EMPTY SPACES. Dedicated to Dot (Dorothy) and Harry Mordey.
Posted: March 10, 2021 Filed under: Poem | Tags: Poetry 1 CommentPOEMS OFTEN BREW WITHIN ME FOR DAYS, SOMETIMES WEEKS, AND ESPECIALLY WHEN I AM WALKING ON CARNINGLI.
THEN, SOMETIMES, THEY COME TO THE BOIL.
THIS ONE IS MADE TODAY, FOLLOWING THE NEWS OF THE DEATH OF AN AUNT.
COVID 19 HAS, THUS FAR, TAKEN THE LIVES OF WELL OVER 2.5 MILLION PEOPLE.
STALIN IS OFTEN QUOTED AS HAVING SAID ” 1 DEATH IS A TRAGEDY. A MILLION DEATHS IS A STATISTIC.”
THIS POEM IS FOR EVERYONE WHO HAS SUFFERED LOSS – DIRECTLY OR OTHERWISE – TO THE RAVAGES OF THE PANDEMIC… MOTHERS, FATHERS, BROTHERS, SISTERS, CHILDREN, GRANDPARENTS, UNCLES, AUNTS, FRIENDS.
please remember them
Across the world,
Empty spaces…
A silhouette no longer framed on the Savannah
In Wyoming, a horse remains unsaddled
Red dirt unbroken in a Senegalese plot
A Russian doll that won’t be dissembled
A Spanish hacienda deserted
An Italian meal untasted
In Japan a temple flag is unobserved
An ice hole, unfished
A desert tent, entrance unused
A rice field abandoned
A new crop not to be harvested
A quilt unfinished
Families, diminished.
The favoured seat in the pub abandoned now.
A classic car, unfired.
A paddle board beached.
Knitting unravelled.
A tractor untended.
A camera shuttered.
A guitar untuned.
A song unsung.
A bed unmade.
A bycicle rusting.
A dog forlorn.
A doll abandoned.
A spinning wheel, not turning.
A pen no longer picked up.
A spade, rusting in a cobwebbed greenhouse.
A boat, sails stowed, bobs alone on the estuary.
Clothes are folded away, no longer needed.
Books, never to be read
Dreams unfulfilled
Puzzles that no longer perplex
Letters never sent
An empty seat in a synagogue
An empty pew in the Chapel
A prayer mat in the mosque stays folded
The graveyards fat with memories.
Grass grows untended
A tweed jacket hangs forlorn
Flowers fail
Broken items that would have been mended
A driving lesson not given
A telephone call no longer to be expected
Empty beds
Empty sofas
Empty rooms
Empty wardrobes
Empty chairs
Loved ones lost
To everyone
Everywhere
“I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.” (Brideshead Revisited)
My Columbine Valentine. For H B-C-M
Posted: February 14, 2021 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentTwo years ago now, we were at sea! The sentiments expressed here though are before, contemporary and beyond. It’s all for you. Thank you. From the heart.
My seaside Valentine
If I could choose
Just one
Moment in time
To take ahead with me
Into unfathomable eternity
Governed by uncertain deity
Then
It would be
Standing Forward
Bedecked by you
( and, in my mind’s eye,
two ghost dogs
standing by)
On our voyage sublime
Watching the watery world slide by
The Pacific, painted by
Glacial blues
Awake
Gelato cream confusion
Melting into the black mirrored swell
As scimitar shaped birds
Slice the crested waves
Balletic marine fencers
Weaving, careening and
En Garde!
Hunting
The ocean’s ceaselessly hungering mouth
Restless, inscrutable, immutable
Breathing, deep water scheming
Its owners have
But scant regard
for our lumbering vessel –
Man made iron muscle –
Outflanked and bested
By shearwater and petrel
Undone by dolphin and iridescent Dorado.
It is as though we were
Tipping over the Equator
Outstripping day and date
Adventuring, ever southwards
Our ship in full spate
Speed baffling knots
Nautical miles
Our beating hearts rate.
Yes!
This would be the moment I’d choose to take.
With
You
and I
Yours and mine
Atlantic,
Caribbean
Pacific
To be specific
My salt spray adored
My seaside companion
My maritime best friend
My own worlds end
My sweetwater , Columbine
Valentine
13/2/19
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Cam ceilog – on “the quickening of the year”
Posted: February 5, 2021 Filed under: Photo, Poem | Tags: Candlemas, Carningli Dairy, Imbolc, Milk, NHS, Vaccines 4 CommentsDylan delivers our milk,
Rich, creamy, butter yellow white
Blessed by mountain angels and Swiss cows
Each mouthful, pure delight.
It is 5:15 pm when he pulls into the yard
And Dinas Head still shimmers with duskling light
Dog days of January,
Murky, misty Saturday night.
“It’s as if the year is taking chicken steps” he says
The longer days are creeping into being.
Cam ceilog.
And he drove on
Much more for him to do.
This week gifted us Candlemas,
“Imbolc” as the Celts would have it.
Crocus, snowdrops, wild primrose
All peeping through the coming grass
Finca scrambling the old stone walls
And two daffodils crowning the cairn
On a windswept, frosted Carningli,
Bracken brown dejected.
Meanwhile,
Others also work long days,
On into the darkness
Injecting fresh hope
Raising possibilities of renewal.
Diminishing at least a portion
Of year long
Gloom and fear.
Salutations to our NHS
Raise a glass to
The milk of human kindness
Toast
Cam ceilog
And the quickening of the year.
Somewhere, there’s hope…
Posted: December 21, 2020 Filed under: Photo, Poem | Tags: optimism 3 CommentsTo all friends who are generous enough to follow this blog, THANK YOU.
I have created a few (though nothing like as many as in previous times) poems during 2020, but, being honest, the creative impulse has been subdued, and what I have written is, well, just too dark for now at least. But, awake at 4 a.m. today (the shortest day of the year) these thoughts, this offering, came to mind. As with all my poetry, I don’t lay great claims to it, but…it’s from the heart, and it is my gift for you.
Take care out there, stay safe and well. And here’s to better days ahead, for our world, for us all, in 2021.
Greetings and good fortune. Yours Aye!
Marc
A young writer sits at home
The first novel just a glimpse in the mind’s eye
The pen, flourished.
The paper, anticipating
A Jane Austen for today
Ready and waiting.
Elsewhere, a teenager moodily lifts the guitar,
Strums newly acquired chords,
Maps out phrases, tinkers with words
And a new ‘Blue’ emerges
Blowing the critics away.
As scales are lifted from blinkered eyes
Fresh minted, eager new leaders
(they’ve life experience of climate change)
No longer question
No longer deny
And radical policies
Practical actions
Arise.
In a home some place
A 100 year old man
Father, grandfather and much more besides
Breathes out, smiles, gently sighs
Reviewing a long life
Well lived, hard won
And, despite great age,
Not yet done.
In a laboratory far away
A new graduate scientist explores
The microbe kaleidoscoped,
Micro-scoped miracles of life,
Her imagination slides, breaks free
Then, a pause
Before the new formula,
The world beating solution
Is born.
In one country
A child reels and spins a home-made hoop
Around a sand dusted yard.
In another
One young man, cocooned
Navigating his kayaked world,
With snow, ice, cold cracking floes
Seal whirled and polar beared
For both
Life is fun
Though life is hard.
In my dreamed of world
Zealots lay down the gun, the sword
Share faith, philosophy, thought
With believer and non-believer alike
Arguing
Yes
Hating
No
Accepting that seeing life differently
Ought not be seen
As something unacceptable
Untoward.
In a year gone by
We all shared
So much sadness
Such awful pain
Collective madness
Greed, disdain.
Who cared?
Who really cared?
How does one cope?
In a room
Nearby
A sometime poet
Wrote
Somewhere there’s hope
Somewhere
There’s hope…
A poem for Remembrance Sunday
Posted: November 11, 2020 Filed under: Poem | Tags: Army, civilians, Navy, Poppies, Poppy Day, Poppy Day Remembrance Army Navy RAF WW1 WW2 WW11, Remembrance Sunday, WW1, WW2 Leave a commentThis is an older poem, but the sentiment, for me, remains the same. I hope it is worthy…
Remembrance Sunday.
What would you have had us remember?
As you mustered in the trenches,
Around the gun emplacements.
As you hopped into the cockpit
And flung yourself skywards,
Or plumbed the depths
Submerged and submarined?
Should we remember your bravery?
Your mockery? Your cynicism in the face of duty?
Your gut wrenching anxiety,
Your fear, your mortal pain,
As you were killed and wounded,
Again and again and again?
Do the flags, the parades,
The preachers, the cavalcades,
Act as sufficient homage?
Or would peace, justice, equality
Be more deserving of your patronage?
But whichever,
It is true.
We must continue,
To remember you.
Always Rosemary
Posted: September 21, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: World Alzheimer's Day 10 CommentsThe 21st September is World Alzheimer’s Day. This poem, written five years ago, is dedicated to my mother in law, Rosemary, who lived alongside of Alzheimer’s for a number of years.
Sleeping now.
May your blanket be woven of spring time threads,
and flamespun from the azalea outside your window,
wild garlic fattening the woodland paths,
your fields, bested by bluebells,
Welsh oak, wild cherry, the rising sound
of saplings, keening in the breeze.
The crushed camelia heads that cushion the verge
below the trees
that you loved to see
as we were Fishguard, ferry bound.
Red petals gracing too, the secret garden,
where, a few snatched weeks ago,
we picked for you
Derek’s daffodils,
lingering strong and plump,
golden on your windowsill.
Sea thrift and campion binding the two Heads,
Dinas and Morfa dipping Westwards,
unwittingly majestic and yet, now, forlorn.
No longer held in your view.
Yet you loved to look out over these landmarks,
contemplating, ruminating,
reflecting perhaps,
on kinder, gentler days,
as you stared across the Bay
sometime sea shimmered,
at others, murk misted
and
“Can’t see Dinas Head’, you’d say.
But cliffs and headlands prevail,
rock steady,
as you well knew,
through older age and illness,
stoically surviving,
cup of tea reviving,
discomfort, trauma,
bravely borne.
Ages slipped by, unwittingly,
as such they do,
and gradually,
and I am sure,
unwillingly
you gathered your very self in,
breathed deep,
withdrew.
Harder to distinguish then
your hopes, your fears,
the altered state
the change of mind.
Some things are, it seems,
beyond the ken
of us, the ones to remain behind.
Left, bereft,
to nurse your memory,
there must be laughter,
there will be tears.
But for all that changed,
across these widowed years,
you remained
a smile,
a crossword clue determined
a flash of will.
And of this I am,
ever certain,
always Rosemary,
somewhere,
it might seem to be
adrift,
yet fixed,
blossoming still.
Resting now,
sure enough and
ready to greet us
from
behind the ethereal, floating curtain.
Heroes
Posted: August 20, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized 11 CommentsHats off to the unsung heroes
Consistently saving our lives
The cleaners
Shelf stackers
Checkout people
Delivery drivers
The post workers
Rubbish collectors
Street sweepers
Waiters
Baristas
Checkout workers
Carers
Kitchen porters
Washers up
Laundry staff
Hairdressers
Reception people
The list goes on…
Unheralded
Underpaid
Undervalued
Passing by without much sound
But now we know
They’re the ones
Who really make the world go round
Friendships and community
Posted: July 27, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentThe Borrowed Boy. I’m really looking forward to reading this new novel by my friend and colleague, Deborah . And I’m intrigued to see how she will have woven some of our community based work into her story. Exciting! Deborah can be found here on WordPress, search for Abra K Deborah.
Sweet peas – for HC.
Posted: June 25, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized 5 Comments
An inch of rain fell overnight.
And the windows, roof tiles
Chattered, clattered
In the fore gathered breeze.
On this first summer morning
You are sleeping.
The day stealthily dawning.
I creep downstairs.
On the table there are sweet peas
Their scent stains the room
Dispelling the gloom.
Two decades before
The olive trees
Silver whistled in the Kythera air.
Dancing and sighing
Incurious mime.
Murmuring, whispering, sweeping the table tops
At Filios Taverna.
Katerina and Nikos were there,
Aiding and abetting our blossom time.
The wind had shadow wrapped the Belvedere
In the fortnight before.
We ate fish and peas, cheese pie,
Bought Turkish Delight
In Leavadi.
Drove away from Kapsali
Late one night.
Cut the headlights
Looking out over the Bay
Stargazed
The Plough
North Star
The Milky Way
And somewhere, off stage
An owl screeched
Scimitar sweeping the purple shrouded sky
As we sat and watched galaxies go by.
Now I make your morning tea.
We let the day slowly unfold.
As the days pass, so too the years,
No longer so young,
but, not yet so old.
For time has been kind
With us in mind.
Two long decades since we met.
So much to remember.
We’ve made a collage
Woven a tapestry
Painted a picture
Told ourselves a story
Rich, vibrant, alive
A collective memory.
Nothing, no nothing
That I’d choose to forget.
And now?
All I can say for sure.
All that I know.
Is that Kythera gifted me
My heart’s desire
Some twenty years ago.
A Woodland garden – by my guest poet, Richard Wheeler.
Posted: June 22, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentThe link below will take you to a film (some 15 minutes or so in length) made by Gwyn Cole. The filming is delightful, and captures the mood of the garden, and of the Nevern estuary at Newport very atmospherically. And Richard’s words are evocative, lyrical and written with the lightest of touches.
This really is a treat’ If you like poems, gardens, and/or Pembrokeshire – feast your eyes.
My thanks to Richard and to Gwyn for sharing their creation.
https://www.stillriverfilms.com/woodlandgarden/
