X marks the spot where the energy ran out, the moment when the tide turned and water ebbed instead of flowing.
A place… a time…the sudden scent not of presence, but of absence. The absence of movement, noise, of that other body that once walked the rooms, floors, opening and shutting doors, windows, a robin’s whistle, a thrush’s trilled song… gone now, gone, all gone.
We drift through silent sadness, avoid each other’s eyes, sit with our heads in our hands or knit our fingers together in desperate gestures that express our emptiness, the emptiness of an empty nest…
Chalk on a blackboard. Black, red, blue, green markers on a white board.
Here comes the eraser. The board is wiped clean, or almost clean, figures, letters, blurred, just about ready for the next class. This happens again and again.
What remains? Notes in a student’s book? Memories of a lesson in tedious boredom, the teacher droning on and on.
“Knowledge: that which passes from my notes to your notes, without going through anyone’s head.”
Yesterday’s lessons: dry dust of a doctoral thesis.
Revisionism: “What color is the blackboard?” “Last year, it was green, but this year, the blackboard is white.”
A walking gilt trip and the woes of the journey packed into the old kit bag that bends your back and weighs down your shoulders.
Take care lest you stumble, for if you stumble you will surely fall, and every fall is a precipice that will never allow you to get back up again.
Where is the stranger, the faceless one, the as-yet-unknown one who will care just because he cares and will help you stand up once more on your own two feet?
Take root where you stand. Plant your feet solidly into the ground. The winds of change will blow, but they will not topple you.
Raise your eyes to the sunrise. Strive upwards, ever upwards, turn towards the light, that fragile lightness of everlasting light.
so easy to forget the troubled times when the lines of life did not align with what we thought we wanted even if we didn’t really want it and it wasn’t any good for us anyway but we did it in spite of knowing all the time the harm it would do short term long term and the results of that one false step walk with us still and we wish we could wash away the stains on our hearts souls minds memories underwear but the strings are knotted and tied and we can forget them knot
My usual discipline has deserted me and, as a result, I have deserted my blog, abandoned it, gone absent without leave. It’s not that I am not creating: I am. I am just not posting. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I thought that, for a change, I would post some of my Pocket Paintings / Peintures de Poches. Maybe I will be inspired to write verse about them. Maybe not. We’ll see.
Supplication
I raise my hand to heaven in fervent supplication: you sever it at the wrist.
I spread out my arms in despair: you take out a tape and measure me for a tailor-made, hand-crafted cross.
I step on my bathroom scales only to find that they have become the scales of your justice: I mourn every pound I have put on.
Where can I turn for solace when all around I see nothing but sorrow and tears?
Covid bears us all down. An albatross, it hangs around our necks and when we raise a hand, your knife is there to cut it off.
Who are you? What are you? Where are you when we need you? Why are you there judging us like this?
I look up at the sky. By day, a great cyclopean eye winks and blinks and tells me nothing. I look at the sky at night: a silver moon slides silently by.
Orion stalks away to the west. He leaves me restless, breathless, agape at all this beauty that I dare not reach out and grasp.
55-54 BCE. Julius Caesar visits Britain, but he doesn’t come as a sight-seeing tourist. When asked later about his trip across the channel, he replied with three little words that have echoed through the halls of history: veni, vidi, vici / I came, I saw, I conquered.
Filled with a desire to paint, I prepared a floral background. Overnight, those words came to mind: veni, vidi,vici. To them I added Alpha (the first letter of the Greek alphabet) and Omega (that alphabet’s last letter), these being the Greek letters currently being attached to the various variants of Covid-19. It being Sunday and me, having years ago sung in the choir of the ancient, 12th Century Anglican Church at King’s Stanley, I thought of the words of the old hymn “Omega and Alpha He”. Then, with a stroke or two of the pen, I added them to the painting.
Last, but not least, I added co- to -vidi to get co-vid-i. The painting was almost done. OMG-3 (OMG cubed in the painting) was the final touch and there you have it. The ultimate Covid-19 painting, or is it a poem? Whatever it is, it is a warning, or rather a series of warnings. (1) It is here. (2) It is real. (3) It is killing people. (4) We are currently at Omicron. (5) There’s still a long way to go to Omega. (6) It’s not over yet, not by a long way.
So my friends: keep well, keep safe, keep out of trouble, keep believing, and keep visiting this site! There’s something new here every so often. And once in a while it’s pretty and / orunique.
My family never forced me underground. Nobody ever made me kneel at the coal- face altar and worship, on my knees, that grimy god with its coal-black soul.
A child in body and heart, nobody ordered me to squirm down diminishing seams, much too narrow for men or machines and fitting only for the smallest child.
Fitting indeed, an early coffin, made to measure, lying in wait for the slightest slip of the rocks above or below. Tight fitting, indeed, no wiggle, wriggle room.
Billy Blake, my mate from Trinidad, younger than me, saw the black faces of miners emerge from the mine, enter the pit-head baths and come out white.
He, too, wanted to be white. He dug underground, grew even blacker, went into the showers, gouged his black skin, drew rivers of blood, never changed color.
He died when the roof above him fell without warning. They pulled him out. Brought him to the surface. Prepared him for burial. Wrote on his tombstone:
“His body was as black as night, but oh, his soul was white.”
My heart is an empty nest, all feelings fledged and flown. I yearn for the warmth St. Kevin felt when the blackbird settled, nested in his hand, laid her clutch of eggs.
Oh, the cold dark stare of the under-earth, growing its cold chill upwards through feet and knees, and the winter branch stiffness of hands frozen into concrete branches, week after week, until the blackbird’s eggs are hatched and fledged.
No saint am I. Just a father deprived of his distant child, of his granddaughter developing, growing older and wiser without him there to help her on her way, or hinder, as old men often do, unaware of the changing times and the ferocious pull of new ideas, new tides, the swashbuckling effects of the new world now upon us, a world we oldlings, so long ago fledged and flighted, will never understand nor grasp. How could we?
And yet that hand stretches out from the window of the cells that hold us, bind us, imprison us, and make us realize how strong are the wings of love that flutter in our ageing hearts.
Memories deceive me with their falsehoods, flashing shadow shapes, shifting with a move of the fingers, dog into man, shift, man into a frightened mouse, squeaking, like the ungreased iron-rimmed wheels on a farm-cart with its load of hay and snapping dogs. Watch out for the horse’s sideways kick, for the sting of the farmer’s cruel whip, for the dogs’ white teeth.
What magic lantern now slips its subtle slides across night’s screen? Desperate I lap at salt-licks of false hope that increase my thirst and drive me deeper into thick, black, tumultuous clouds.
My grandfather in the trenches, drenched in a gas cloud, groping, choking, invalided home, returning, so brave, to face that gas grave again and again, only to cough up the last of his tortured lungs thirty years later. I remember him bent over the table, struggling for breath, balancing his hesitant life against an immanent death. Today it is
so different. A pandemic storm lays waste to memories that dog my mind. At night a black dog hounds me, sends my head spinning, makes me chase my own tail, round and round. It snaps at dreams, shadows, ghosts of family members who drift, slowly fading, through my mind.
I try to track them through Ancestry, through Tarot Cards and Tea Leaves but they are all lost in a Mad Hatter’s illusion of a dormouse adrift in a teapot in an unkempt nursery rhyme of a tail within a tale and hunter home from Caer-Filthy hill, I return to find my house empty, my deserted body devastated, my future a foretold mess.
rogermoorepoet 