Joy of Words

Rage, Rage 7

Rage, Rage
7

Blood of my blood,
my daughter’s daughter,
time is not on our side.
 
I sometimes wonder
if I’ll survive,
if you and I
will ever meet again.

When we talk online
I see you trying
to understand, to hold
my image in your mind,
to figure out this shadow
that moves and talks
on the computer screen.

Words, born from old Welsh
melodies, bring poetry
to my heart, place music
on my lips.

But they fall short,
and fail to satisfy
my need to reach out
and hold you.

In spite of that I still survive
and live in hopes to see you
in our realities of flesh and blood.

Commentary:

When I first came to Canada, such a long time ago, I communicated with home by means of air mail letters written on special air mail paper that came in very thin, foldable envelopes. Very rarely I communicated by means of very expensive telephone calls of a limited three minute duration. How times have changed. Now via Skype (as was), Team (as is), Messenger, FaceTime, and other means, we can have unlimited face to face conversations, free of charge, with people on the other side of the world. And yet, face to face and screen to screen, there is still something missing. The cat senses it. She stares at the screen and sniffs – then she bristles and hisses. She fails to understand a known voice that has sound and movement but no smell.

And yet, what we now have is so much better than what we had before. Communication is so much easier. We have generated a generation that works in the audio-visual world, not in my preferred world of written verbalization. How we have changed. I can do so many things, in my head, that the younger generation cannot do, even with pen or pencil and paper. However, when my computer fails me, or my cell phone acts up, it is to that younger generation I go, because they dominate this new world in which we live.

I gave one of my academic articles to a friend the other week. “I can’t read this,” he said. “Tell me, what’s it all about?” I started to explain. “Hold on,” he said. He asked his AI program to read my article and generate, in words a 14 year old could understand, the main contents of my not-so-easy-to-read academic writing and thinking. About thirty seconds later, the analyzed contents appeared on the screen before him. I threw my mind back to when Coles Notes were forbidden. “Anybody caught using Coles Notes will be given an automatic F.” Then I looked at my own article, analyzed perfectly, and set out in the very way I had planned it, albeit with a simplified vocabulary – and the longer words explained in a sort of appendix. Quite simply, I was blown away.

Then my mind went back to my childhood in Wales. No running water, no electricity, no indoor toilets, no telephones, no television, a radio with limited stations and programming … imagine what we have come from – imagine where we are going. My only questions – will we control it or will it control us? And you know what it is. The clarion call goes out across the centuries. – Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Who shall guard the guards? Who shall police the police? Who shall program the programmers? Each generation must find its own answers to those questions. And the sooner you do it, the better because it’s not going to be my problem for much longer!

Rage, Rage 5 & 6

Rage, Rage
5

Empty now the house,
clean the floors
where she scattered her toys,
polished the grubby tables,
where her small hands
splattered food,
wanted and unwanted.

Empty the bathroom,
the tub where she took
her daily bath,
dry the towels she dampened,
wrinkled the toothpaste tubes
she happily emptied.

Empty too
this heart of mine
wherein she built her nest.

Like a wild bird, she has flown,
joined the end of summer migration,
yet I still possess a part of her
within my emptiness.

6

I remember how she stood
at the window, excited,
gazing at the birds.

“Finch,” I pointed.
“Goldfinch. Grosbeak.”

Her hands plucked at the air,
not a feather fell,
she caught nothing.

“Yellow, she cried, “yellow,”
jumping up and down with joy.

Her nose, all wet and runny,
left damp, sticky smudges
on the cold window-pane.

I see the greasy smears
that remain where her nostrils
pressed against the pane.

Still the glass stays unwashed
and now that shadow stands
between me and the sun.

Commentary:

Empty house, empty nest. How many homes have just enjoyed the festive spirit, rejoicing in the company of family and friends. Alas, the holiday is almost done. In many houses, the taxis have left for the airport, the cars have driven away, the rooms that were filled with warmth, joy, and laughter are cold and empty. Only the shadows remain. The echo of voices that are now silent.

The old remain, as they were before the festive invasion, old and lonely. The young have flown back and away to their usual lives, their schools, their jobs. I sit before my screen and type these words. My beloved sits in another room and watches TV. When the adverts come on, the volume increases and the same tedious voices mouth their joyless messages. My nest may be empty, but I do not have an empty head. And I don’t want it swamped by the commercial acumen of the tv set.

My head contains many rooms and many of those rooms are filled with memories that will, as Albert Camus said, last me a lifetime. One summer afternoon, examined in its intensity, will last forever, or for as long as the viewer lasts. Alas, I mourn for those who age, who suffer from Alzheimer’s and the like, and whose heads are empty. What do they think, what do they feel, what twilight memories flicker through the empty nests of their ageing brains? I hope and pray I never know.

Rage, Rage 4

Rage, Rage
4

I walk from room to room,
startled by shadows,
and open doors,
search under the table,
look behind chairs.

Nothing. No one.
The house stands
still and empty,
but for the sadness,
the silent sadness,
that fills each room
with their remembered
presence.

Commentary:

Absence and presence. How many of us feel that something is there, walking beside us, or just behind us? How many feel that an empty room is not empty, but is filled with a presence, something we feel, half-recognize?

I have been in houses, invited for the night, where I would not sleep. Why? I do not know. But I felt a presence, a prescience, if you wish, that filled me with a desire to leave and not to stay.

What is it? Is it other memories, other lives, that impinge upon ours in this current time frame? I do not know. But I do know that there are houses and rooms in which I will not stay. I also know that there are others that throw open warm arms to welcome me.

Look at Moo’s painting(s). How many of them welcome us in? Do some of them shut us out and make us shiver with a fear, not of the unknown, but of the hardly-remembered, that lies in wait to shake us out of this dream which is our present life?

Rage, Rage 2 & 3


Rage, Rage
2

These problems start the day
you realize you are alone.
Your beloved goes away,
for a holiday,
to be with your daughter
and grandchild.

Now the house and the cat
are yours, and yours alone.
No problem you say and
everyone believes you.

You jumped in the car,
drove daughter, and child,
holidays done,
to the airport.

Your beloved went with them,
her holiday about to begin.
And that’s when it all began.

3

When I come back home
from leaving them at the airport,
the front door stands open.

I thought I had closed it
when we left.
I tip-toe in and call out
“Is anybody there?”

Echo answers me –
‘… there, there, there …”

Commentary:

Raymond Guy LeBlanc, one of my favorite Acadian poets, published his poetry book, Cri de Terre, in 1972. My painter friend Moo, who also likes Acadian poetry, borrowed the title and changed it slightly when he painted this painting – Cri de Coeur. Earth Cry / Heart Cry.
What is all creativity, visual of verbal, but a cry from the land or a cry from the heart? Sometimes it is more than a cry – it becomes a clarion call, a shout out, a calling out.

So many of us are born with creativity in our hearts. So few of us carry that creativity, be it verbal or visual, into the adult world, a world that all too often grinds us down and sifts us out. We become grey people in grey clothing sitting behind grey desks beneath artificial lighting, doing grey jobs that slowly turn us into nine to five (or longer) dusts.

Moo has promised me a series of red paintings for this sequence. We shall see how he does. Red for anger, red for age, a red flag for danger, a red rag to wave at the raging bull of life, to provoke it, then bring it under control.

Nadolig Llawen – Welsh for Have a Joyous Festive Season. You can add other languages, as you wish. But above all remember Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s words – “Life is a dream and dreams are nothing but dreams.” One day, we shall all wake up. Artists and dreamers, grey ghosts and people of straw and dust.


Carved in Stone 72 & 73

Carved in Stone
72

Is this world I create real?
Of course it isn’t.

It exists only in my head,
and on the page,
but perhaps, one day,
you too will see
the things I have seen.

Yet the world I describe
is as unreal as the words
from which it is woven.

73

Heraclitus once wrote
we can never bathe
in the same river twice.

This is the Catch 22
faced by all poets,
to remember,
and to try to recreate.

Shadow hands on cave walls,
colored pictographs on gesso,
hieroglyphics on papyrus,
ink on paper, raw words,
and in the end,
everything reduced
to these three little letters
carved in stone –

RIP

Commentary:

If you have read this far, we have walked a long journey together – 73 verses that comment on life and the meaning of life. Hard reading in places, easy in others. I trust you have enjoyed the journey and found some stops and resting points along the way in which to contemplate the ways in which the threads of your own life intermingle with mine.

Throughout this journey, I have tried to use a four step process. (1) Verbal – the poems themselves. (2) Visual – photos that intertwine with the verbal. (3) A Commentary – that goes beyond the verbal and visual and opens up the ideas a little more. (4) A Dialog between myself – the poet – and Moo – the visual artist who has so frequently loaned me his paintings when he thinks they illustrate my words.

It’s been a topsy-turvy journey through what Bakhtin calls a world of carnival, where little is at it seems, and the world is turned upside down. That said, we have a clear choice – to slide down the downside of this life, or to scale the upside, to contemplate, with joy and happiness, the world from those heady heights.

Blessings. Pax amorque.
And thank you for travelling with me.

Carved in Stone 67 & 68

Carved in Stone
67

At night, on the cool
sea-shore of my dreams,
the calls of shore-birds
at Ste. Luce-sur-Mer
are borne on the wind.

High-pitched, they are,
like the voices of children,
or of men and women,
in distress.

I walk on the sand
at low tide and a lone gull
flies past my head,
battering itself
against the wind’s cage
with outraged, sturdy wings.

68

Sunset.
Sea mists descend.
The church on the headland
steps in and out of darkness.

Shadows gather, persistent.
Gulls surround a lone heron.
It clacks its beak in anger
forcing the gulls to scatter.

These words are not my words.

They came to me in the speech
of birds hidden in the foliage,
or carried on a feathered plume
sprung from the osprey’s wing.

Some came from the click
of the crab’s claw as he dug
deeper into the sand
a refuge where he thought
he could live safely.

Commentary:

Sunset. Sea mists descend. The church on the headland steps in and out of darkness. And so do I. I seek clarity, but there is no clarity when the sea mist descends, just the blurred image and the clouded thought. The cloud of unknowing, one philosopher called it, many years ago, and it is still with us. Especially when the sunlight fades and we are left wandering in the mists of unknowing.

“Is it here, you ask, or over here?” Well, if you do not know, I cannot tell you. But I will ask you this, and think very carefully before you answer – does the answer come from outside of you, given by another, or does it come from the deep, sacred intimacy of your own soul? The answer to that question will tell you all you need to know, one way, or the other.

These words are not my words. They came to me in the speech of birds hidden in the foliage, or carried on a feathered plume sprung from the osprey’s wing. Some came from the click of the crab’s claw as he dug deeper into the sand a refuge where he thought he could live safely. Sunset. Sea mists descend. The church on the headland steps in and out of darkness.

Crystal Liturgy

I

Crystal Liturgy

Here, in the abyss,
where song-birds pluck their notes
and send them, feather-light,
floating through the air,
here, you’ll find no vale of tears,
no fears of shadow-hawks,
for all blackness is abandoned
in the interests of sunlight and song.

Here, the crystal liturgy surges,
upwards from the rejoicing heart,
ever upwards, into the realms of light,
where color and sound alike
brim over with the joy that, yes,
brings release to head and heart.

Here, seven-stringed rainbows reign,
the everlasting harp is tuned and plucked,
and an eternity of music cements
the foundations of earth and sky.

Here, the master musician conducts
his celestial choir, their voices rising,
higher and higher, until they reach
the highest sphere, and song and voice
inspire, then expire, passing from our eyes
and ears into unbounded realms of light.

Here, the seven trumpets will sound
their furious dance, a dance that will announce
the end of this singer, the end of his song,
but never the end of song itself.

Commentary:

Crystal Liturgy is the first poem in the poetry sequence Septets for the End of Time. I will start placing these poems here and you can follow the sequence as it evolves. It consists of 56 poems – seven septets and a coda.

A Note for Readers

Olivier Messiaen is one of my favorite composers. I purchased his Quatuor pour la fin du temps / Quartet for the End of Time in Rimouski, PQ, in 1982 while driving around the Gaspé Peninsula. I was fascinated both by the music and by the words that headed each section. I should note that I have always enjoyed ekphrasis, the verbal description of visual works of art. With Messiaen, I tried to recreate not only the thoughts and images generated in me by his music, but the spaces and repetitions that come from light and dark sounds and birdsong caught in the intervals between notes. This was a new sphere of experimental writing for me and while composing I played first the Quatuor pour la fins du temps / Quartet for the End of Time, then Éclairs sur l’au-delà/ Lightning above the Beyond, and finally Petites esquisses d’oiseaux / Little Sketches of Birds. What I tried to capture came from within my own mind, but the metaphors and images were inspired by listening to Messiaen’s music.

As Right as Rain

As Right as Rain

It’s the day after the night before
and I awake to an ache
in each of my arms.

I went to bed early, at ten,
and slept until eight-thirty,
but my AI watch tells me
that I only got six hours sleep.

I found a bump in the bed,
on the right side,
when I look towards the window.

I must have lain my arm against it,
during the night. It was so sore,
my right arm, the Covid arm,
when I got up this morning,
but the left arm, the flu arm,
was perfectly alright, except for
a little itch, and a tiny tingle,
like the jingle of elf-bells.

Black coffee and an aspirin
soon cleared it all up, and now
I am as good as new,
as right as rain,
except the rain that fell last night
brought power losses, cold,
and an absence of warmth and light,
and that sort of rain is not all right.

Commentary:

That’s a golden oldie from a couple of years back. I did both jabs in the same arm this year and didn’t feel a thing. It didn’t rain either, but look at the muck coming down in the photo – we had a bit of that a couple of days ago. Welcome to our Canadian half-winter. We used to get 3 metres / ten feet of snow every winter. Last year I only used the snowblower of three occasions. No wonder I think of it as a half-winter – winter ain’t what it used to be.

Carved in Stone 63

Carved in Stone
63

Words descend, soft and peaceful.
They brush my mind
with the hushed touch
of a grey jay’s soundless wings.

Yet the grey jays have gone,
vanished along with the grosbeaks,
evening, pine, and rose breasted.

Words can hardly express what I feel
in this diminishing world
when I inhale color and light.

Dawn bursts into bloom,
and the indoor hyacinth starts,
once more, to blossom.

Its immanent beauty
fills me with a warmth
that disperses night’s shadows,
taking away all sense of gloom.

Commentary:

The indoor hyacinth starts, once more, to blossom. Its immanent beauty fills me with a warmth that disperses night’s shadows, taking away all sense of gloom. Indeed it does. Once upon a time, it became infested with little bugs and was reduced to one leaf. Clare worked with it, spoke to it, cajoled it, and bit by bit it came back to life. Now it lives in the front porch in summer and returns to the house, southern aspect, in winter, to flourish when least we expect it.

Hyacinth, Jamaica in Spanish. And nothing more delicious than the miel de jamaica that one is offered in Oaxaca, fruit juice squeezed from the hyacinth flowers. “My wife has gone to the West Indies.” “Jamaica?” “No, she went of her own accord.” Humor flows and the hyacinth flowers, and I spend my winter hours sitting and watching my indoor flowers.

Yet the grey jays have gone, vanished along with the grosbeaks, evening, pine, and rose breasted. They used to flock on the picnic tables but as the weather warmed, they went further north. I remember when 64 mourning doves perched on the power lines. Now, we have two or three who look lonely in the garden and sound even lonelier. Words can hardly express what I feel in this diminishing world when I inhale color and light, but long for the passerines’ morning and evening flight.

But, in spite of all that, sad as it is, the hyacinth’s immanent beauty fills me with a warmth
that disperses night’s shadows, taking away all sense of gloom.

Daffodils

Daffodils

Winter’s chill lingers well into spring.
I buy daffodils to encourage the sun
to return and shine in the kitchen.
Tight-clenched fists their buds,
they sit on the table and I wait
for them to open.

For ten long days the daffodils
endured, bringing to vase and breakfast-
table stored up sunshine and the silky
softness of their golden gift.

Their scent grew stronger as they
gathered strength from the sugar
we placed in their water, but now
they have withered and their day is done.

Dry and shriveled they stand paper-
thin and brown, crisp to the touch.
They hang their heads as their time
runs out and death weighs them down.

Commentary:

A sad poem, really, for a wet, damp, dark, chilly day that begs for some light and warmth. And what warmth and light daffodils bring. Not to mention their delicate scent that lingers long in the nostril, faint, but intoxicating. For ten long days the daffodils endured. This was a joy in itself. Sometimes cut flowers wither so quickly. But ten days … wow! And they do indeed bring to vase and breakfast-table stored up sunshine and the silky softness of their golden gift.

Their scent grew stronger as they gathered strength from the sugar we placed in their water. Indeed it did. And the sugar itself enhanced their ability to linger on. A little Somerset trick that, all the way from Zummer Zet where the cider apples grow. And no, you can’t have real cider without real cider apples from real cider apple trees. But never forget Sally the Sozzled Sow – she got into the storage shed and drank about five gallons of the stuff. It was all over the newspapers. She got loose and knocked the milk churns over and rolled them in the clover. The corn was half cut at the time, and so was she.

Dry and shriveled they stand paper-thin and brown, crisp to the touch. So sad when this starts to happen. Then one day, they just fade away. And then they hang their heads as their time runs out and death weighs them down. Sad, really, as I said at the start – but we must never forget the joy and light and happiness they bring us when they are in their prime.