Blog Archives
New Year Poems
Happy New Year, all.
I haven’t been on line so much over the winter. Not much to make one want to be, in many ways.
Anyway, I wrote a couple of poems on New Years Day, one a little more hopeful than the other.
Hope you like them.
Rewilding Little Lives
Flowers in my window box this New Years Day
Brought smiles to see flies upon the white petals
Delightfully drawn to pollinate these late blooms
Providing provender in winter and spring seeds.
.
Insight that acts of rewilding can be so easy:
Simply leave a little land for life, and equally
Life will return once we allow it land, thus we
Keep everything alive a little longer by these
Little acts and actions, ceding some concrete
So when our concrete recedes life can yet proceed.
.
Nothing Changes On New Year’s Day
We kiss at midnight and wish
One another the best, that
The world will rise above our
Worries with the coming year;
.
Raise our champagne to celebrate
Our survival of the last, then we
Rest in unhurried slumber, until
The bells ring in the faithful for
.
New year’s Service, and we
Step out to see too the debris,
Finding revellers have left their
Refuse in the most amazing places.
.
Picking up a cracked plastic party
Trumpet, we ponder if we will play
These in the next decades, and stroll
Slowly to our sacred spaces, with
.
A grim smile, while the sun slants low,
Watching Earth go round just the way
It spun yesterday, today.
Last Dance
The Dance of the Gnats
In slanting sunlight along hedges warmed
Hordes of gnats amass in glittering swarms
Like plumes of dust thrust up
From the ground burst open, abounding,
In an ultimate race to lay eggs ere autumn:
.
A bountiful sign summer rests on last legs,
Yet, at least, as the flourishing knots
Feed the gathering flocks of swallows
Ere their exodus, fill lizards left lying on
Stone even cooling, fatten bats come twilight,
.
An indication our Earth brims, still:
Life resides, ready to thrive when we let it.
While they fly I will delight
In the dance as long as lasts this light.
Autumn has finally arrived, with a storm, some rain and wind and now chilly foggy mornings. And very happy we are to see it, and the flies dying as they should to be born again next spring…
Landscape Poems
In the Mist
.
Calling cranes cross overhead like ghosts in the gloom,
Bells echo down the hillsides from hidden forest horses
Like shots across the valley, voices and dog barks below
Reveal others on the path as invisible to us as we to them
Knowing surrounds only by memory and sounds in the
Silence, the mist expands our senses out like landscape,
Until the sun lifts the veil and sends down into our pocket
Of the earth, a gentle caress of golden warmth and sets
The sky blue brightness shining off mountain cloud
Shimmering across imagined land beneath silver shroud.
.
The Same Scene a Thousand Times
A painter can select one scene,
One view, from a certain lookout,
Turn it into their subject: treat
It a thousand ways, in varying lights.
But can a poet? Write a thousand times
Of one mountain range and valley?
Of all the many shadows and scudding
Clouds along its sides, and all
Aspects of the mists across its sky.
A painter can settle in one spot,
A cottage on a cliff:
Paint through the window.
A poet may install himself
In the same place,
But can he use words more than once
To illustrate the landscape?
Or once used, need he seek new views
To inspire new vocabularies?
It seems the answer lies in the
Lines, led along by eyes, looking
In ever-finer focus always finds
The mind inspired to write.
.
I have no photos of the scenes that inspired the first poem, but the second poem was inspired by sunset in the same spot I watch sunset most Sunday evenings, and each time it’s inspiring, but can I write of the same valley for the rest of my life? Possibly. It depends less on the inspiration and more on my ability I suppose!
The Smell of Rain
Like many in my situation, living as an emigrant, I’ve been wondering about when I’ll get home, and certain things make me think of Ireland…
The Smell of Rain
Not the petrichor: that scent at
The first few splats of heavy plashes
As a high cloud unburdens its humid load,
Stinging the nose with its distinctive smell,
Nor the nostril flaring storm at first,
Suddenly splashing the unsuspecting
Then spattering along the streets,
As if to sweep them from the scene,
To shelter and, swiping eyes, appreciate
The spectacle. Not either the drizzle,
Softly seeping into hair and shoulders,
Seemingly seeking to stay aloft like fog,
Hovering above the soil as if unimpressed
With landing, but accepting settling
On stems and leaves, leaving shoes
Darkened should one step through the grass.
None of these, is the smell that sparks
My senses, resurrects memories.
But later, when it’s soaked in after
Several repeated storms, then
The smell of wet earth, seeps
Into sinuses, springing forth
Almost feared forgotten scenes
Of rolling streams through soggy ground,
Sodden peat and spongy moss,
The sparkle of water wringing the island
From sunlit rainbow down to buried rock,
Reminding me of Ireland, only Ireland.
The Earth Dances
Thus, Shall we Dance
We shall dance, as the waters rise to sweep us under,
Clinging to one another as the cold creeps up.
As the fires near, burning all before them, we shall dance, locked in our final embrace, and thus they shall find us, as in the ashes of Pompey.
We shall dance, when the soldiers bang upon our doors, to take us away to the place nothing leaves except than screams and dead bodies.
We shall dance, to remember the disappeared, to hold their souls in our hearts, to follow their footsteps forward.
We shall dance the rains down upon the parched soil, the grass up into the sun. We shall dance the acorn out of its shell, the herds through their great circles,
We shall dance the great dance of the Earth, to the thunder and the birdsong, the cascade and the pulse of blood.
We shall dance our dirge to the tiger, the rhino, the great and diminutive wild brothers we have lost.
We shall dance to the Great Spirit, who sees all these deeds, all this destruction in the name of what you can not eat, what does not sustain, to sustain ourselves.
We shall dance, as we have done, for that is what we do. Thus have we always. Thus has it always been.
And if we live long enough, we shall dance upon your graves, and those of your ancestors, drumming them into dust for all this.
I wrote this poem during quarantine, when my family had a writing challenge to keep us entertained – we had to write something beginning with the phrase “we will dance” but in Spanish. I of course, wrote it in English and translated it for the zoom call! But it wasn’t quite the happy story everyone else wrote to cheer us up and pass the time.
But time passes, and little changes. Some things we want to change and some we don’t. And the things that stay the same seem to be the ones we want to change and those that do are sliding away from the wonder we have before us.
But we will go on.
“From a Distance…”
In my last blog post I said that we need government to get us out of this crisis we are immersed in (it’s 20˚C in Pamplona today, the 26thof February, while the kids in my school are supposedly up in the Pyrenees skiing for the week).
The problem is that governments are only interested in keeping their economies going full steam ahead on the coal of capitalism.
Of course, some of them are so fucking shit that they’re doing the opposite of what their puppet masters would have them do. It’s possible that they might help the planet by fucking up our society… something pondered in this next poem.
Macro Views
What would another species say
About our world?
Watching these tiny actions,
While the worst barely awaits,
Each effort hardly abates.
Indeed, we are bathers
Intent upon our piece of sand,
While the wave rears up behind.
The idiocy of some, the ignorance
Of others, ill intent and greed of
Thirds all add up to cancel out
The efforts of all the rest
To avoid the coming destruction and
Current misery.
Yet, in cold chemical analysis, knowing
The decimation imminent for so many
Might an outsider smile at
Individual deaths
Inflicted by despicable people if that
Also impedes the current trajectory:
Disruption of our good government,
The usual business of bustling populations
Slowing down the business as usual
Which we aren’t wont to stop
But must if we are to have
Any business being on the planet
In the usual way we’ve been since
First becoming people.
The course needs altering, if not
Halting. The actors less relevant
Than the actions: Evil instead of
Well-intentioned will still be better
Than acting not at all.
No points for guessing who is the main person I had in mind for this clusterfuck.