into a stumble or fall.
I can only sit for so long before a screen or an empty page. Anguish gets the better of me and I rise to my feet and lumber round the house, avoiding the loose ends of carpets and the skittering cat.
A dropped plate that I can’t pick up, the table shaken so that liquids spill, such events are more frequent now.
I sometimes think I am sitting, enthroned on time’s sea-side sand, trying to hold back the rising tide, that cares not, nor listens, nor obeys.
Two shadows, at three in the morning, their faces masked, shifty in the moonlight, slip soundless over snow, as they move towards the bird feeders.
They huddle together, forming a darker patch. I watch the feeders move, but cannot see the seed nor hear it as it falls.
The feeders empty, they move again towards the back porch, climb the steps, and settle once more.
I know that by morning, all traces of seed will be gone, devoured by Dyson and Hoover, scavengers and professional seed removers.
Comment: Light Breaks
“Light breaks where no sun shines…” but sometimes it takes a long time to happen. The name of my blog is rogermoorepoet and it’s main function is to showcase my poetry, above all, to my friends and followers. In my efforts to publish in print form, I have neglected to pay attention to the main function of this blog – poetry. Why? Because when I submit poems I always find the phrase – ‘must be unpublished – including on social media’! So I stopped publishing poetry on my poetry blog and on other social media. Okay, okay. I know. I am an idiot. BUT – light has now broken where no sun shone – Dylan Thomas, of course, another Swansea Boy, and as of today poetry is back. A big thank you to any and all who have been waiting for its return. Give me some encouragement – let me know if you like what I am doing – paintings and poetry!
What do authors do when they send manuscripts to agents or presses? They have several choices. For example, they can listen to the sound of silence. Listen carefully to the paining above. What does it say to you? Absolutely nothing. Quite. It doesn’t communicate. It’s the sound of silence.
Another choice, they can read and re-read Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Alas, in this case there are many Godots out there and all of them are super-busy gazing at their navels – and I don’t mean oranges. Some indulge in the wonderful world of “Mirror, mirror, on the wall…” and we all know what the answer is to that question. And we know what happened to Narcissus when he saw himself in the river water. Or have we forgotten? Our failure to share cultures is also a sound of silence – two solitudes, gazing at each other, neither one having anything in common with the other one, except maybe the weather. And we can’t always agree on that.
A third choice, they can climb into their dustbins, Queen’s English for garbage cans, and stand there waiting for someone to put the lid on so they can go back to sleep. Allusion / elusion – you don’t know what I am talking about? Well, maybe we are living in two separate solitudes. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
A fourth choice, they can take up painting, and scribbling, and drawing, and doing all sorts of things. But, if the phone rings and you don’t recognize the number – don’t pick up the phone. It’s probably a fraudulent scam call. And if you don’t know the e-mail address, put it in Spam and then block it. It’s probably some bot from another country trying to trap you into giving them your bank account details and signing your savings away. Whoever it is or they are , I doubt if it’s an agent or an editor!
I searched for the blog prompt, but I couldn’t find it. Not by name and I don’t remember the number, nor do I know how to search for it. So – here I am, on the sea shore, stranded, looking for something I may never find. Yet an echo of it has found me.
I googled ‘candy’ to find out what it meant because when I think ‘candy’ I think of Candy Floss, that long, thinly-spun web of sticky pink sweetness sold at the fairgrounds and the ice-cream stalls of my childhood beaches, back in Gower. Barred and banned it was, and seen as a source of cavities and visits to those much-to-be-feared, brutal, ex-Armed Forces dentists who terrified our childhood while working in those days in the NHS.
Candies, in my Olde English language, were called sweets. In post-war Britain, where rationing was the unwelcome rule, sweets were rare, for they cost us coupons, and were therefore, very, very precious. In those days, my grandfather had many friends and his friends were priceless. On Saturday mornings he would take me to Swansea Market, the one that had been bombed during the war. It had been rebuilt but, in those days, remained roofless. There he would work a shift at Green’s Sweet Stall while someone took a break – and I helped him. We would take the orders, count and weigh the sweets, take the cash, count it, check it, place it in the till, and hand over the correct change along with small, white paper packets that contained the hand-made sweets.
We received no money for this pleasurable work. However, when our duty was done, I would be given my choice of hard-boiled sweets. My favourites were those red and white striped sweets, called winter warmers, laden with the lusty tang of cloves that lingered long in the mouth. We held competitions to see who could make their sweet last longest. And woe betide the losers who cracked them, or swallowed them whole, for they were mocked and forced to watch, minute by minute, the lucky ones whose sweets dwindled on and on, shown off, paper thin, on tongue tip, for all to see.
But better than any candies were the Cockle Women in their tall black hats and red Welsh shawls who came all the way from Penclawdd on Saturdays with their baskets of cockles and their buckets of laverbread – bara lawr – at thruppence a pound. Laverbread – Welsh Caviar, Richard Burton used to call it, a delicacy to be savoured for breakfast or lunch and sweeter to the enthusiast and devotee than any candied sweets, even winter warmers.
There I was – with my trusty snow-blower blowing the snow – and I shifted gear to go backwards – and my glove caught – and the snow-blower kept on coming – straight at me – and there wasn’t room to manoeuvre -manoeuver – maneuver – aka I couldn’t get out of the way – and the snow bank behind me caught me just at the back of the knees – and I sat down in the snow – oh dear – luckily I let go of the gear lever and the throttle lever – but the machine was almost on top of me – and I couldn’t get up – so I called for help – but no help came – and I tried to pull on the machine with one hand – and I put the other on an ice patch in the snow and that hand went through – so I am sitting there – can’t stop laughing – and then my beloved appears – and she brings me my walking stick – and she moves the snow blower forward – and then she gives me the stick – in my left hand – lifts me and pushes – while I lift with the left and pull with the right – and I have pulled a cork from a champagne bottle more easily than I pulled myself out of that snow – but together we did it – and oh was I wet – I had to finish the blowing – go inside – and change my jeans – and I am still laughing at the thought of myself – sitting there in that snow – and I needed to pee so badly – as the cold and damp crept in and – what if there had been nobody there to help – or what if it had been windy and my cries had not been heard – and what if we fall – as so many others have done before – fall to rise no more – and what if – “if – if – if – if – onions climbed a cliff – potatoes would rise – with watery eyes – if it wasn’t for if -” and that’s what my grandfather always sang to me when I asked him “what if…?” – so- what if … but don’t answer – because we’ll never know –
I once asked my grandfather, a decorated soldier from WWI, if he was worried about dying. “No,” he replied. “Why not?” “Well, Roger, we’re all going to die. We just don’t know when. So, if I worry, I will die. If I don’t worry, I will die. So, why worry about it?” I was about five years old at the time and we were standing outside the Swansea Hospital, as was, by the seat where the old men used to sit and gossip. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was my first lesson in Stoicism.
“The day I was born, I took my first step on the path to death.” Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645), Spanish Neo-Stoic, among so many other things. Thinking like that tends to put things into perspective, for death walks with us every day. Death is our twin sibling, brother or sister. We face his shadow every time we look in the mirror and that shadow follows us around all day. “Death is a law, not a punishment, so why worry about it?” Also Quevedo. Dying is a different matter and yes, there are so many ways to go, some of them, especially nowadays, with the advent of life-preserving medicines, slow and unpleasant. Yet, mors omnia solvit – death solves everything. And it brings a release from all pain and suffering.
The lead photo shows a plaque in Avila (Spain). La Calle de la Cruz (1660) -The Street of the Cross. It is also known locally as La Calle de la Vida y de la Muerte – The Street of Life and Death. Why? It is rumored that here, turning left outside the main cathedral, duels were fought. Two men entered, but only one emerged alive. It is interesting to meditate on the close proximity of life and death, always there, side by side.
So, for the fun of it, let’s change the question: what is life? “What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is small, for the whole of life is a dream, and dreams are nothing but dreams, after all.” Life is a Dream, Calderon (1600-1681). Looked at from this point of view, what is death? Is it the shutting down and the turning off of the cerebral computer or is it the great awakening from the sleep of life? You can think of it either way but, either way, it’s pointless worrying about it. As my grandfather also told me: “If there’s nothing afterwards, I’ll just fall asleep and that will be the end of it. But if death is the great awakening, then I will be very happy to wake up in a new reality.”
Robert Bly, in The Sibling Society, writes of the lateral movement that now embraces society with its grip of instant pleasure, instant gratification, instant happiness. As a result, we have strayed far from the vertical knowledge that sustained us for centuries. We have abandoned the wise words of our ancestors. Now the old are no longer the keepers of wisdom and the guardians of culture, the institutional memories of the race, if you like. Now they are foolish, clumsy, out of date with the world’s most rapid advances. Only the young, and their siblings, can keep up with the ever changing instants of life as presented to us.
But all is not lost. “What a peaceful life, that of the wise man who withdraws from this noisy world and follows the hidden path along which the world’s wisest people have always walked.” Fray Luis de Leon (1527-1591). We can move far from the madding crowd. We can construct our own realities. We can base them on the words of wisdom handed down to us over the generations. Switch off the TV. Watch the sun as it moves across the cathedral face (Monet) or the walls of your house (Moo). Live each moment of each day. Do not fall into despair. Above, don’t worry – it does no good at all.
Sun Absence Depression – People complain about the absence of the sun – and so do I. Five sun appearances between early December and the end of January. A sun glimpse, so to speak, pale coin between clouds, a sudden shadow that appears on the wall and vanishes before you can catch it. Do these count? Sun glimpses, mind you, and even less sunny days.
Snow, Sleet, Ice Pellets, Freezing Rain – Take your choice. The snow itself isn’t too bad. The snow blower takes care of that. But not when it rains on top of the snow, then freezes. Not when ice pellets weight it down and make it the consistency of wet sand on a wintry beach. My neighbor broke his snow blower trying to shift the mess. I was willing to risk the snow blower, but not my health. I couldn’t even get the blower out of the garage and into the mess that masqueraded as snow. I sat on the back bumper of the car, huffed and puffed, and decided not to risk it. And as for the freezing rain – my beloved had to put crampons on her shoes to be able to walk the ice and take the garbage to the end of the drive. As for blowing the ice that had fallen on the snow – the snow blower grunted, and groaned and complained as it slipped and slid all around – and so did I.
Rejection – Dejection – “Paper your walls with rejections.” Well, I won’t do that as we have just had the walls repainted. That said, when I checked my progress files this morning, out of 95 submissions, 93 had been rejected. Does the 2% make up for the 98%? Well, 5 more rejections and I’ll let you know.
Inflation – Gas. Luxury foods. Alcohol. You name, it and I will complain about it. And if I don’t, every day I go out shopping I see and hear someone complaining about the rising cost of just about everything out there. Being on a more or less fixed pension doesn’t help much either. Luckily, we don’t have to make choices yet, like some pensioners, and working people, are doing in the Untied Kingdom [sick]. Eat or heat? Food or medicine? Dog food or cat food? They have been staples for pensioners in the UK for a long, long time. Cheap and nourishing, though prices are rising, and taste disguised in a nice curry sauce. I kid you not.
Top Ten – well, I guess I could go on and on. But I won’t. Four reasons to cry are enough. Today, the sun is shining (positive). The overnight temperature was -25C / -13F, but it’s rising in the sunshine -15C / +5F as I type (positive), and I don’t have to go out in the cold (very positive), and I don’t have to snow blow today (very, very positive). So, may we all walk on the sunny side of life, find a silver lining to each and every cloud, and carry on regardless. It’s better than the alternative.
rogermoorepoet 