Message in a Bottle
Message in a Bottle – Atlantic Poets post poetry in Ireland. Here’s the link :
Hiraeth
Anonymity
Anonymity
Multiple masks stripped away, old wall paper
shed in strips, layer by layer, until you reveal
the bedrock foundations of your delicate face.
Your visage dissolves before my eyes until you
become what you were when I first met you:
sweet, young, fresh, a delight to catch the eye.
As you still are, to these old, fragile eyes of mine,
cataracts removed and lenses still capable of
seeing you in your spring, although it is your winter.
The snowfall of your hair cannot deny the sparkle
in your eyes, the summer freckles that will soon return,
the sunlight and joy you bring when you enter the room.
Ageing, yes, but you are as young and as sweet
as you always were. How could you not be?
Anonymity peels itself away until no barriers exist
between what you are to me now, and what you were.
It is a lie, that only the young write poetry in praise
of their beloved’s eyebrow, her lips, her gaze.
For how many days have we stood together, as one,
breathing the same air, walking together, facing
the same difficulties, and overcoming them hand in hand?
Yes, we have both slowed down – the way of all flesh –
and we are no different. We wither and perish, but
we haven’t perished yet, although we are withering.
The magic of our love, our gifts, molded into our DNA,
will not perish with us, and never will, not while
our spirits live on and our love creates others in our shape.
Click here for Roger’s reading.
“In the human face, the anonymity of the universe becomes intimate.” John O’Donohue, Cara Anam, p. 37.
The Rover’s Return
The Rover’s Return
The eternal return to The Rover’s Return,
renovated, again and again, but filled
with the ghosts of Ena Sharples and others
who walked this cobbled street before,
and every episode more or less the same,
though décor, characters, accents change
and life becomes ever more complicated
from episode to episode, the street slang
changing slightly, and ageing characters
ageing more and more as time goes by,
and yet the trumpet’s martial sound,
the rhythms of the northern brass bands,
the first of those accents to break the plum
in the mouth snobbery of Oxford English
and the BBC’s domination of the language,
and ‘hey, Mr. Oxford Don, me no graduate,
me immigrate,’ echoing round the abandoned
buildings where the working class once worked,
and the elderly were cared for by their friends
and neighbors, not tossed into care homes,
and abandoned to their fate, as they have been
so often of late, and all things change, in time
with the clocks that tick-tock forward, their clock
work everlasting, and the pigeons still there,
and those crazy chimney pots, and that cat,
slithering down the roof, and the rovers still roving,
then returning, once again to the Rover’s Return.
Click here for Roger’s reading.
Comment: For more than sixty years I have listened to Coronation Street and some things have never changed, the trumpeter from the Brass Band, the rain on the cobbles, the memories and ghosts that linger among brickwork and paint. It takes me back to my childhood, when ITV was the upstart channel that dared to challenge the might of the mighty, one might almost say, the almighty BBC. And now, here in Island View, I turn away from the color and recall the old black and white sets, with their selection of two channels, one of them advert free, and their scheduled times of programs, not the TV blaring twenty four hours a day and two hundred channels available at the touch of a button.
It’s all one sentence, though I had to stop and take a couple of breaths while reading it. My good friend and fellow poet, Jane Tims, has called me ‘the master of the long sentence,” and I do love long sentences, especially when I am in rant mode, like now. But I am also very much aware of other friends that warn me that “your sentences are too long. They are too complicated. I don’t understand them. Write shorter sentences.” OMG, FFS. LMA* – 4 – UAW** – IMHO.
Translation of unusual terms: LMA* = Leave Me Alone. UAW** = You aRe Wrong.
Acknowledgements: My quote from the poem, inaccurate, and from memory, is from John Agard, whose poetry I love. I acknowledge now his poem and its influence upon me. I too am no Oxford don, and I too am an immigrant. His wonderful reading of the full poem can be found here. John Agard, Oxford Don.
Blessings
Blessings
I wish I could bless you
as you have blessed me,
with gifts of love and life.
Together, we have walked
this world, wandered its shores,
scaled rocks, seen rich tapestries
of land painted beneath us.
Only you know me as I am,
know what I want to say,
the difficulty I have in saying it.
You know why words trip
on my teeth and lip, and exit
with those little slips
that make me hesitate to speak.
Do tree roots speak? Does
the yucca, blossoming each
spring, share words with
the hollyhock growing beside it?
Do the birds and the bees
silently commune, as we
so often do, sitting together,
peaceful in our silence,
and doubly blessed?
I wish such blessings to fall
on all who need this verse.
Click here for Roger’s reading.
“When you feel love for your beloved and the beloved’s love for you, now and again you should offer the warmth of your love as a blessing for those who are damaged and unloved.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 35.
Comment: I changed read [sound reading] to need in the last line, because most people who need such blessings will probably be unable to access this blog. My apologies for my initial short-sightedness. My thanks for being allowed to make the correction.
Erratic
Erratic
Four Elements pp. 156-159
Plucked before my time
by some glacial hand,
that tore me from my land
and deposited me on
this foreign shore.
Long did I languish,
worn slowly down
by wind, rain, ice, snow.
Now I am carved anew
and learning to grow.
The old land rejected me,
wouldn’t let me back.
This land had no choice,
but I found I had lost all
notion of a distinctive voice.
Now I belong nowhere, a stranded
immigrant, I cannot return.
Neither can I call this place home,
and yet I have sent my roots
deep into its landscape.
I have grown into it,
become one with its seasons,
accepting its long hours
of silence, with white snow
falling upon darkening trees.
World Within
World Within
Anam Cara, p. 15
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.
Sound of Silence
Sound of Silence
Cara Anam, p. xv
Where do the deer go
when they leave their tracks
behind them and pass out of our sight?
We lose them when, like school children,
they scale the snow bank,
stop at the roadside, and look left,
right, and left again, then walk sedately,
one by one, across the road, and blend
into the dark woods opposite our house.
Too many friends have walked a similar way,
crossed the great divide, and lost themselves
in the unknown that lies there, out of sight.
All too soon, we will be faced by that same
decision, whether or not to cross.
Our paths already tell us where we’ll go,
but the hands of our body clocks don’t yet
point to how, or when.
Heart and Hearth
Heart and Hearth
I remember the old coal fires in Swansea.
My grandmother’s house in the Hafod,
with a hearth separate from the kitchen.
The hearth held a huge cast iron fire-place
where cookpots and kettles hung
or nestled into smouldering coals.
My grandfather’s house in Brynmill,
had a magic fireplace. Banked in before bed,
it gave warmth and light all through the night.
Warmth, comfort, the family gathered,
the wisdom of the old shared with the young,
traditional tales and songs passed down.
Everybody was welcome and each one
had a special spot reserved around the fire.
Comment:
I have been revising this poem, shortening it, and changing it very gently. Funny how the old days come back and dance before us, like the flames dance on the coals, as the old ghosts walk now upon the logs.
Hearth and Soul
Hearth and Soul
The kitchen – hearth and soul of the house. Here we gather, sit around the table and talk our hearts out. But here, in Island View, we have a kitchen, a gathering, but no hearth, and hence no real heart around which the household revolves.
In spite of that, old habits die hard. I remember the old coal fires in Swansea. My grandmother’s house in the Hafod, with a kitchen in a separate room from the stove, with a huge cast iron fire-place where cookpots and kettles could be hung or nestled into the coals. My grandfather’s house in Brynmill, where kitchen and hearth were separated, but the fire-place still held its magic. Banked in at night, those fires gave warmth and light ar hyd a nos and then they we resurrected the next morning.
We have a woodstove here in Island View, but we rarely light it as the fine particles make breathing difficult after a while. We keep it for emergencies. This winter we lit it when the temperatures dropped to -40C, with the wind chill factor, and heat pump and electric furnace needed assistance.
Warmth, comfort, the family gathered, the wisdom of the old folks shared with the young, and the passing on of traditional melodies. All the old memories and thoughts, the wishes and desires, the hiraeth too, handed down, from old to young. Everybody was welcome and everyone had his or her special place.
Such memories tug at the heart strings – hearth strings. Anyone who shares them with me will know what I mean.
Swansea
Swansea
To be Welsh in Swansea is to know each stop on the Mumbles Railway: the Slip, Singleton, Blackpill, the Mayals, West Cross, Oystermouth, the Mumbles Pier. It’s to remember that the single lines turn double by Green’s ice-cream stall, down by the Recreation Ground, where the trams fall silent, like dinosaurs, and wait, without grunting, for one to pass the other. It’s to read the family names on the War Memorial on the Prom. It’s to visit Frank Brangwyn in the Patti Pavilion and the Brangwyn Hall. It’s to talk to the old men playing bowls in Victoria Park. It’s to know that starfish stretch like a mysterious constellation, at low tide, when the fishnets glow with gold and silver, and the banana boats bob in the bay, waiting to enter harbour, and the young boys dive from the concrete pipes without worrying about pollution. But when the tide turns, the Mumbles Railway has been sold to a Texan, the brown and yellow busses no longer run to Pyle Corner, Bishopston, Pennard, Rhossili, sweet names of sand and tide, where my father’s ghost still fishes for salmon bass, casting its lines at the waves as they walk wet footprints up the beach to break down the sand-castle walls I built to last forever at Brandy Cove and by the Slip on Swansea sands.
rogermoorepoet 