It's not always peacock-feathered

This thing had no feathers, nor carried a tune,

just a low growing scrub I saw, by a dune;

no bird had ever sung in that desolate spot,

no cloud had marred that sky with its untidy blot;

yet it grew, stood its ground without any fuss

in a quiet version of hope, unselfconscious.

An immense vastness, a certain light offers

tiny, easily missed, wild-austere metaphors.

It is not always peacock-feathered and resplendent.

It doesn’t sing always, it can remain silent. 

And that rounds off my rather turbulent year on a note of quiet hope, I know it will start singing sometime.  Thank you for being here and seeing this year through with me. A very happy new year MMXV to you and yours. Stay happy and blessed, wishing you lots of poetry and birdsongs of hope. See you next year. 

Love's not a Christmas thing

I’ll love you with the dance in my bones

and the pigeon calls in my veins

with the soil of my flesh and its stones,

the bungled belly laugh in my brains.

I’ll love you when the dances get dim

when the anklets draw hooks and blood

when pirouette is brimstone and grim

the last thrash of fish on the mud.

I’ll love you when the tinsel’s trash

when the tree’s just needles on the floor

all festive is only one flash,

and the dark is the maw of the door.

I’ll love you still when the music thins

under the amber songs of dawnskins.

Merry festivals to you, whichever you are celebrating, and the very best for the coming year.

Stocking stuffer

The props were made of black and bleak

not a single caravan came by

but I turned both the eye and cheek

and found some loopy plump cacti

thorny pretty and far from meek

growing thick in a crick of rocks

and that too felt as beautiful

as stuffed stockings of windsocks

waving off the stereopull

of incensed roads and office blocks.

Parasol

Early autumn morning, the sun’s warmth’s strong

on the sands, a parasol’s on the ground -

keeled over months ago, its thatch partly torn;

it toppled quietly without any surround sound

and there was no-one to hear it, record

how and when a patch of thatch had come down

its shade rolled small.  The off season resort

abandoned like a dried up fountain, rimmed

with watermarks. The ocean whispers on.

There is one other tourist - the crowds thin

end of summer, the swimmers crush gone

back to city squares, graffiti, imagined

and real grievances, unemployment, phone

apps, power cuts, lives of grim, urban grins.

Riverlove

A certain yearning for those ancient rivers

eats into the morning without results;

the nearest one’s two thousand kilometres,

and the Hooghly’s distance now measured in worlds

the Benue and the Nile both out of bounds

just indifferent seagreen gulf's around.

There’s far too much inspirational guff

about the threequarterness of oceans,

about how the rivers end up being cupped

by loving seas.  And the televisions

get thinner and bigger, open wider jaws;

yet no rivers come by.  Not one trickle flows.

Riki's Prayer

Image : Riki Roy

The prompt

"Can you write me a poem too or a prayer whichever you like...where my ashes be strewn in the Rockies near Jasper..as I am in love with the place...and may I be born in Canada to snowboard in Jasper's amazing slopes...where my hubby is my instructor and I fall in love with him again in a new time and place and we marry amongst the singing slopes and enchanting lakes..."

The poem

I.

Snowmelt’s going to be washed to the oceans

someday anyway, so give my ashes to

a fresh snowfall laid at the feet of mountains,

give them to the arms of pinewoods,  the immense

worlds tucked in a print of a caribou.

Give them, my love, to the vast stillness, the flakes

dancing to the leaps and whims of snowstorms,

trembling on the ribbed ripples of tranquil lakes

and when the universe finally remakes

them, may they again take a woman’s form.

May I be reborn around these mountains, close

to these spring-touched fields, these winter-bright slopes;

and one day quite by chance walking these snows

may we meet again where the conifer grows

as stars pin clouds in place with their sapphire drops.

May I be born here on the ridge of a mountain,

come face to face with you, and fall in love again.

II.

Let me be grateful for each scar, each success,

every step taken with you by my side;

and every step taken alone in some dim recess

of memory, but special nevertheless

because each led here, where our paths coincide.

Let me be grateful for wonder and its huge breadth,

the depth of my passion, the lightness of mischief;

the bonds between us that persist beyond death

and the ken of humans, beyond narrow faiths

and streams speckled with leaf-shadows of grief.

And grateful for each grain of sand and grit,

the barefoot mornings, carefree and wriggly-toed

coming in with summers swinging at their hips.

For the jewelled ice on winter nights’ fingertips,

for pristine snows on hard shoulders of the road.

Grateful that you test the knots, ease every climb

just by going ahead or backing me up all the time.

III.

Praying that when I’m remade in some future birth

I walk along this same majestic icefield;

or wavy tracks on a slope where snow’s disturbed,

a red helmet moves against the sky and earth

in graceful loops; and again, my fate is sealed.

It’s déjà vu, “I know you! from someplace else,”

you’re nonplussed but too polite to contradict.

Far below, the green lake ripples, the snowmelts

chuckle gently, trickle soft in their channels.

You’re visibly relieved as I change the topic,

“I’d like to learn snowboarding, give me a try?”

and you unstrap and step off, ever courteous.

I’m shaky as I mount, and your palm’s a sigh.

Thunderstruck at this touch, your smile’s awry -

you finally make the connect between us.

“Notice the helmet’s still red, what does that prove?”

the board steadies underfoot as I start to move. 

For my dear friend Riki Roy, with thanks and much love and friendship. May she be guided to her love and happiness unerringly, in every life that is granted her, and may they both be equally inspirational partners in all of them, as they are now. 

This one is strictly 'write as it comes' - no editing, no over-thinking, posted as soon as written, from the heart to brain to blog in half a morning's work over three consecutive days.  I hope I have been able to do justice to the prompt, Rik.

Riki's prayer II

Image : Riki Roy

Let me be grateful for each scar, each success,

every step taken with you by my side;

and every step taken alone in some dim recess

of memory, but special nevertheless

because each led here, where our paths coincide.

Let me be grateful for wonder and its huge breadth,

the depth of my passion, the lightness of mischief;

the bonds between us that persist beyond death

and the ken of humans, beyond narrow faiths

and streams speckled with leaf-shadows of grief.

And grateful for each grain of sand and grit,

the barefoot mornings, carefree and wriggly-toed

coming in with a summer swing at the hips.

For the jewelled ice on winter nights’ fingertips,

for pristine snows on hard shoulders of the road.

Grateful that you test the knots, ease every climb

just by going ahead or backing me up all the time.

A prayer for Riki Roy

Credit: Riki Roy

Snowmelt’s going to be washed to the oceans

someday anyway, so give my ashes to

a fresh snowfall laid at the feet of mountains,

give them to the arms of pinewoods,  the immense

worlds tucked in a print of a caribou.

Give them, my love, to the vast stillness, the flakes

dancing to the leaps and whims of snowstorms,

trembling on the ribbed ripples of tranquil lakes

and when the universe finally remakes

them, may they again take a woman’s form.

May I be reborn around these mountains, close

to these spring-touched fields, these winter-bright slopes;

and one day quite by chance walking these snows

may we meet again where the conifer grows

as stars pin clouds in place with their sapphire drops.

May I be born here on the ridge of a mountain,

come face to face with you, and fall in love again.

For my dear friend Riki who leads the most extraordinarily inspirational life and who wishes to be reborn where she now lives and loves. We were reading some verses together, and she asked for a prayer/poem about being reborn in the Rockies.  Stay blessed and happy, Rik.

Read if you wish

Read me, if you wish, like a two-fold pamphlet

handed out at street corners by children

forced out of childhood early, their eyes set

into surly orbits of need, desperate.

Patches of limp lines, thrust out as and when

the lights turn red.  A stereotyped gimmick

thrown into cars caught with windows open

weird damaged overlarge wings in that traffic

light, and sudden fright turning to a quick

indifference, “It’s that same old thing again”.

Or read me like frayed love letters, blinking

between dusty pages. The books from when men

still wrote letters, fancy penmanship and ink

counted for, not much, but still worth something.

Pressed, not thrown.  A shade of precious even,

preserved for a future nostalgia fix;

though the addressee didn’t know it then.

Or read me as I am, forget the tricks

of metaphor, of angles and semantics,

just words written into verse and plain spoken.

Fossils, Findings, and Prodigious Savants

I have known John J. White for the longest time, from the infancy of my blogging days and since my time at Helium, which was a long time ago indeed. John had a blog called "Give It Up, You'll Never Be Published" where he wrote forthright, quirky-humorous posts about writing and the quest for publication. An infrequent blogger, but a prolific, and multiple award-winning writer. His book Prodigious Savant was released last month, and two more titles are scheduled in 2015/16.  Check out his new author website.

Today I am honoured to have him here, sharing his insights and experience. All yours, John, and many thanks. 

Finding That Elusive Fossil

By J.J. White

“Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft

Ashless

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~ Leonard Cohen

It burns intense, and it also burns slow -

great heat, a sheer blue flame, finely haloed

but it yields nothing, no ash, minimal glow

and there’s no charred heap once it’s out, no broad

smear on soil from which meanings can be clawed.

Yes, it’s poetry, that tiny rimmed blue leap,

that transparent smoke with its musky smell

though it leaves no trace of itself in the sweep

of its own wide dispersal.  Hard to tell,

to tease out the proof that it’s burning well.

Because that quote from Cohen just took my brain in its jaws this morning and worried it like a big cat with its prey.

The first lesson

Image credit

Hassana was a schoolmate, tall, clean-limbed,

dark-skinned with the smooth bloom of a jamun;

a modern Noliwe if you like, undimmed

by a Shaka, a vibrant, stunning woman.

The two-year-old, mischievous toddler son

of our tutor was often at her hip -

Hassana’s I mean, after lessons were done.

A male an almost-part of a female rib.

Is he a relative that she babysits?

I’d asked her once, she’d thoughtfully replied,

‘no, but I like him, and it’s good practice

to work with a child hanging off your side.’

He left one day. I saw her grieve, understood

the first lesson of love, and of motherhood.