Post about a poem or the writing or publication of poems
Following on from the short February 4th ‘Miracles’ poem with it’s ‘time’ theme, another poem that recognises the variability of time!
Tick, tock, distant star
How I wonder when you are
Just a timepiece in the sky
Your every ‘now’ another lie!
Around me, the unseen miracle
Of the past: the birds in the tree—the hills—the clouds—the people passing by,
I am at the centre of my time
And they are all in the past
What stranger miracles are there?
After Walt Whitman:
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
A Haiku
Golden sunsets streak
Cloudy skies over the sea
A lost horizon
Mid month
as a good a time as any other
to write of howling winds that smother
Every hint
of comfort and the daily norms
to replace them all with Darragh’s storms
Which break
the trees which crash and fall upon
wires, and thus: the village power has gone
And then
in every room in every country cottage
is darkness from the lack of wattage
No heating
warms, no ovens cook, no hobs to boil
and freezers let their contents spoil
Crouched around
wood burning stoves we try to read
by candlelight, wondering how to feed
On anything
that isn’t cake, or bread and cheese
or how to boil water for our teas
The luxury
of an old potato baked in the embers
(a boy scout’s trick my mind remembers)
Barely makes
a meal but is a change from more cold food:
stale bread, cheese with pickle slowly chewed
Deadlines pass
with no heat or glimmer of a friendly light
and then no power to warm my bed at night
Till suddenly,
hours before the last deadline, a sudden shock –
lights and heating are back in stock
In the abyss
between language and meaning
the crease of intent
is shelved with
volumes bound in leather
each embossed
in gold
And when you
have selected,
dust, no… polish each
with the softest
white vapour;
care for the interstices
that lie between its words;
consider the colours
and shades of nuance;
search out the drifts
and shivers of significance—
do not embrace,
do not grasps greedily
but use them tenderly
feeling for the perfect edge
which, with great love of locution,
I honed. Only
then will you know my sense
and each allusion sense and sense
allusion
Wishing everyone a peaceful Christmas and 2024.
I want to share this poem, recently posted on WriteOutLoud, by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, which was published in his 1971 collection Not for the Sake of Remembering, a few years after the 1967 Six-Day War, fought between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In 1994, Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shared the Nobel peace prize with Yasser Arafat, President of the Palestinian National Authority, and Israel’s foreign minister Shimon Peres. Amichai was invited to participate in the prizegiving ceremony, where he read this poem:
WILDPEACE
Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds – who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.
Yehuda Amichai
Translated by Chana Bloch
I don’t write many long poems … most of my poems are less than a page, but occasionally an idea hits me that merits something more – or so I think at the time! These poems take longer to write and usually demand some research work – probably why there are so few of them – only four in my Mostly Welsh collection.
Not so long ago I had this idea to do something on TIME. It has fascinated me for a long (err!) time – how we see it – experience it – understand it – WHAT it is! I remember that it was only just over 100 years ago that we decided to regulate time… as travel and then public transport, became more common, it became more convenient for people in Aberystwyth to know that the train from London would arrive at THEIR 10:30 rather than London’s 10:30… which might have been as much as half an hour adrift from Welsh time! So travel, particularly on the railways helped to control time (some of you may think that the railways still do – though not in a good way!)! Time zones arrived in the world in 1883.
But the whole idea of measuring time is artificial, isn’t it? Who says there are sixty minutes in an hour? Why sixty? And don’t get me started on the physics of time and gravity! Mainly because that is the bit I struggle to understand! And then I heard someone on the radio say that you can never prove the existence of time and that thought was niggling away at my mind, I suppose.
And as it sometimes happens, right at that moment (see my previous post on coincidences) I heard a review of Carlo – I should say Professor Carlo Rovelli’s book – The Order of Time. It is a beautifully written book – written for my simple mind – and he makes a complex subject easy – or easier than it might have been – but that isn’t to say that it is an easy read – I probably understood about a fifth of it! There are frequently simple sentences that require re-reading. Several times. Statements such as
Time passes more slowly in some places
There is no such thing as past or future
Time is the measurement of change (Aristotle)
All require a little thought… and make writing quite difficult! My problem was that our language – our understanding of our world – revolves around the concept (a concept) of time: “The poems take longer to write” – “Not so long ago I had this idea” – “just over 100 years ago” … “the sentence I write next”… and so on.
But the book provided some of the background for what became THE ELEGIES OF TIME.
FIVE of them… making a work as long, I think as any poetry I have written. Fortunately they are poems so you do not have to worry as there is not much science in them! Like – I suppose – many of my poems, they have autobiographical elements – a DWELLING on the past… on lost times… on existence… on eternity…
Oh! I have just suggested that the poem dwells on the past! The past that, like the future, like eternity does not exist!!! – what more could a poet want?! A freedom to write of something that only he knows – that no one else – none of his readers – can ever see!
The Elegies of Time appears (appropriately enough!) in Lost Time: Chorus and Other Poems.
I, poet, may write of love
and in that moment feel
a meaning clear:
yet my soul knows love
my hand will never pen
You, reader, read that word
and think to know my mind
I say you cannot know the love
my heart placed behind that word, only
your sense of the love you thought you saw
The poet can never truly speak
and have his reader know
his soul’s pain, his heart’s love.
Each word you read is ever stolen
from my page
I thought it would be useful to provide an index to the poems and the short story that I have written in the first half of 2023. Most are available here; the few that are on external sites are starred and will open in a new tab.
The most recent poem is at the top of the list working back to ‘Annual, again’ posted here in mid-January.
Short story – The Story Teller
Poems
Stars *
A grey shade in the cottage shadows
a paw lick of sinuous silence
a tail flick of smoke
a pounce on time’s toll
Like a smoke devil escaped the chimney
she inhabits the lounge at night
never settling
she drifts across the hearth
Like the umbral weight of her past
she settles beyond my sight
I sense only the leak
of light left by her passing
Like the presence of an unseen wraith
she is at my supper table
to fill the empty chair
across from me
Like the gentle press of death I feel
her weight as sleep prowls
she makes no noise
as I enter our dream
Later she is an autumnal dawn mist
a purr of a past warmth
an absence that chills
as I greet another cottage day
A grey shade in the cottage shadows
a breath of sinuous silence
a tail curl of smoke
drifting across cottage time