loses so many road signs,
stolen by tourists!
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The moon petals the sea. Rose petals the sea. Stone sea. Stone petals. Rose petals of stone. Stone rising before me. Sea moves. How moves...
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Wednesday, 31 March 2010
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Monday, 29 March 2010
I am the man who corralled the wolf (& Haiku #96)
Back in early February I posted a poem entitled I am the man who swallowed the boy. In fact it was one of a pair. At the time I did not feel ready to loose its companion on an unsuspecting world, but here it now is:-
I am the man who corralled the wolf,
hunted it down and baulked at the kill.
I am the man who thought that to name it,
thought that to shame it, would weaken its will.
I am the man who nurtures the wolf,
nurtures the wolf, supposing he must,
must either nurture or slaughter the wolf,
but cannot hate it enough.
I am the man with a knife on his belt,
the knife that was meant for its heart,
the knife that remained in its leathery sheath
when I chose the less difficult part.
I am the man who placated the wolf
(having hunted it down and baulked at the kill),
who corralled it safely away from the crowd -
since when it has eaten its fill.
I am the man with a wolf for a friend
who has lived with its lusts and disdain,
who with horror discovered it part of him,
whose fear of it kept it enchained.
I am the man who baulked at the kill,
who baulked at the death of the beast,
who thought he could handle both it and the thrill -
was invited to some of its feasts.
I am the man in the anti-wolf guise,
despising the thing that it is,
steeling myself to its wayward charms
as it proffers its Judas kiss.
I am the man with a thorn in his side,
a devil that pricks at his pride,
a wolf that's knocking all night at his gate -
at an ego he cannot deflate.
I am the man with the wolf in the fold,
aware of the damage it's caused,
how innocence bleeds from the teeth of the wolf
and the love that was there is grown cold.
Haiku #96
From big business come:-
debt, dysfunction and dissent.
(Football's present state.)
I am the man who corralled the wolf,
hunted it down and baulked at the kill.
I am the man who thought that to name it,
thought that to shame it, would weaken its will.
I am the man who nurtures the wolf,
nurtures the wolf, supposing he must,
must either nurture or slaughter the wolf,
but cannot hate it enough.
I am the man with a knife on his belt,
the knife that was meant for its heart,
the knife that remained in its leathery sheath
when I chose the less difficult part.
I am the man who placated the wolf
(having hunted it down and baulked at the kill),
who corralled it safely away from the crowd -
since when it has eaten its fill.
I am the man with a wolf for a friend
who has lived with its lusts and disdain,
who with horror discovered it part of him,
whose fear of it kept it enchained.
I am the man who baulked at the kill,
who baulked at the death of the beast,
who thought he could handle both it and the thrill -
was invited to some of its feasts.
I am the man in the anti-wolf guise,
despising the thing that it is,
steeling myself to its wayward charms
as it proffers its Judas kiss.
I am the man with a thorn in his side,
a devil that pricks at his pride,
a wolf that's knocking all night at his gate -
at an ego he cannot deflate.
I am the man with the wolf in the fold,
aware of the damage it's caused,
how innocence bleeds from the teeth of the wolf
and the love that was there is grown cold.
Haiku #96
From big business come:-
debt, dysfunction and dissent.
(Football's present state.)
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Saturday, 27 March 2010
Haiku #94
Regrettably, I will be out of cyber-circulation this weekend, but expect the haiku to keep coming. See you Monday.
Posthumous attempt -
Muriel Spark shortlisted
for the Booker Prize
Muriel Spark shortlisted
for the Booker Prize
Friday, 26 March 2010
Tanka #2 & Haiku #93
Our long lost Russian forebear
spills her D.N.A.
leaves it as our legacy
in some Siberian cave.
Geoffrey Hill, poet,
difficult, divisive - up
for the Oxford job.
Thursday, 25 March 2010
Please don't drink and doodle!
Last Sunday we celebrated our daughter's 44th birthday with a family meal at The Anchor, Witley. It is a favourite spot with canal boats, canoes, a lock gate and much activity on a fine sunny Sunday - which it was. The Anchor had a fine menu to go with the day - and more to the point, some equally fine wines and beers. I took the photographs after the meal, which was a mistake.
(My budget statement is below)
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Haiku #89 and #90
available in China -
look on the top shelf.
now he's made Poets' Corner.
Still changing landscapes?
Monday, 22 March 2010
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Saturday, 20 March 2010
Babes in Arms
One time this would have been a holiday:
hardly a soul about; few staff, no kids;
an empty playground, drive and car park,
myself, a telephone and piles of paperwork.
This is no holy day, the children are at war,
their papers came and off they went.
Only the men and women left to hold the fort.
(An ageing population, all too old to fight.)
An hour has gone, no sign of movement,
even the sun on hunger strike, black
as a black cloud, in lieu of clouds
precipitating rain - a dirty rain,
to catch the feel of altered memory.
It might be nothing more than memory -
a single, half-forgotten recollection
half-wiped from some computer,
which in the wiping found itself
beyond salvation, buggered, bound for hell,
somehow diverting to the here and now.
Dan, obsessive dresser-up, born
actor-out of childhood's fantasies,
never plays himself. Today
A turban for his head has slipped across
his eyes - seen closer though,
it is a bandage flecked with blood.
Dan and Peggy
(never before so aptly named),
an amputee, are led by Steve,
face hidden by a plastic mask -
the surgical variety, concealing burns
and missing skin.
The end of the procession
and an ancient tractor
wheezing through its tall exhaust
hauls in its wake two trailers
piled high with bodies. (Whether
wounded, dead or dying
is difficult to tell.) Trailed behind
the trailer on a long rope
to his ankle, bumps a half-
familiar figure (fallen from a pile?)
from whom a blood-stained puttee,
gravel-torn, unravels in the rain.
The brain consults its image store
and holds the closest match
up to the boy: a pair of images,
which even as we look, converge,
fuse to a single shot: a Tudor criminal
hung, drawn but not yet quartered,
then gutted for his crime.
hardly a soul about; few staff, no kids;
an empty playground, drive and car park,
myself, a telephone and piles of paperwork.
This is no holy day, the children are at war,
their papers came and off they went.
Only the men and women left to hold the fort.
(An ageing population, all too old to fight.)
An hour has gone, no sign of movement,
even the sun on hunger strike, black
as a black cloud, in lieu of clouds
precipitating rain - a dirty rain,
to catch the feel of altered memory.
It might be nothing more than memory -
a single, half-forgotten recollection
half-wiped from some computer,
which in the wiping found itself
beyond salvation, buggered, bound for hell,
somehow diverting to the here and now.
Dan, obsessive dresser-up, born
actor-out of childhood's fantasies,
never plays himself. Today
A turban for his head has slipped across
his eyes - seen closer though,
it is a bandage flecked with blood.
Dan and Peggy
(never before so aptly named),
an amputee, are led by Steve,
face hidden by a plastic mask -
the surgical variety, concealing burns
and missing skin.
The end of the procession
and an ancient tractor
wheezing through its tall exhaust
hauls in its wake two trailers
piled high with bodies. (Whether
wounded, dead or dying
is difficult to tell.) Trailed behind
the trailer on a long rope
to his ankle, bumps a half-
familiar figure (fallen from a pile?)
from whom a blood-stained puttee,
gravel-torn, unravels in the rain.
The brain consults its image store
and holds the closest match
up to the boy: a pair of images,
which even as we look, converge,
fuse to a single shot: a Tudor criminal
hung, drawn but not yet quartered,
then gutted for his crime.
Friday, 19 March 2010
Thursday, 18 March 2010
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
Monday, 15 March 2010
Award
For this Beautiful Blogger Award I am indebted to Gwei Mui at take away thoughts.
With my grateful thanks.
For my other awards please visit here
Sunday, 14 March 2010
Haiku #80
children picking wild flowers -
acts of love for mums.
(What a strange beast, progress is!)
Saturday, 13 March 2010
Thursday, 11 March 2010
The Displacements
Night drew in at platform one -
the only platform as it happened.
Tiny wayside station,
its sun competing brightly with the starry
windows gleaming warm and half-inviting,
frost-filigreed one side, misted on
the other. Passengers mere silhouettes.
Where had it been to gather such a fug?
Snow - a dusting only -on the carriage roofs.
Difficult to see the train for what it was.
Tiny wayside station,
the guard, red flag in hand,
was on the platform in a jiffy,
No one taking any notice. Crowds
were boarding, not a soul dismounting.
Only I was hesitating, who would
later follow on, though still unsure,
to find myself a quiet compartment,
warm enough for meditating, open
to the stars - a time of simple joys.
So night chugged on through blazing cornfields,
a moment always short of holocaust,
the sun a scorching winter overhead.
A half-light passed us in the cutting,
returning to the frosts we'd left behind.
Clack, clack and tickets please! the wheels
went in their rhythm on the track.
I, who had not meant to go with Night,
thus being without ticket, hid my eyes
and trusted to the stars to see me through.
Soon crossing the Displacements -
acres, hectares, landscapes, people,
couldrons, ice-wells on the move.
Between them: turbulence - and refugees
caught up in earth-quakes, floods and conflagrations.
Camel trains of old, we saw them searching out
the next oasis and the next. We passed some
frozen into hillsides, their eyes still
scanning the horizon for a land
somewhere or water capable of life.
and forecasts warmer weather.
I claim the credit.
Though I'd thought he might just frown,
it seems my haiku shamed him!
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Monday, 8 March 2010
Doodles in the woods
A couple of friends were good enough to say of my March 2 doodles that they would like to see some examples that were not doodles. In fact, I fear they all are. I have neither the ability nor the equipment to be able to visualise the effect I want and then go get it. Doodling is what I do. Sometimes an effect will suggest something and I will try to follow it or enhance it or whatever to see where it leads, but it always begins with doodling. However, there are degrees of doodling, I suppose, so here, for what they are worth and without initial comment, three of my more focussed "doodles" - and one original photograph.
Enchanted Wood
Encounter in the Wood
Bare Trees
Autumn Trees
Haiku #73 and #74
with so much success there are
so many to thank.
clasps like a babe to her breast -
a gold plated man?
Sunday, 7 March 2010
Saturday, 6 March 2010
Friday, 5 March 2010
Haiku #70
bird song (cheeps, chirps and warbles),
church bells... balloon squeaks?
Thursday, 4 March 2010
Painting the Mountain
Painting the Mountain
Today I paint
note
annotate
the mountain,
line and word approximate,
provisional. (First thoughts are
hesitant, of love -
and little understanding.)
Tomorrow I will climb the mountain
only then will I know how
to capture it in paint
or summon up the gist of it in words.
But after climbing it, what will I know?
Its flintiness
its broken-glassness
and the heft of it beneath my feet.
I will have felt
the steepness of it in my labouring,
the softness of it at my chosen resting spots,
its silence deeper than my thoughts,
its lightness and the way it takes the weight of things,
the way its nature sides with us
against the pettiness of life,
a carnal flood to drown anxiety.
You may be sure it will be full of words
and frantic marks for me to lay on paper.
Composed of them -
and they of every tongue.
As now I think too much
the mountain stays remote from me.
The climb will plant it firmly in my senses.
The unsensed mark is just so much pollution.
Expect in future versions, words
employed more miserly and I
more tight-arsed making marks.
offers pension to ease debt -
the Greek Government's.
- so that's where it went! - see Haiku #67.
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Haiku #68
To confess a sin, press 2
(premium rate, of course!)
It doesn't really lend itself to the Haiku moment, but I couldn't resist this one.
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
Doodling Again!
Two shots of the crowds milling around Bournemouth pier - back in the summer, of course.
Haiku #67
Most nations have debts
hardly a one in credit -
Where has it all gone?
Most nations have debts
hardly a one in credit -
Where has it all gone?
Monday, 1 March 2010
Haiku #65
remember his words: recall
the small things in life.
Don't quite know what happened to this one - it was for yesterday. Maybe St David held it up, thought it more appropriate today!
Haiku #66
I'll give you today's anyway - there you go, BOGOF!
Fruit juices toxic
pain killers causing deafness -
glad that I read am I!
pain killers causing deafness -
glad that I read am I!
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