Hiraeth

Absence

Absence …

… makes the heart grow
callouses scabs you can
pick at with your finger
nails bleeding fresh blood

they remind you that you have
a heart feelings something
buried so deep you need
a pick and a shovel to dig
a shaft with wooden slats
placed carefully at the sides
so your mine won’t collapse

you dig deeper and deeper
until in the gloom you see
the feathered fluttering —

a broken-winged canary
sacrificed in its cage
so part of you can escape
flee the mine
and come out alive

Commentary:

A golden oldie. Moo thought Poppy Day (11/11/2024) would be a suitable painting. Those who survive rarely forget those they were forced to leave behind. Kindred spirits, they travel though life together, the live one carrying the other on his shoulders as he would have done earlier, had he been able to.

Moo still has a teddy bear. He tells me he has always slept with one. His first teddy was an Australian Koala, a real stuffed koala given him by his Australian family, back when he was born. Moo was reading a book on the Battle of Britain (15 September 1940). It had a picture of the gunner from a Bolton Paul Defiant, sitting in the gun turret. Behind him, he had his little teddy bear. Moo couldn’t stop crying. He thinks he might have been an air gunner in another life, and when he saw that teddy, it brought back so many memories – flak, night fighters, search lights, tracer bullets, pain, flames, and then the unending darkness. So many did not come back, especially the tail-gunners. Their absence is still a presence to someone in their families. And so it should be.

Clepsydra 16-17

Clepsydra 16 & 17
Click on the following link for the previous stanzas
Clepsydra 14 & 15

16

… would this be the beginning
     or the end

men and women
     on the street
          hands out
               fingers splayed
                    panhandling

their eyes
     black holes in empty faces
          not brain dead
               just drained of hope
                    brains deadened
                         by blow after blow

loaf after loaf crisping
     blackening in life’s oven
          fit only for preacher crows
               flitting from tree to tree

descending on garbage day
     to feast on desperate souls
          marooned kerbside
               for garbagemen to find …

17

… no soul allowed
     to weigh more than forty pounds
          each one swaddled
               in a plastic garbage bag
                    that serves
                         as a winding sheet

dust to dust
     to grey-faced ashes
          wound up by brawny arms
               swung flung skywards
                    into the truck

then ferried away
     to that place where crows
          and hunch-backed vultures
               gulls and humped eagles
                    wait for merciless ferries,

they cross into the shadow lands
     who was the one who found me
          who untied the ties that bind
               freed me from my cell
                    the shell of myself
                         and set me free …

Commentary:

Poetry explains itself.
If it doesn’t, it’s inexplicable.

Autumn Leaves

Autumn Leaves

I used to run,
jump, and catch them
in mid-air,
one, two, three
in each hand.

Now
I stand and wait
for them to fall
and land, perhaps,
on my clothes
or catch in my hair

…

the Leprechaun luck
of my Irish heritage,
so long-denied,
with its pot of golden leaves
waiting for me
at summer’s cast-off
rainbow’s end.

Commentary:

Autumn Leaves, but where does it go to. Good question. Moo asked me that the other day. I just had to tell him that I didn’t know. However, he did offer me the perfect painting for the fall and the changing leaves. Fall Folly Age. I never realized that he could play with words like he plays with paint. Anyway, I know that last winter he painted a picture of little white dots with wings. “What are they?” I asked him. “Snow flies,” he replied. “You know, when the snow flies …” “When the snow flies do what?” “I don’t know.” Moo and I live in a mysterious world, as you have probably come to realize.

Any way, the combination of fall foliage and fall folly age is quite a good one and it shows the folly of ageing and trying to chase down falling leaves when gadding about in the garden with two sticks, one in each hand. Of course, in case you don’t like that painting, and I hope you do like it, because I do, then here’s another one for you.

The text reads – “Autumn leaves – catch them if you can – while you can -and close the door behind her – when she leaves.” Oh witty Moo. Painting and occasional poetry too.

OAS

OAS

I take up my pen to scribble
my name and a riddle in the sands,
neither seen nor understood
by folk in far off lands.

Yet here I stand on foreign strand
my body twice marooned
by friends and fate and oft of late
my achievements all lampooned.

I bid you spare a thought for me
and also for my fate:
I came, I saw, I got a job,
but retirement ain’t great.

A pittance for a pension,
a life on OAS,
a walking stick and SOS,
that’s all that’s left, I guess.

Commentary:

A Golden Oldie from way back (2013 or so). Things get worse, in many ways, but yma o hyd – we’re still here. And that’s the main thing. We need rain, more rain, and yet more rain. Yet the damp really gets to those of us who suffer from osteo-arthritis. Maybe we should put a tariff on it (250%) and then it would be priced out of existence. Then it can rain as much as it wants and the aches and pains will stay in Aix-les-Bains and not come running after me.

I asked Moo for a painting of rain drops falling on my head, but he didn’t have one. So I found a photograph of a real rain storm falling on the back porch, a year or so ago. We need one of those right now. Moo is nodding his head as I type. Oh dear, he just snored. He must have fallen asleep. He does much more noddy now than he used to. And so do I. Maybe I’ll do a photo of a big yawn next. Or he can paint one.

What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?

What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?

Right now, I am quite interested in (re-) learning the Welsh Language. Although I was born in Wales, I was never allowed to speak Welsh at home and my parents sent me to schools in which Welsh was never seen nor heard, let alone taught. That didn’t stop me from hearing out on the streets, reading it on the street signs, or visiting places whose names were only available in Welsh, or an Anglicized form of Welsh.

I am no longer an assiduous student of languages, but I get a Welsh Word a day by e-mail, and each word comes with an explanation of meaning and extended meanings. I also receive the words’ pronunciation and its phonetic changes (something peculiar to Welsh – they come in written form and can be quite complicated). Useful sentences are added – not long, but 3-4 seconds, repeatable ad infinitum, by reliable Welsh speakers, who often offer the variant pronunciations not only of North and South Wales but of other regions as well.

A great deal of linguistic and cultural history is wrapped up in language and the origins of the word are analyzed – sometimes going back to Indo-European, proto-Welsh, Medieval forms, and modern changes to the language. Emphasis is also placed on the survival of Welsh and its preservation, in written form, in Y Beibl Cymraeg, The Bible in Welsh. This fixed the language and helped enormously in its preservation.

I am also interested in Welsh Songs and Hymns. I already know most of the tunes having sung them in English during my childhood. Now I am learning them in Welsh and am currently working on the words to Calon Lan, one of my favorite hymn tunes. So, there you are. A new start at a very advanced age. A return to the past and an investment in the unknown future!

Poisoned Pawn

Poisoned Paw

Openings are so important.
They should be magnets
drawing the opposition in,
but sometimes they’re whirl-pools
dragging you down.

You try to hold your breath,
but you must breathe deep, let go,
go with the flow and prepare for
whatever awaits you in the deep.
Down there, it’s a different world.

Light breaks its black and white bishops,
and the knights walk a forked path
when not pinned down. When you lose
do you mourn for the simplicity of draughts,
or Fox and Hounds or do you strive
to establish, once more, your light in the dark,
down there, where no sun shines.

You are the glow-worm,
glowing where no light glows.
You are the line, the sinker, the hook,
the bait, the temptation that encourages
your opponents to sacrifice their own peace,
 to join you, and together, to swim, or drown.

Commentary:

My family didn’t play much chess. I bought my first chess set when I was ten years old, at Boot’s the Chemist, down by the market, in Swansea. I also bought Harry Golembek’s book The Game of Chess. I still have both the set and the book, seventy years later. Descriptive notation. Absolutely bewildering. I stared at the chart that gave the code names of every square and remained totally confused. I had to look up each square, from its notation, locate it on the chart, then move the piece on my board into the appropriate position. And remember, each side had exactly the same format – QR1, QKt1, QB1, Q1, K1, KB1, KKt1, KR1. Not quite a mirror image as the squares reversed themselves on the other side of the board.

I remember clearly the day that ‘Light broke where no light shone.’ I looked at the maze of numbers, and suddenly the pattern clicked into shape in my mind and I understood the whole idea of descriptive notation. Boundary Knowledge – you cross a boundary after days of bewilderment, and enter a new phase of enlightenment ‘light breaks where no light shines’. When I watched the film, The Poisoned Pawn, I remembered my own learning days in chess. Great fun, that particular opening. Do we take the poisoned pawn, or do we leave it? I will leave you to decide. But remember, it’s not called the poisoned pawn for nothing, damned if you do and damned if you don’t!

I used descriptive notation throughout my school days. I had one particular friend in boarding school who also played chess. We slept in the same dormitory, two beds apart. After lights out, no talking, no reading. Prefects prowled at night to enforce the rules. After lights out, one of us would call out ‘P-K4’ and thus the game started. We weren’t exactly talking, so it wasn’t easy to catch us. Every night, we played the game in our heads. A great memory trainer. Occasionally we managed to finish a game – not often – we were both too wary of Fool’s Mate and the simple early traps! Each day, during one of the school breaks, we would restart the game of the night before, from memory, and then play it to its end. We very rarely forgot the moves we had made and we virtually never disagreed on the board position.

This was totally unlike chess with my family. The grown-ups would all gather round the board. Their object was to distract me, to move pieces when I wasn’t looking, to remove (MY) pieces and leave me in a desperate situation. “‘Knock, knock!’ ‘Who’s that at the door? Go and look.” And off I would go to return to a battlefield that had totally changed its shape and mood. I would carefully reconstruct it, piece by piece, square by square. But I have never forgotten the black looks, the accusations of cheating, the fury of the old ones being beaten by the younger generation. In the end, nobody within the family would play me, unless I gave them a handicap by removing a rook or one of the bishops.

I didn’t discover algebraic notation until I lived first in France, and then in Spain. Algebraic notation. Each of the 64 squares had its own letter and number and, as a result, there was no way to confuse the position of the pieces. Staunton chess sets in England became a variety of different piece shapes on the continent and I often lost games when I forgot that the pawn had one circle, the bishop two, and the queen three, but they all looked like. Many a time I gave up a bishop thinking it was a pawn – oh that poisoned pawn again.

Now, in my dotage, I play chess against the computer. I haven’t played a live opponent for years. But I do have a chess book collection and I have played Fisher’s best games, and Fisher vs Spassky, and I have studied the Russians and how they play and think – very differently from me. And so, in my old age, I sit at the chessboard of my life, and I move the pieces here and there, and remember old friends, and how we shifted across the shifting boards of our days. So many pieces have dropped from life’s chessboard, but a few of us are left, and we move more slowly, but we wander on and on.

PS Moo, sometimes slow in understanding, offered me several paintings that suggested the aftermath of the Poisoned Prawn. When I explained the basics of chess to him, he said he didn’t have a chess painting he could recommend, so he suggested this painting – the correct way to teach. ‘You can’t teach chess,’ I said, ‘it is so instinctive.’ I took one look at the right way to teach and loved it. Here we go The Right Way to Teach! X – WRONG!

Hair Cut

Hair Cut 

Curly locks, wisps of grey and silver,
curve around my ears, cuddle my collar.
I stand in the bathroom, look at my scissors,
glance in the mirror, and start to hack.

I turn my head swiftly from side to side,
watching white hair falling, like snow.

“All done!” I look at myself in the mirror:
hair shorter, still sticking out in clumps,
but some curls still tickle and cling.

Not bad for front and sides. I still
can’t see the back, but if feels fine.
“Right” I say. “I’m ready for the show.”

What show? The one where I sit before
the computer screen and admire myself
before I click in the code, type the password,
and join the virtual meeting that today,
in the pandemic, passes for face to face.

Commentary:

Face to Face – Moo helped me with this one by allowing me to have one of his ‘face to face’ paintings. Thank you, Moo. Sorry I said you weren’t too bright yesterday. And we both got the singer of All Shook Up wrong – it was Tommy Steele of course. Also, as you explained to me, you may not be great at adding two and two and making four, and you may be unenlightened with words, but wow, when you add a colour or two to the palette you are enlightened and enlightening and dazzle people with the lightness of your enlightenment. There – hope we can be friends again now. I would miss your paintings if you withdrew your services.

And this is a Golden Oldie. In 2020, when Covid walked with us, I started cutting my own hair – hacking might be a better word – and I have continued to do so ever since. In fact, I have only been to the barber’s three times since 2020. Each time, the hair lay so thickly upon the floor behind the barber’s chair that we walked knee deep in the white stuff. Great fun. How the young lady made fun of me. Right down the middle of the back of my head she found a large mullet that I couldn’t reach with either hand. She found that so funny. Asked me if I wanted to keep it. Of course, I said no!

I remember those face to face on the computer days. At least we couldn’t catch Covid from an image talking back to us on a screen. I always find those online meetings so difficult and awkward. I love the awkwardness of that word – awkward. The facilitator always began with – ‘Now, let’s all introduce ourselves.’ What on earth do you say on such occasions. ‘Easy,’ Moo told me. ‘I always say “Hi. I’m Moo. I’m a painter.” Nobody bothers me after that. Once somebody asked me what I painted and when I replied ‘houses’, everyone lost interest and the facilitator moved on.’

I always get tongue-tied and can never manage to be coherent. In fact, I am neither coherent nor cohesive and I often fall apart. “Hi! I’m Roger. I’m a writer.” This always opens the doors and the windows to all sorts of questions. ‘What do you write?’ ‘Have you published anything?’ ‘What’s your latest work?’ Of course, if I had any sense – and often I have less sense than Moo – when someone asks me ‘What do you write?’ I should reply. ‘English.’ Or ‘Italics.’ Or ‘Greeting cards.’ That last would be as much of a show stopper as Moo’s response – ‘houses’! Of course, I could get really inventive and say ‘Bilingual jokes for Christmas Crackers.’ Another pet peeve – have you noticed how the French and the English don’t match up? I could have a great old rant about that one. But don’t let’s talk about Fortune Cookies!

And suddenly, we have strayed a log way from the act of getting our hair cut during Covid. But, like many diversions, the journey is often more important than the destination, especially if we are amusing ourselves! And I hope you had some fun and took some joy from my words.

Time Flies

Time Flies

… bends like a boomerang,
flies too rapidly away,
limps back to the hand.

Endless this shuffle of unmarked
days dropping off the calendar.

Hands stop on the clock.
The pendulum swings:
time and tide stand still,
do not move.

The print in my grandma’s house:
seemingly moving seas,
sails swelled out,
the ship stays firm in its frame.

‘As idle as a painted ship
upon a painted ocean.’

Our garden fills
with brightly colored birds
and red and grey squirrels.

Light and dark
switch back and forth
each day
a twin of the day before.

The TV screen hangs out
the daily washing.
Tired, worn out shadow,
their faces boring us
with shallow wit
and hand-me-down wisdom.

Time:
an albatross around the neck,
an emu, an ostrich, a dodo,
an overweight bumble bee,
too clumsy, too heavy to fly.

“Time flies?”
“You can’t.
They fly too fast.”

Commentary:

My friend Moo told me he was ‘all shook up’ when I read him this poem. I don’t think Moo’s too smart. He thought All Shook Up was written by the Rolling Stones when they went out moss gathering during the Fredericton Harvest Festival, but I said no, it was definitely written by Buddy Holly on an off-day when he was playing cricket. It wasn’t okay in those days to play croquet.

The last three lines come from an examination question in the General Paper, “S” Level, as it used to be. “Punctuate this sentence – time flies you can’t they fly too fast” – of course, they should have said, “in exactly the same way we want you to. Corrections and alternative versions will not be accepted.” What did they think I was? A mind-reader? I wasn’t. I was a teenager having a field day in the national examinations. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when they marked my paper.

In the biology exam, they gave each one of us a Brussel Sprout and asked us to draw it and tell us as much as we could about it. Of course, I ate mine, and I said it tasted a little bit dry and needed some salt. Then I drew a mess of potage, all yellow and green with chewed up squiggles, and added “That’s what the sprout probably looks like right now.” I failed that exam too. Didn’t even get a part mark for ingenuity, though the science teacher said I could have a glow of satisfaction. Very useful after lights out in a boarding school, I can tell you.

I can’t remember if Moo went to that school with me or not. I don’t think he did. I think he drifted into my life a little bit later. He wasn’t a painter at that stage, just a half-starved philosopher doomed to live in a garret. Of course, once he started painting houses, he made money. It’s amazing how many people will pay you for painting their houses. Of course, that was before they invented plastic siding.

About now you realize that I live in a strange world all of my own and a lot of people live in it with me. You, too, if you enjoyed reading this. Long may the ‘strange world of me, you, and Moo’ continue. I’d send you a penny for your thoughts, but they have gone out of circulation. I can’t even sing you a song of sixpence these days either. Silver sixpences have walked the dodo path too.

Love in Old Age

Love in Old Age

How do I love you? Let me count the ways.
I love you when together we start to write
for although you’re sometimes out of sight,
you’re never out of mind. So many days

we’ve spent sitting together at keyboards, tapping
at computer keys. Is this the way to please
each other, a choosing of words, a squeeze
of meaning into a smaller space, with overlapping

metaphors and images improved in ways
we never would have dreamed of? Each
to his or her own, we say. Yet we reach
out to each other over time and space,

not joined at hip or lip, but with energy and zest,
sailing similar seas, and trying our very best.

Commentary:

A Golden Oldie, the poem more than the painting. Moo is more up to date than me. He also thinks my beloved and I sit side by side, or at opposite sides of the table, gazing at each other, but not saying much. Hence his choice of cartoon – The Sound of Silence.

“Each to his or her own, we say. Yet we reach out to each other over time and space.” Sometimes silently, often with words. Silence is best – because as my hearing goes, what I hear is a mumble – like the rumble of the old Mumbles Railway – does anybody else remember that? The result of the overheard mumble is an inelegant ‘Eh?’ Too many ‘ehs’ spoil the silence. Don’t they, eh? What’s that you say, eh?

So, I am now having great fun reading a new word a day in Welsh. What a joy to pursue the language that was forbidden when I was a boy. I don’t have anyone to talk to, but that is beside the point. Reading, remembering, the old place names still there at the tip of the tongue – Brynhyfryd, Rhosili, Pwll Ddu. Each name brings with it a visual memory, usually silent, but sometimes filled with the cries of sea-gulls and the growling of corgis defending their territories. Whatever – what joy!

On reste ici

On reste ici

The double meaning
troubles my brain,
tugs heart strings,
sings a violin strain
or strums a throbbing
double-bass tightly
enclosed in my chest.

Rest, reste: here
we will remain and rest.
I like the sound of it.

Outside my window,
the mountain ash weeps
red autumn tears.
Robins flock, grow tipsy
feasting on its berries.
Ici on reste.

You and I, now,
and here we will remain
until, at last, in peace,
we will rest.

Commentary:

I live in a functionally bilingual province in a legally bilingual country. Yet I am consistently told that poems should contain only one language and should not wander between two (or more) of them.

This always reminds of the old joke – “I know what CBC Radio means, but what do the initials EC mean in ici [EC] Radio Canada?” This draws attention to one of my pet hates – the translators who translate for our politicians as they transfer their thoughts from one language to another. Suddenly, without warning, the husky-voiced male prime minister starts speaking French and his deep voice immediately changes into the high-pitched feminine interpreter’s alto. Most disconcerting. I flick back and forth between channels to catch those politicians in both languages. Alas, they rarely deliver the same message in both languages as the nuances and emotions change. Listen carefully and you’ll see (or hear) what I mean.

And so it is with poetry. I love the play on English – rest (to rest or to stay) and French rester (to stay or remain). Why shouldn’t I use that type of play in my poetry? It lends infinite shades of meaning and emotion to the verse. Ah well, the jury’s out. But don’t put foreign words (NB in Canada, French is NOT a foreign language) in your poems. You won’t get published and you won’t win any competitions, even if you do explain what the words mean. And remember, T. S. Eliot didn’t translate the foreign words he used in his Four Quartets. And he wasn’t a bad poet!