Creations - Now, The River Bank

Isn't it strange, the way creativity works ? I've been trying to write a villanelle. These are the luxuries a mama can indulge in when her children are away. I took a lunch break, which was less about hunger and more about frustration, and while I stood at the sink peeling my hard-boiled egg, I thought about an earlier conversation about co-sleeping. My favourite co-sleeping factoid is that the Japanese have a special word for the child who sleeps between her parents. The sleeping child is like a river and each of her parents is a river bank, keeping her safe. And then - BAM! - goodbye villanelle, hello haiku :)

Now, the river bank

Is free to be the river.

Her children are grown.

Poetry Wednesday - Rapa Nui

Rapa Nui, April, 1722

Sailor, on sight of land
You name it resurrection.

Illuminated, the bird descends.
She breathes you in
On the tide’s flow.

The earth burns. Fever
shakes it down to the bone.

A river of glass to meet you,
Your Passion
A plague, an exodus.

The horizon breaks.
A dream, interrupted.

Poetry Monday: Ana o keke

Ana o Keke

Inside my mouth
An egg
The tern calls
Circling
Careless one
Plaintive

Come to me
Tangatu mana
Man bird
Bring your red
Into my blindness
Your crown of hair
With its stink of the sea

The tern calls
Circling
Ana o keke

I am your milk
Man bird
Come to me
Inside my mouth

An egg
Inside the egg
A tern calling

A Poem is a Frog

For those in classrooms

The first thing you need to know about poetry is that it's a living thing, and that your aim, in reading or teaching it, is exposure. Exposure and infection, so that your blood flows with it and you exhale lines like this:

I have my heart on my fist
like a blind falcon*

and breathe in others:

For a time I rest
in the grace of the world**

A poem is a frog, a thing built of breath and movement and sound, its form a skin around the heart's rhythm.
Something our children observe, like the fall of leaves, the texture of feather, barrenness flowering into colourful confusion, the refuge of the subterranean.

Encourage observation. Take a stanza like this and see where it takes you. Hear what you can hear.

When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, in exile from himself, his life, the love gone down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself. ***

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
The poet is speaking to you.

Take time to listen, to puzzle out your own response. To dissect this poem now is to snatch the frog from its pond and pin it, limb by limb, and in the tearing apart, whose purpose is sense and explication, to destroy the living thing.

Watch. Listen. Learn its rhythms instead. Let the poem live with you. Read it at first light, in a moment stolen from the hustle of the day, in the hollow insomniac hour.

When the poem has you by heart, when, as in a dream, the frog turns into a room you can conjure and live in at will, when the mood of the poem is the mood of the room - ecstatic, grieving, ironic or detached - then - then, you begin.

* from The Tomb of the Kings by Anne Herbert
** from The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
*** from The Poem as Mask: Orpheus by Muriel Rukeyser

Extract & Link: When The Towers Fell by Galway Kinnell and WTC 9/11 by Steve Reich

From our high window we saw the towers
with their bands and blocks of light
brighten against a fading sunset,
saw them at any hour glitter and live
as if the spirits inside them sat up all night
calculating profit and loss, saw them reach up
to steep their tops in the until then invisible
yellow of sunrise, grew so used to them
often we didn’t see them, and now,
not seeing them, we see them.


Read the rest here.


I'd also like to link to this, Steve Reich's WTC 9/11 
Please be aware this piece of music, accomplished and full of interest, also has the potential to be upsetting and difficult to listen to for some. 

A Dream in Which I Fail To Take my Poetry Seriously

Last night, before I went to sleep, I asked my subconscious to please allow me a dream of the the animal whom I should write about in my next Zoo stanza. Thinking tragic, majestic, poetic. Thinking Rilke.

Goldfish. That's what I dreamed about. Trying to keep two goldfish alive in my bra - bowls and Tupperware being unavailable, apparently - by pouring water into it.  Pleasingly, I not only managed to keep the fish alive; one of them even gave birth to a little goldfish. Touching.

Ape, eagle...goldfish ? I don't think so.

Finding the Time

Turns out it's not that hard to find the time to write. My girls babysit for the neighbors four hours a week. If I don't mind being a rubbish mother and sending Snowy off to watch TV in my room, I can have half a day a week to write.

Turns out the hard bit is how selfish you get when you start to write. How you don't really care about anything but a line, an image, the rhythm of the poem. The things you take pleasure in as a mother disappear; the meal on the table, the story read cuddled up in bed, the sound of girls dancing and laughing.

Who is this mother, with her drafts and her mutterings, her eagles and her apes ?

from Zoo


1. It is difficult to hold
His gaze, my silver-back
Slave, melancholy; tester
Of my white pills, bitter,
On the tongue and in the brain.
Heart and lung; my drugged breath
Breaking open the sac of my disease;
His heart a loop of film. Electrodes.
The children kept from their mothers,
Caged. The loop a bracelet worn into him
Like rope, scars on the skin of his wrist,
His neck; the places he was tethered by
Or led by. How much does he remember
Of life outside the camps ?

I am wheat and braid,
I am wrapped in the Reich-flag.
I will never burn for him.


2. Your death over you, small
Mammal in the shadow of
Muscle and talon descending.
Dressed in your puppeteer’s black
You think you hold the hunter’s strings.
When the eagle no longer frightens you
That is your adulthood. Within it
You find something broken,
Summer-brittle as prairie bone.
              _________


Find more Poetry Friday here.

The Tourist Drive

Helena's post, with the lovely title between moons, and some even lovelier photos of a place by the sea I love so much and pictures that make me homesick for mist over the escarpment, put me in mind of this poem. And yes, whereas Helena's moon and her sea are light and blessed, mine are dark and somewhat on the cursed side. We all have our strengths.

the tourist drive

picadilly neon  was never more enticing
than this; the coast road and a full moon

bald tyres hastening , as mercury,
each new corner an invitation to speed

ninety pushing a hundred: FALLING ROCKS
DO NOT STOP an easy justification

of the suicidal evening
pale as an egg, the moon sings

from its sphere - unlovely siren,
the night's grim lorelei

who winks its one eye as if to say:
i know where you're headed

stilled, as a dead man's cries, the sea
casts its silver like a shroud -

acceleration: the taste, briefly, of air,
then salt, then salt -

Granta - the F Word, An Ambassador, A Few Poems, A Quote, A Lovely Landscape

Thanks to Catherine for this link to the latest issue of Granta, which explores the ways in which feminism continues to inform, address and complicate. Check out her blog MotherHugger in my blogroll, especially if you have an interest in maternal feminism.

Selected prose, poems and essays from the issue online here.

I see that the poet Gillian Allnut has a poem in this issue; Sadly, it isn't online. Gillian was my very first writing tutor at a young writer's retreat near Hebden Bridge in the UK, not far from where Sylvia Plath is buried. She was quiet and patient, the perfect person to critique the work of 15 rather intense and inexperienced writers. I seem to remember she turned down our invitation to join us on a slightly inebriated walk to pay homage at SP's graveside but I don't hold that against her at all. Her poetry is delicate and tough.

Our other tutor, the writer David Dabydeen, came with us. I have mixed feelings about David. On the one hand, he thought I should be writing, not about the Wicker Man, which I was at that time, but about things I knew. He suggested Aboriginal legends as an example of things I might know and I suggested to him that not only was I much more interested in, and knowledgable about, the Wicker Man, our First Peoples might not take kindly to me appropriating their stories. He wrote about post-colonialism, so I never really understood his suggestion. I'm an Anglo-Celt all the way through so the Wicker Man is pretty much mine to do with as I wish. On the other hand, he was charming...if your poem wasn't working, he would say things like "the whorls of your ears are like a sea shell", which, at 19,  was consoling.

Get a glimpse of the writers retreat, Lumb Bank,  here.

To return to the topic of feminism, however, I find this is as good a post as any to post my favourite Rebecca West quote, known to you all, I'm sure.

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

More Rebecca West Quotes here.

ETA - a quick google tells me that David Dabydeen has moved on from charming writing students and is now charming all of China as the Guyanan ambassador! I'm feeling all star struck...

Also - it sounds as if I'm being flippant about His Excellency, which I'm not. He was lovely; he gave me some excellent advice and support with my writing during that retreat and after. And he's a well regarded writer. And no, I'm not sure how I ended up here either! I only sat down to post a link.

Anyway...a little poetry now this post has become a hodge-podge. This is from David Dabydeen's long narrative poem, Turner.

Stillborn from all the signs. First a woman sobs
Above the creak of timbers and the cleaving
Of the sea, sobs from the depths of true
Hurt and grief, as you will never hear
But from woman giving birth, belly
Blown and flapping loose and torn like sails,
Rough sailors’ hands jerking and tugging
At ropes of veins, to no avail. Blood vessels
Burst asunder, all below – deck are drowned.
Afterwards, stillness, but for the murmuring
Of women. 

Read the rest of the poem here.

And this is by Gillian Allnutt.

Epiphany ( Yorkshire Dales )

for John


Solitude  your death  a drover's
road  two dry stone walls  the borders
of the earth  each stone a hand's width and the berth of God


Where blackthorn lays the wind bare to the bone
you herded stars.

The Moon, Hidden.

I even wrote it on my calendar, to be sure we wouldn't forget to look.  The moon will be huge tonight, full and close. We've woken to rain, a grey sky, a good chance that tonight the moon will be hidden. The poets will have to do our looking for us.

Full Moon by Tu Fu

Above the tower -- a lone, twice-sized moon.
On the cold river passing night-filled homes,
It scatters restless gold across the waves.
On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze.

Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars,
Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon
Spreading in my old garden . . . All light,
All ten thousand miles at once in its light!

The Trouble With Reading Too Much Emily Dickinson

Is that instead of inner dialogue sounding like this - "Better remember the library books and those phone calls." - it sounds like this -

Remember to return -
the books - telephone -
the school - call the physician -
and the vet - observe -
the list of all there is -
to do -

Taking a Break

To follow this piece of advice, excerpted from Wendell Berry's poem How To Be A Poet (to remind myself)

Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens (....)

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Perdida

Perdida

I accumulate loss like pebbles at the beach,
Inconsequential at first; heavier as time passes.
The absence of light but also of birdsong,
Of rain’s insistent voice.

Only the heart’s pulse, magnified in darkness,
To pull me down to a humid sleep,
To be my mother, to hold me to
The marriage-bed of rock.

And all the while he crouches, insubstantial
Except for breath, which is the metre of his being.
Measured and unhurried. Like water,
He has aeons to wear down all living things;
And my own lifetime to wear down me.

Underground, the minutes thicken. The air is clotted
With time, the hours explode like a galaxy in the brain.
Grain and mother, season and tide, gone. He has a sweating
Bride of earth, amnesiac. There is a tapping,

A falling of seeds, a sweet blackness held to my mouth
And refused. A thirst for melody instead, for threshing songs,
For harvest and all bounty, for night’s cessation.

Poetry Friday

St. Francis And The Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell

Spent the morning at the vets and got to thinking about this poem. How beautiful is the idea of "reteaching a thing its loveliness" ?

Poetry Friday

A Prayer in Spring


Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.

                 - Robert Frost 

I told you this week would be cheerier!!!

Poetry Friday

A cheery one next week....I chose this today because of reading The Book Thief and listening to the Anne Frank diary. I've also taken the liberty of playing around with the line breaks.

Death Fugue
by Paul Celan translated by Jerome Rothenberg
Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night we drink and drink we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland  your golden hair Margareta he writes it and walks from the house  and the stars all start flashing  he whistles his dogs to draw near whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand he commands us to play for the dance Black milk of morning we drink you at night we drink you at dawntime and noontime we drink you at dusktime we drink and drink There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta your ashen hair Shulamite  we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie He calls jab it deep in the soil you lot there you other men sing and play he tugs at the sword in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue jab your spades deeper you men you other men you others play up again for the dance Black milk of morning we drink you at night we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime we drink and drink there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta your ashen hair Shulamite he cultivates snakes He calls play that death thing more sweetly  Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland he calls scrape that fiddle more darkly  then hover like smoke in the air then scoop out a grave in the clouds where it’s roomy to lie Black milk of morning we drink you at night we drink you at noontime  Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland we drink you at dusktime and dawntime we drink and drink Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue he shoots you with leaden bullets his aim is true there’s a man in this house  your golden hair Margareta he sets his dogs on our trail  he gives us a grave in the sky he cultivates snakes and he dreams   Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland     your golden hair Margareta your ashen hair Shulamite

Night Poem 1

I must explain
what I can only
come at
obliquely,
like a child
with her fingers
over her eyes
so as not to let
the world
see her.

The bowl of limes
from our stunted tree
holds its sharpness
inside but bleeds
colour into
 the winter air.
I am writing
myself a lullaby -
song of the old times -
one arm resting
beside the bowl of limes.

In this house
I make the lullabies,
soothe fearful
children to their sleep,

 lie awake to the radio -
noise from the island -
music that mocks
with its drone
underneath the melody,
drags me right into
its heart,
its earth, its black
earth, its night,
its contagion.

Yet here I prosper.
Be not afeard,
the Isle is full of noises.

Poetry Friday

Some say cavalry and others claim
infantry or a fleet of long oars
is the supreme sight on the black earth.
I say it is
the one you love. And easily proved.
Did not Helen who far surpassed all
mortals in beauty desert the best
of men, her kin,

and sail off to Troy and forget
her daughter and dear kinsmen ? Merely
the Kyprian's gaze made her bend and led
her from her path;

these things remind me now
of Anaktoria who is far
and I
for one

would rather see her warm supple step
and the sparkle of her face than watch
all the dazzling chariots and armoured
hoplites of Lydia.

By Sappho.

Poetry Saturday

The Second Coming by W.B.Yeats


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand:
The Second Coming! hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born ?



Hmmm...hard to type this without hearing Joni Mitchell...and I never knew Yeats was so fond of the semi-colon.

Poetry - Oops! - Sunday

On Friday I was too busy hosting book club. On Saturday I was too busy reading and making apple pie, today I was too busy drinking coffee and playing Moshi Monsters with Snowy ( don't ask, but if you want to see our Moshi Monster rooms online, ask for boydetective and boydetectivemum ).

Tonight, though, with permission of the poet.....


Black & light by Kathleen Bleakley

I dream of
a white dog
running across
paddocks
spiked with
morning frost

of stroking
soft fur
holding
a small dog

when I wake
you are still
gone
little black
& tan dog

I remember cradling
your body
beautiful black fur
not a spot of red
yet inside bleeding
to death

I've dreamt
so many replays
times of reaching
you before the car

in the eighth year
the white dog
comes to my dream

but breath
stabs my chest
I see you lying
a statue on
the grass
I called your name
not dead
you could
just raise your head

I held your body
fragile
bones, fur
and breath
prayed
for your spirit
to stay

maybe that
white dog
is your light ?