Osprey
An osprey on the wind
wings thrusting
for maximum lift
then flattened
for feather-tip control
Wheeling up and away
the soft-wing
sway of him
ascending his celestial
staircase
in a rush of blue air
Light his flight
sky steps
danced to wind music
played over beach below
and rock and rolling waves
Watch him
wave good-bye
with a waggle of his wings
and a well-judged flick
of his paint brush tail
brown white and black lines
neat strokes
across a cerulean sky
My First Thanksgiving
For the first twenty-two years of my life
Thanksgiving held no meaning, no life,
no substance, no form, nothing familiar,
nothing special to hold my attention.
When I emigrated to Canada
my cousins changed all that
with an invitation to visit them
in Kincardine for Thanksgiving.
Turkey on the table, colored
table napkins, and a family gathered,
arms outstretched, to make me welcome.
We were all surprised at how alike we looked.
“Like Cousin George, in Vancouver,” they said.
“Like Cousin Elsie in Revelstoke.”
“Like my mother’s mother, back home
in Swansea,” I said.
They told me how the Second World War
had brought the family back together
on these special holidays:
Christmas in Wales for the Canadian boys
or Thanksgiving in Winnipeg
for the Welsh boys learning to fly.
That Thanksgiving, the old family names
turned to photographs: snaps of my mother’s wedding,
my grandmother holding me, age three, on her knee.
And finally, as a special Thanksgiving gift,
a long-distance call to Britain and Clare
on the telephone saying
“Yes,” she would come to Canada,
and “yes,” she would marry me.
And I remember crying all the way
from Kincardine to Toronto,
and that was my first Thanksgiving in Canada.
Comment: A Golden Oldie, indeed. This poem is from my collection Secret Gardens. The secret love poems I write to Clare. It was published on our Silver Wedding Anniversary, 24 December 1991. It is a pleasure to re-publish it here for Thanksgiving, 2021. Now what am I going to do for 24 December 2021?
Click on the link below for Roger’s reading.
Into the Sunset 2
I told you: always go back to the original!
Survivors
Last night’s rainstorm shrank the house.
We closed down rooms
and now the walls are closing in.
There’s so much we no longer use, nor visit,
so many rooms we no longer enter.
Almost all our friends downsized long ago.
We are the holdouts. We love it here
in this big house with its lawns and trees
and flowerbeds with bees’ balm, butterflies, birds,
and the yard abuzz with sunshine and bees.
But now we are starting to throw things out.
Maybe we’ll move, next summer perhaps,
or maybe not. For now is the time of indecision.
Like friends of the same age,
we travel the lesser road of memory loss,
a name and a face here,
a date or phone number there.
Perhaps, when the time comes,
we will have forgotten how to move.
Meanwhile, the mandatory old man’s question:
‘where did I put my glasses?’
Pepe’s Bar
Friday Fiction
Pepe’s bar was at the top of a steep, cobbled street, on the left-hand side. When we got there, it was crowded with men, mostly fishermen off the North Atlantic ships that cross the sea to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The men stay away for weeks at a time, and when they get back home, they too have a huge thirst, large and curious appetites, and money with which to indulge them. We all pushed our way into Pepe’s bar to join the crowd.
“Phew! Let’s get out of here. The place stinks of fish!”
“We can’t go without drinking something. You know what Pepe’s like.”
“Let’s share a porrón.”
And a porrón of red wine duly appeared. The porrón is designed for a small boat in the open sea. It is a glass flask of variable size, holding half a litre or a litre of bright red wine, depending upon the number of people drinking from it. It has a wide funnel at one end through which the wine enters and a thin spout at the other through which the wine exits in a fine ruby jet which the experts shoot directly into their mouths; done with skill, no lips ever touch the flask which circulates from hand to hand amidst cries of appreciation for the skilled and jeers for the careless (and the educational tourists, like me, here to learn about the language and the culture) who suddenly choke and cough as they squirt a red stream of wine up their noses and onto face, shirt, and tie. By dint of hard work, some of it done in the bath tub at home while nobody is watching, I can manage a porrón in the quiet confines of the bar; but I still don’t know how I would fare, out at sea, in an open, wind-swept boat.
I was soon going to find out.
Ruffed Grouse by Kaitlin Hoyt
Kaitlin Hoyt
(KIRA, May-June, 2021)
She is an oyster, silent at low tide, yet with a host
of pearls waiting inside her, ready to be released.
When set, she will release those pearls herself,
stringing them together, like Chantal’s beads,
into a skein of meaningful, enigmatic moments.
Enigmatic, yes, but, like Elgar’s Enigma Variations,
a Russian Doll puzzle of secrets and intrigue. Comic
book artist, she evolved to graphic designer, then
multi-tasked first to Kinetics, and then to a painter
who reaches out in empathy to the world around her.
For her, all art is linked and communications are key,
on many levels. Visualization. Achievable goals.
A step-by-step process with each step foreseen, planned
beforehand, and each step always taken with an open mind
that accepts the true response, leaving falsehoods behind.
Kinetics, yes, but she is above all a loner. Kayaking.
Hiking. Weight-lifting. Yoga. Meditation. Mindfulness.
Caring. Sharing. She sends me her web page and I am
blown away by her empathy with birds and the natural world,
that world her oyster and her, an oyster in that world.
Comment: This particular bird visited our Mountain Ash in the garden at Island View. Kaitlin saw my photo and asked if she could paint it. I sent it to her, and this is the result. Wild life to Still Life to art and never Nature Morte! Together, Kaitlin and I have preserved forever the surprise visit of this beautiful bird.
Light
Sometimes we forget how light falls upon flowers and other living things.
It is joyous to delight in light.
Open up your heart and let in the light.
Spotify
Don’t forget to scroll down to appropriate audio episode.
Daybreak
… early morning sunshine
creepy-crawly spider leg rays
climbing over window and wall
my bed-nest alive to light
not night’s star twinkle
but the sun’s egg breaking
its golden yolk
gilding sheet and pillow
billowing day dreams
through my still sleepy head …
… the word feast festering
gathering its inner glimpses
interior life of wind and wave
the elements laid out before me
my banquet of festivities
white the table cloth
golden the woodwork’s glow
mind and matter polished
and the sun show shimmering
its morning glory on garden and porch …
Comment: Not every day is the same, nor are the colors the same. Monet would watch the sun crossing the face of Rouen Cathedral. Every hour brought a different set of colours and a changed palette of impressions. No two mornings in the Red Room are the same. Each one presents a changed light, changing moments, changing impressions, but all (or almost all) are unforgettable. The poem, incidentally, can be found in One Small Corner. A Kingsbrae Chronicle (available at this link).
Comment: Another moment of magic: this is the morning of the partial eclipse (Thursday, 10 June, 2021). However, there’s enough cloud cover for me to have missed the actual moments of the eclipse. That said, the sun is all distorted and not at all clear, as it usually is when seen early from the Red Room, nor is it the same rich colors at all, so perhaps I did catch something worthwhile after all. More than worthwhile, this too is a magic moment.
Dawn at KIRA
The Red Room
Spotify
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Dawn at KIRA
A fiery wedge, fierce beneath
black-capped clouds, alive
the firmament with light,
breaking its waves over woods,
waters, tranquil the bay, grey,
yellow-streaked, then blue,
the new day dawning,
driving night away,
false shadows fleeing.
To rock this new born babe,
to swaddle it in a cloak of cloud,
disguised for a moment its promise,
nature nurturing heart and mind,
filling the flesh with memory’s
instantaneous flash breaking its light
into the dark where no light shone,
fearful, the dream world,
gone now, dwindling, as day light
shafts its arrowed flight.
How thoughtful My Lady
who placed me here,
at this desk,
at this window,
at this moment of time.
Glorious, this day-break:
words no justice can do
to peace and light,
this early morning,
filtering sunlight
through the waking mind,
relighting the fires
within the heart,
and glory a word’s throw away
outside this window.
Comment: The poem dates from June, 2017, my first KIRA residency, and can be found in One Small Corner. A Kingsbrae Chronicle (available at this link). The photo, however, dates from this morning, Friday, 11 June 2021, and coincides with my second KIRA Residency. The early morning light in the Red Room is indeed glorious, and the room well deserves its name. The small table by the window overlooking Minister’s Island and Passamaquoddy Bay is a wonderful place for a writer who wishes to create nature imagery based on impressions of light and changing light.
Wake up, sleepy heads, get out of bed and admire the sun as he starts his daily climb. He has left the underworld and his horses have started to draw his chariot on its daily trip up the sky. Look closely, and you can just see the hot breath of their efforts, up there, just above the sun.
Spotify
Don’t forget to scroll down to appropriate audio episode.
Ginger Marcinkowski
(KIRA, August, 2019)
“My walk each morning, rain or shine,
feathers my black galoshes with dewy grass.
There I would ramble through gated doors
that kept out the world and sealed in
my pen’s work for that day.
I often found myself sidetracked,
exploring paths that led through flowerbeds,
and up to my favorite sculptures.
I paused to watch my fellow artists
as they focused on chosen subjects
unaware that I was eavesdropping.
Then silently, I would steal away
along the well-trod path to my studio,
pausing long enough to greet the llamas
and baby goats. If I listen carefully
I can still hear their bleating.
In wonder, every day, I climbed the steps
of wood that led to my studio, opened
the door, and turned to breathe in my good
fortune. “What a blessed woman you are,”
I would tell myself before taking my place
for hours on end at my desk, each moment,
each stroke of the pen, each letter added
to the growing lines on the page, a gift.”
Comment: I have been writing poems about the KIRA artists as part of my next poetry book, The Nature of Art and the Art of Nature. This is my KIRA2021 project. The Nature of Art is a revision and expansion of a poetry manuscript of the same name that placed second in the WFNB’s Alfred G. Bailey Award (2020). This poem appears in the section entitled Impressions of KIRA Artists. Currently this section contains eleven poems, but it is still under construction. This poem is interesting in that it is a ‘found’ poem, in the sense that Ginger wrote these words to me in an e-mail. I removed them, reordered them, polished them, and sent her back her own poem in her own words. What fun! This should help explain the use of inverted commas at beginning and end, for this poem is spoken in Ginger’s own words.
