I had no paper with me in the car and wrote this on a bottle redemption slip.
Redemption: that’s what I seek and some days it seeks me. A double need this need to redeem and be redeemed. A double need too this god I need, the god who needs me.
Lonely he will be without me, and I without him. Knock and the door will open. Seek and ye shall find.
I look and, yes, he’s there, him within me and me within him.
This redemption slip is all I need: empty bottles on the one hand, my empty heart on the other, both now redeemed.
All of this while I sit in the car. outside Wendy’s or outside Taco Bell, sitting quite still and ready to wait, not knowing my upcoming fate.
Words grow like flowers, invasive, cruel, beautiful, cutting, and when cut, they wither and fade, just like flowers. Catch them while you can, I say. Catch them, hold them tight, press them to you heart, for time is voracious and will soon devour them, swallowing them down in the black holes of forgetfulness, carelessness, and memory loss. Shine a light on your words. Underline them, grace them with stars, think about them, carefully. And remember, the word once spoken or written can never, ever be recalled.
Joy of Light
I wait for words to descend, soft, peaceful. They brush my mind with the soft touch of a grey jay’s wings. When they refuse to come, I know that silence is golden. Sunshine spreads its early morning light, upwards, under the blinds, into my room and my eyelashes radiate its rainbow.
Light from the rose window in Chartres once spread its spectrum over my hands, and I rejoiced in the glory of its speckled glow. I spread my fingers before my face and marveled at the suit of lights clothing my body. In such splendour mortal things like words cease to flow.
Words are inadequate. They cannot express what I feel when I breathe in color and light and my heart expands into an everlasting rose, as red as dawn, as bright as a blushing sunrise over Minister’s Island. Flowers burst into bloom. A sense of immanent beauty fills me as light, and warmth, and joy disperse night’s gloom.
A child among timeworn men, I learn traditional songs, if ever there’s going to be a life hereafter, with the correct words, no messing about with watered down lyrics, for back in the Emerald Isle ‘they’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green’. I listen as all the ageless grievances are aired yet again by the exiles who parade around the family kitchen. I study the old ways and practice songs and tales from Ireland until they become familiar. As for those men, I met them in later life, at my mother’s funeral, knowing I had never really known them or understood them, those uncles and cousins, realizing that my family had split apart a long time ago down religious and racial lines. Yet I still sensed our closeness and recognized the familiar map of Ireland drawn in their ageing faces. Their Weltanschauung was Irish Catholic while mine was Anglo-Welsh, tinged with Methodism. Each new school I attended introduced me to a new faith and eventually I believed in none of them. I became an outcast, standing on the outside, looking in. I often wonder what the early immigrants to Canada the French and English, Irish and Scottish, when they first came here. What did they see and, conversely, how were those people seen, and by whom? Who now will tell those stories and bring those early cultures back to life? Today, I sit on the shore at Indian Point and listen to the silence. I wait for the wind’s whisper as it whisks all footprints from the sand. I hear the song of the sea as it rises and falls. In my mind’s eye, I watch the rocks as they slowly crumble and I repeat the song of the stones as they grind together, metamorphosing unhurriedly into sand. It takes a juggler to hold all this ancient world together especially when the old nests are empty and the birds have all flown. Wave foam slips into a single footprint abandoned in the mud and sand. All around me there are tales to tell and songs to sing. Some of them are even mine. I often think about an immigrant’s first foot-print, a lone print on an empty beach, waiting to be swept away by the rising tide. Man Friday, perhaps. Or was it Man Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday … Man Saturday is best. But it’s never on a Sunday, so Man Sunday is as impossible as Woman Sunday, for the sadness of our memories exiles our better halves, our better two-thirds, our better three-quarters. All around us, there are songs to sing, stories to tell, words to repeat, wordless moments to recreate. “Patience and shuffle the cards,” Cervantes wrote. “Distinguish between all those false sirens, your one true voice.” That’s Antonio Machado. Find your own star and follow it. That might even be me, though it’s probably in the I Ching or the Daily Horoscope. The nests were all empty. The birds had flown. Who wants to live alone in a jack pine crow’s nest hotel in the Land of his Fathers where nobody knows him, where he doesn’t speak the language, and where he now feels ill at ease? The last time I visited the UK, I sat on the English side of the Severn Bridge, drinking a cup of tea, but I couldn’t cross that bridge, and I couldn’t stay in a htoel, in the Land of my birth, where I no longer knew anyone. Not that Wales was ever the Land of my Fathers, for my father was born in England, and my grandfather in Ireland. The Land of my Mother, perhaps, for she was actually born there. But the Land of my Mother never appears in any national anthem, and Mother is always singular while apparently a man can have more than one father, depending I suppose on the rub of the green.
It’s surprising how TV advertisements stick in your head, well, mine anyway. I can sing so many, from so far back. I remember going into a pub in England and standing at the bar. The barman asked me what I wanted and I said “Worthington E”. He looked at me in a funny fashion and said “We ain’t got any”. So I said “A pint of Watney’s please, Draft Red Barrel”.
Well, if I ever did. People around me were spluttering with laughter and choking on their beer. “Gor blimey,” said the barkeep, “What planet have you been living on? They stopped making that stuff generations ago. Come on,” he said, “Try again. Pull the other leg, it’s got bells on.”
“Well,” I said, “”you wouldn’t have a pint of Moosehead would you? Or Molson Canadian?”
I settled for a pint of best bitter. It was okay, but it wasn’t quite the same. And then I discovered Old Thumper. I’d never heard of that before, but it certainly was the best thing going.
There used to be “Blue birds over, the White cliffs of Dover” – and I remember how white and bright they were, when I was a teenager, returning from my summers in France and Spain, to see them, shining, and to know that I would soon be back in England – an England I no longer recognize.
Windmills, cliffs collapsing, line-ups for miles of trucks and traffic waiting to make their way into a Europe that we rejected. I remember travelling to France, Spain, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal and always being welcome. I remember the days when, as a pre-teen and an early teen, visas were still necessary for entry into some countries. And I remember how, later, with a European Passport, I was welcomed as a member of a larger community.
The Latin Mass, a common factor throughout Europe in my youth, now celebrated in many languages, is only open to those who speak those languages. Progressive or Retrograde? I guess, like beauty, everything is in the eye of the beholder. De gustibus non est disputandum – and that’s how it should be. But I long for that freedom, that sense of adventure, that sense of belonging that once, so long ago, I knew.
And yes, I wish I could still see those bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, not just lines of lorries and piles of portaloos and stress and discontent and impatience and misery. Just sign me sad, I guess, but now I know why those bluebirds are blue.
A friend wrote to me today and sent her greetings to ‘you and your bride’. Well, that delightful phrase set me thinking. Clare (my bride!) and I have known each other for 61 years and we have been married for 56 of them, 57 this Christmas. I often wonder how this wonderful woman has put up with me during all those years.
Mrs. Thomas Thomas, my good friend from the little village in Wales where my parents had their house, once told me about a friend of hers. That friend had been married for 35 years and had never had a quarrel or a fight with her husband. ‘There she goes,’ she told me one morning. ‘Never a fight with her husband. Bloody boring marriage, if you ask me.’
The point, I suppose, is that yes, there can be disagreements within a marriage, and doubts, and uncertainties, and questions about major decisions, and no, we don’t agree on everything? How could we? And one of the best parts about marriage, well, ours anyway, is agreeing to differ, and then making up again, as quickly as possible, after any disagreements.
Whatever, it is hard to argue against 61 years of togetherness and happiness. The secret formula? Clare’s – to learn my languages with me, to help me with my work, to lift me up when I am down. Mine – to love cooking for her, spoiling her, bringing her flowers, and trying to support her as she has supported me.
We have often led separate lives – Clare as a tennis player, a national gymnastics judge, a dedicated show secretary of the local kennel club, a show dog owner, groomer, and handler. Me – as a rugby player and coach, a researcher who has travelled frequently and visited important libraries in my field, a poet and short story writer who has taken and led workshops and writing groups.
We have also worked together at all levels. Each of my four graduate courses (MA, Toronto, 1967) demanded a paper every two weeks. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – paper #1. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday -paper #2. Saturday – rugby with U of T Blues or Toronto Irish. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – paper #3. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – paper #4.
I would sit in the kitchen and write the papers in longhand. Clare would sit at the other side of the table and type each page as I finished it. She did the editing too, when and where necessary. She also developed her computing skills faster than I did. Result: web pages, art work, design, photography, and several of my book covers. Our keys to success include team work, mutual assistance, deep caring and sharing, but separate paths, when and if we needed to take them.
So, there you have it. A swiftly-penned picture of me and my bride, or, as I call her, my better two-thirds. My life would have been very, very different without her. And don’t forget: behind every lucky man, there stands a wonderful woman.
Sixty years ago, in 1962, somewhere around today’s date, I left my public school – private school – boys’ boarding school and entered the real world as a free man. I was lost. They educated me to be part of a world that no longer existed, the world of walls, and boundaries, of lists and rules, of school reports and chains of authority, older boys > house monitors > prefects > head boy of house > head boy of school > masters > house masters > head master. That great chain of authority was to rule me for the rest of my life.
Lists
This is my clothing list. Six times a year I packed all items into my school trunk, 3 times to go to school and 3 times to go home. Six times a year I unpacked all items from my trunk, 3 times when I arrived at school and 3 times when I arrived home.
Reports
I still have my school reports signed by by teachers, initials only, and my father, full signature. He had to sign so that the teachers could ascertain that yes, he had read my school report and that no, I had not hidden it from him. The report is a disaster story. I look back on some of the comments and wonder what worlds, what different realities, were we living in? One verbal remark, made in class: “Why are you in the sixth form?” “I am going to university, sir.” “The only way you’ll go to university is on a train.”
I sent that gentleman my train ticket, but he didn’t choose to remember the comment, made to a fifteen year old boy.
Scars
I still carry them. So many of us do. Less than most, possibly, for us ne’er do wells and miscreants.
In the beginning was the word, and the word, maybe, may endure. I guess, maybe, one day we’ll find out.
“When I stand still and contemplate the path that led me here.”
I see purple arrows painted on the corridor floors their sharp ends pointing to the treatment room where the machine’s stark metal throat waits to swallow me.
I shed my Johnny Coat and lie on the bed. I mustn’t move as they adjust me tugging me this way and that, in accordance with the red marks painted on my belly and hips.
Then they raise my feet, place them in a plastic holder, cover me with a thin cotton sheet, and leave the room to take refuge in the safety of their concrete bunker.
With a click and a whirr, the bed moves up and in, the ceiling descends and claustrophobia clutches.
The machine circulates weaving its clockwork magic: targeting each tumor, scrubbing me clean, scouring my body, scarring my mind.
Comment: It all happened a long time ago now, but one never forgets. The desire to reach out and help and comfort any and all sufferers is still with me. This is the link for my book, A Cancer Chronicle.
Rant, I say, rant and rage away, rage, rage against the death of friendship, and loathing built now on what was once holy oath and undying love. This is a blood sport where even the spectators are spattered with the refined frenzy of friends turned into fiends and foes, and this is a protest, a rant against love that doesn’t last, that doesn’t stand the test of time, against families that break up, against a society that breaks them up, driving wedges and knives between people once bound by the puppet strings of love, against relationships that can no longer continue, against the rattling of dead white bones in empty cupboards where skeletons dance their way into legal daylight and the spectators call for more: more blood, more money, more blood money, and the engagement diamond is a blood diamond now, a tarnished garnet, and where is the Little Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, that spire inspired needle that will stitch their world back together, and stitch you back together when you’ve been shocked out of your own ruby-sweet rose-tinted world and torn into little bits in their oh-so-bitter one, the biters bitten and those bitten biting back in return, a new world this world of snapping turtles, turtles standing on the back of turtles, and turtle after turtle all the way down until this carnival world puts down its dead clown mask and turns turtle in its turn.
Comment: My thanks to Brian Henry for publishing this on Quick Brown Fox.
Septets for the End of Time ~ Why do the people? by Roger Moore
1
Divide and Conquer
They divided us into houses, Spartans and Trojans, and encouraged us to compete with each other, single combat, and then team against team, house against house, eternal, internal civil war.
We divided ourselves into Cavaliers and Roundheads, Monarchists and Parliamentarians, Protestants and Catholics, and we continued those uncivil wars that marred the monarchy, brought down the crown, and executed the Lord’s anointed.
We fought bitterly, tribe against tribe, religion against religion, circumcised against uncircumcised, dorm against dorm, class against class, territorial warfare. We defended our bounds, bonding against all outsiders to guard each chosen ground.
With it came the denigration of the other. Not our class. Scholarship boy. Wrong end of town. Wrong accent. We don’t talk like that here. Speak the Queen’s English, you… and here … we inserted the appropriate word of vilification.
Our wars never ended. We carried them from prep school to junior school, to senior school, sometimes changing sides as we changed schools or houses, always clinging grimly to our best friends, protectors, and those we knew best.
After school, all those prejudices continued to hold us down, haunted us through university, red-brick or inspired spires, Trinity Oxford, Trinity Cambridge, or Trinity Dublin, each gilded with the white sniff of snobbery that gelded us.
Alas, we carried them, piled in our intellectual rucksacks, through university, into grad school, out into the wide world, infinitely small minds based on prejudice and pride, continuing our tribal warfare, unable to understand anything at all, other than us or them, shoulder to shoulder, divide and conquer.
2
Rage, rage …
Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you realize that you can do no more. What is it about family split-ups, the ugliness of a disputed divorce, the glue coming unstuck in an already unstable marriage, a financial settlement that satisfies nobody and impoverishes both sides of a divide?
And how do you bridge that divide when you are friends with father, mother, children and the wounds are so deep that everyone wants out, whatever the costs and whatever it takes? And what is it about the deliberate wounding of each by the others, leaving permanent scars that will never heal over, no matter how hard one tries?
And what is it about lawyers, when too many guests gather around the Thanksgiving turkey and knives are out for everyone to take the choicest cuts leaving nothing but a skeletal carcass, no flesh on the bones, and the guests all hungry and their empty bellies rumbling for more, more, more.
3
Reconciliation
Rant, I say, rant and rage away, rage, rage against the death of friendship, and loathing built now on what was once holy oath and undying love. This is a blood sport where even the spectators are spattered with the refined frenzy of friends turned into fiends and foes, and this is a protest, a rant against love that doesn’t last, that doesn’t stand the test of time, against families that break up, against a society that breaks them up, driving wedges and knives between people once bound by the puppet strings of love, against relationships that can no longer continue, against the rattling of dead white bones in empty cupboards where skeletons dance their way into legal daylight and the spectators call for more: more blood, more money, more blood money, and the engagement diamond is a blood diamond now, a tarnished garnet, and where is the Little Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, that spire inspired needle that will stitch their world back together, and stitch you back together when you’ve been shocked out of your own ruby-sweet rose-tinted world and torn into little bits in their oh-so-bitter one, the biters bitten and those bitten biting back in return, a new world this world of snapping turtles, turtles standing on the back of turtles, and turtle after turtle all the way down until this carnival world puts down its dead clown mask and turns turtle in its turn.
Roger Moore is an award-winning poet and short-story writer. Born in the same town as Dylan Thomas, he emigrated from Wales to Canada in 1966. An award-winning author, CBC short story finalist (1987 and 2010), WFNB Bailey award (poetry, 1989 & 1993), WFNB Richards award (prose, 2020), he has published 5 books of prose and 25 books and chapbooks of poetry.
Over 150 of his poems and short stories have appeared in 30 Canadian magazines and literary reviews, including Arc, Ariel, The Antigonish Review, theFiddlehead, the Nashwaak Review, Poetry Toronto, Poetry Canada Review, the Pottersfield Portfolio and The Wild East. He and his beloved, Clare, live in Island View, New Brunswick, with their cat, Princess Squiffy, but they live on the far side of the hill from the St. John River, with the result that there is not an island in view from their windows in Island View. Visit Roger’s website here.
rogermoorepoet 