New n Old

 

Bring me no roses, however deep their red,

they bloom for a day, the next morning they droop,

don’t get me orchids in mauve and violet -

none of them are watertight nor weatherproof.

Plant me a night jasmine or a fig instead,

something with a longer arc, a wider sweep,

a deeper tale, not just a trivial vignette,

that will outlast us both and won’t be so brief.

Of course it's Valentine's Day, so I've been writing love poems. This one's an obvious response to roses are red... Apart from that, I've also been looking at the early V-Day posts on this blog. Here's one from Feb 2014, gosh that's 12 years back..

Loveweak I

did my love merit marks - commas, full stops

did it fuel business, make rhymes flow quicker

magic freedom into crystallised hope,

weekend loveshot irises, did it flicker

once in your blingflamed veins and quietly die?

or was it a recurring decimal

sung offkey though holy, strung through your “I”

candied on your tongue like a capital

pulped in your bone in the sponge of marrows?

it asked no marks from me, I can tell you

safely, nothing punctuation, no close

and no throat grabbing start, I never knew

 

what begun and if it’s finished with me yet

it gave no period at this close of sonnet

Well, I was certainly more experimental with my language then! However, the message is the same I find.  Underneath all that drama with no punctuation and portmanteau-ed, coined words. Some things don't change. 

Which one did you like better?  

Another Route to Return

 

Sometimes I go back, return just before dawn

to those narrow lanes we’ve long left behind,

those ancient town gates, rough-hewn cobblestones,

the modern boulevards, landscaped and tree lined.

 

The sharp edges of stones underneath my sole,

the whispers of water, wind and centuries,

the long stories that shaped them, told and retold,

the smells of growing grass and flowering trees.

 

I don’t know if it’s I who moves through those streets

or it’s the dreams and stories that move through me

like wind and water, milestones beside my knees,

plumes of grasses in autumn, shells from the sea.

 

A recurrent dream that keeps me wide awake,

it moves through me sometimes just before daybreak.

The way things are shaping up this year - I feel like returning instantly, burrowing back to places and times in the past. 

Though I am emphatically not one of those people who automatically view it with good old days type nostalgia. Old is often not gold, far from it. Go back fifty years, only 60% of women were literate. Go back a hundred, tuberculosis was a death knell. Another 25 years, there were no indoor loos for the majority, poor sanitation killed people. Mortality rates among infants and children were unbelievable. No hot water on tap, no gadgets, everything done with huge amounts of elbow grease. Life was hard. 

Yes, the past is great to romanticise and write poems about, but not so great to return to in actual fact. On second thought, I'm good where I am, thank you. :) Still fretting about the weather, both literal and metaphorical and about the roughness all round. But also grateful for a whole heap of things.

Weak signals

May you go places where the networks are weak,

and time’s marked with birdsong, there’s no need to speak,

the ocean whispers its secrets in your ears.

May you listen and fathom better this year.

 

Where the lanes vanish a few paces in,

the sands are knee deep and the foot traffic’s thin

and unknown lizard tracks rush off somewhere

pursued by predators. May you walk there.

 

Where the grasses are tall and the trees are high,

the fragrance of earth billows in the sky,

wildflowers bloom like fireworks in the air.

May your footsteps enhance the peace over there.

 

May you go places where the signals aren’t clear,

experience a deeper, full body year.

The year has certainly started with a bang, everything already spiralling out of control, breathless at the avalanche of changes. I've been thinking about what I want to do with the blog, if I should go back to my original practice of posting weekly. But nearly two weeks in, that idea doesn't seem all that great, right? :) So sticking to the fortnightly routine for the near future. Less is more. Taking it one step at a time and keeping it as positive as I can. That's the non-resolution for 2026.

I hope your January is going well and you are already experiencing a full body month.