Sufficiency

Icy night,

although days 

from winter.

To hold 

warmth close …

but mind

must match.

I am 

who can 

companion me.

Heavy blanket, 

hot bottles, 

toy teddy –

warm enough.

Process notes:
An erasure poem – but  the source was my own first draft, which wasn't working, and I'm not going to share it with you. In fact I haven't kept it. Doing the erasure, I found myself in a game of keeping only two words per line. (Then I did rearrange some a little.) Finally worked on it a bit more, thanks to suggestions from the excellent Pearl Pirie, see Comments.

Linked to Gillena Cox's Monday WRites and also to the current Tuesday Platform at 'imaginary garden with real toads

Before the Storm

The air's tense. I contemplate rain,

and contemplate absence of pain.

Tears, they say, are healing.

This parched, aching ground has a skin

taut with thirst, craving the first thin

drops, then the full spilling.

Written for Prompt Night 16: Rain showers my spirit and waters my Soul

Travelling with My Friends

My joy is to travel, every chance I get, with dear friends. These good companions, who throng my house at the best of times, become my guides to faraway places – or even, sometimes, to places I didn't yet know in my own country. I always have plenty of choice which beloved friends, new or old, to travel with. For some I feel such affinity, I choose them again and again. They are always ready to revisit familiar delights or show me little details, unexpected views, missed on previous visits. And with some I explore unfamiliar, fantastical places, crossing time zones, meeting strangely different cultures, finding new worlds. There is much to learn from these expeditions, that's true, and I am happy to learn – but mostly I travel for the fun of it, the sheer fascination, the joy.

When I was a girl I used to lie on my bed, on my stomach, head propped on my hands, lost in the latest adventure. 'Why won't she play outside in the fresh air?' my mother would demand rhetorically of everyone or no-one. During that awful period trying to find a job after leaving school, when application forms asked for hobbies and interests, I could only put reading. 'You need to appear more well-rounded,' careers advisors said. Luckily I found my job in a library, where they understood that a reader is the most well-rounded of all. And still the passion persists. My beautiful friends, many of them lifelong, accompany me everywhere. I have moved home several times, but always find a house convenient for them. I must have proximity to my trusted tour guides, my intimate travel companions!

moving in

unpacking the books

I stroke each one

For Haibun Monday #14 "Too Many Mind ..." at dVerse, we are invited to share our favourite form of relaxation.

Dark Night, Full Moon

A small full moon, high

in a blackly cloud-covered,

almost starless sky.

Only one point of light,

Mars, is visible with her –

bold, warm and bright.

It is enough. There is peace

inside the womb-dark,

a soft release.

The night makes no sound.

I enter sacred space.
The circle folds me round.

(But I couldn't get a good one that included Mars.)

Linked to Gillena's Monday WRites and to the Tuesday Platform for 24 May 2016 at 'imaginary garden with real toads'.

The Writing on the Wall

Look up here, friend!

The man who wrote Eternity

in perfect copperplate

all over the city of Sydney

did it on footpaths mostly,

in chalk. But he meant for you

to raise your eyes to Heaven,

and your thoughts. I, conversely,

with a blast of spray paint

and a stencil, exhort you:

HERE AND NOW! and I urge

that you look from this display

down to the ground you stand on

and all that lies around you.

This jagged, brash, imperfect

piece of graffiti blaring at you

from up here, says: There's a lot

that sucks, go fix it! We've got

an election coming up. Do you

really want the same buggers

coming back? Stop! Look!

Pay attention! Eternity must wait.

NOW the sick are unfunded, 
made ever more helpless, NOW 

the temperature's rising beyond

bearable, HERE we fracture

good farming ground, HERE

we poison our water, HERE AND NOW

we torture our neighbours

(not love them) in island prisons.

And we don't let the word get out.

Don't tell me it isn't us, it's just

the Government. We elected them.

Eternity may be perfect. Meanwhile 

I'll settle for a Here and Now

of ordinary kindness: flawed perhaps, 
but human, beautiful ... and here now.

Written for Play It Again: Taking It To the Streets at 'imaginary garden with real toads' and for Prompt Nights: Imperfection is Beautiful.

You can read about 'the eternity man', Arthur Stace, at Wikipedia.

Is the Etheree

Is

ether-

ee ether-

eal? Is the

etheree, eh, is

it really ethere-

al, all of it, really, or

is it merely a light fantas-

tic melody, lovely and summer-

y, highly incorporeal, eh, eh? 

Is the etheree ethereal, real-

ly? The etheree? Is it then real-

ly ghostly? Ghastly ghostly, or

merely unreal, the ether-

ree – the unreasonab-

ly, ethereal-

ly etheric-

al ether-

ee, eh-

hey?

Having tried an end-stopped etheree for dVerse, here now is a completely enjambed one. And having aimed for coherence last time, here is nonsense. (I chose the photo for suggesting both ethereality and summer.)

Upon a Time

Once,

I said –

once there was

a sweet summer,

long days all golden.

Oh, you don't believe me?

But I was there, I knew it.

I traipsed the wide green all those hours

indeed all those days, the blue above

deep and endless, in my sunny childhood.

They nodded indulgently – well, some did –

and turned away to their own pleasures.

Their summer was city buildings

and hot streets drifting with dust.

How could they hear my talk?

They wanted ice cream

and movie screens,

not my old,

distant

'once'.

At dVerse just now, we are writing etherees about summer. 
I made it an exercise for myself to do it with all end-stopped lines.

The photo is of where I live now, not where I spent my childhood,
but it illustrates the kind of landscape well enough.

Not the Big City

It’s a small, calm town,

leafy even in autumn

with native evergreens.

No-one living here

can walk down the street

without meeting neighbours

or old friends from school.

Today I watch 
a quietly beautiful girl 

sit with her laptop 

in a sunny café, safely.

A second poem for Quadrille–9: Green at dVerse. 

My first described a young girl sitting alone in an internet café, unconscious of her own graceful beauty. Had I been an artist, I'd have wanted to paint her; but my art is with words, so I made a poem. I became startled and then horrified as reader after reader commented that she seemed vulnerable and ought to be more careful about sitting there alone and/or using the internet. 'She must beware,' they said. What – in the middle of the day, in a public place, doing nothing out of the ordinary? (I did mention that her top had slipped off one shoulder, but that's not an unusual look in contemporary fashion, at least in our warm climate here.) Can so many of my readers really be so prurient? Or is it that they live in cities where such dangers are commonplace? Perhaps the title I gave that poem was open to misinterpretation? Anyway, I was moved to write another poem, giving my subject more context. 

Stranger in the Internet Café: Portrait

In green youth's

unconscious grace,

she leans into her screen:

a slight girl, sitting alone,

fluttering fingers

deft on the track pad.

Tendrils of hair 

drape one shoulder,

skimming her breast.

The nearer shoulder's bare,

her lacy top slipping.
Pursed lips are flower soft.

Written for dVerse's Quadrille – 9: Green

Come Back No More

It's a different me now, no

rest from alterations more and more 

increasing – not at all by my will,

nor yet against it. This is the journey, the

way that we all grow, more wild

than we know, tossed by an invisible wind

which we ignore, imagining that

it's we who tilt the glass for the sand that passes.

The first young grasses can't return,

fine and fresh; they are long fronds now, no

way back to a before all gone, no more....
Blown onward unknowing, nevermore we return.

Written for the "No More" Sunday Mini-Challenge at 'imaginary garden with real toads'. The form is the Golden Shovel, based on the closing lines of Watching the Needle Boats at San Sabba by James Joyce: 'No more will the wild wind that passes / Return, no more return'.

I Walk Too Far, and Not Far Enough

I walk on my feet, and in my imagination. If I don't walk further on my feet, my muscles will melt. I read that somewhere and it frightened me. If I walk too far into my childhood, that could be frightening too. Or sad. And sad it would be if my muscles did melt – like my mother's did, and my husband's, and they kept having falls. Each of them, finally, was taken to hospital after a fall and never came home again.

I walk the streets of our little town: behind the shopping mall, skirting the park. I don't power walk, I linger, photographing quaint old buildings and majestic trees. But I cover the ground. It is late in the day, but I must resume daily walking. It has lapsed too long. 

At home, at my desk, I walk into the past: up and down the big back lawn after my Nana died; and again, after the birth of my little brother. Alone with my thoughts, I walk past the summerhouse and into the veggie garden, sit down on the wooden plank that swings on ropes underneath the weeping willow, and bend my head far back. My long hair trails, brushing the ground, as do the translucent willow fronds. 

childhood memory

green willow tendrils in Spring
tiny leaves still curled

Written for Haibun Monday #13 — Walking, at dVerse

Late Mother

After Eliot

Here you are again, little Mother, whom I have let

past my barriers again. Just now I see us

that last time in your house. You wanted me to go

taking the image of you dressed up and looking pretty. Sadly, then

it is followed by a different view of you

months later in the nursing home, mewling and

haggard. Summoned from far, by my cousin, I

struggled to come to terms. At the last, when

you sat up and glared past me at that sight invisible to me – the

vision – then flopped back down, dead … at that point the evening

went suddenly quiet and still. Ah well. What is, is.

Since that axe of a moment, nearly twenty years have spread

my life and some other deaths around me. I keep out,

nearly always, the memories; our differences, our troubled love. Against

this day, though, my defences buckle. It's Mother's Day – the
day on which to remember. 'Yes, you look pretty,' I think at the sky.

White chrysanthemum by Satdeep Gill licensed under Creative Commons  
(A symbol of Mother's Day, which in Australia falls on the first Sunday in May)


De at dVerse recently invited us to try the Golden Shovel, in which a line of poetry provides end words for one's own lines. I've always been captivated by the two opening lines of Prufrock; here I've used both. However I didn't write a poem in time to link to the dVerse prompt. The combination of Mother's Day – in which I refrain from joining the facebook adulations – and Brendan's Mini-Challenge: Harrows and Hallows at 'imaginary garden with real toads' gave me my subject matter. I'm also linking the poem to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #301.

The Skipping Quadrille

(Skip to my Lou, my darling)

This poem 
is a skipping quadrille.

Slow and stately couples

in mellow light

dance with downcast eyes.

But in the hearts of those women

little girls live, who skip

with fancy footwork,

their dancing feet remembering

fast hops and jumps ...
though the men forget.

The first Quadrille at Almack's. 
Image in the public domain. 




'The Quadrille is a dance that was fashionable in late 18th- and 19th-century Europe and its colonies' – Wikipedia. Some versions were apparently quite lively, but it was also described as 'stately'. Recently the term 'quadrille' is also used for a 44-word poem. For Quadrille–8 at dVerse this week we are asked to include the word 'skip'. The phrase 'Skip to my Lou' (from a children's dance) is mentioned. So that got me thinking about these two different dance movements. This is also a late response to the first quadrille prompt, which asked us to use the word 'dance'.

In composing the poem, I used Elizabeth Crawford's instructions in her chat with Sherry at Poets United this week: Step by Step: How to W rite a Poem When You're Blocked. Not that I was blocked, but I thought it would be a good method anyway, and it was.

Inescapable

Let’s keep contact to a mimimum,

he said. I know it’s unfair, but you

remind me of those painful events

we shared long ago. In old age

they keep coming back – and oh,

I want peace these last few years,

whatever’s left. Selfish of me, but….

Agreed – but my mind, now,
writhes with dark memories.

Written for Flash 55 Plus at 'imaginary garden with real toads': a 55-word poem, plus the inclusion of a word with the prefix 'in'.