Categories
Poetry

Genesis

Of the Dust of the Ground

Dirt!
We were held between the tangled roots of the tall grasses and the fragrant herbs
and, amongst those pale veins that gave them life,
teased by the whispering white threads of the mycelia,
pushed aside by the harsher muscular cords that gave succour
to the bright pomegranate and the fragrant cinnabar,
we were stretched  and broken as roots grew and gained power
yet we held their tubers softly in place and felt
the rhizomes spread through our mire.
Water fell and we accommodated it briefly
as it gave succour to our burden,
drained, and left us, dust blown in the winds or
muddied clay, sod that found brief form,
as the waters gathered and flowed,
servant to some greater force, to tumble in rill and stream,
to join mighty rivers, seeking their genesis.
We were the loam left.
An afterthought.
Dust!
We were the stuff of clay, without form beneath so much life:
above us we knew verdant vine, meadowland and forest
flourished in the mists as we—slumbering,
nascent among their umbilicals, feeding their growth, were
diminished by the day’s fierce heat to mere loess,
mere powder from dirt’s dust destined for desert or steppe—knew only
the mighty winds that reduced our substance
until at a dawn the brume returned and held the gusts at bay
and we were one, at peace between the green grasses and the purple thyme.
Then there came one great exhalation
and in that breath power came to our ylem soul.

Categories
Fiction Short Stories

A Little Taste

A Time of Plague; a Time of Love

It was strange to think of the poet sitting in his usual chair, drinking his usual espresso coffee and watching the world go by. As usual. She liked to think of him like that—his old scarf still around his neck despite the warmth of the place, his jacket open on the usual black T-shirt and his bag on the floor under the table—although she knew that now—now in this strange time—he would have to be at home. Because he was old—well, old by her standards—and he wasn’t allowed to leave his house—he had told her that…

The beginning of one short story in When I Am Not Writing Poetry (available next month).

Categories
Fiction

The characters behind the characters!

If you have read The Dark Trilogy you may remember three minor characters – Jan, Simon and Neal – friends with whom I walked some of the way home when I left prep school each day. They only get brief, passing mentions – adding some detail from life that serves to add to the picture which hopefully also make the story more real.

I remember that we both used to try to walk some of our way home from preparatory school with the lovely Jan although she turned off our route almost as soon as we reached the end of the school grounds…

and, again,

the pretty and petite Jan with whom – along with Simon and sometimes Neil – we made sure to walk the few hundred yards to her aunt’s bungalow as we left school…

…but in soon-to-be-published When I Am Not Writing Poetry I have created back stories for all three of my friends which gradually build their relationships to me in their adult lives. Of course – although all three children existed (I have not used their real names!) – I do not know their adult lives as well as I pretend.

I wonder if any of them will recognise themselves!

… or the blazer badge!

Categories
Poetry

Annual, again

Amongst
the soggy rotting leaves
or between
the bowed grass blades
thrust
the tips of snowdrop
leaves

Categories
Event Fiction

New Title!

What will the next cover be?

We are pleased to announce that our new title, When I am not Writing Poetry will be available at the end of February. This collection of short stories – some very short and one almost the length of a novella – was written during the latter half of 2020… my only excuse being that I was stuck in front of my computer during the Covid lockdown! And there are only so many poems I can write! I needed a change!

Several of the stories make oblique reference to the Covid ‘plague’ but other tales are a reflection of my earlier life, a half-dozen of them going all the way back to my time at sea! Regular readers – of both my poems and my fiction – may notice a tendency to link themes to the sea! And if not the sea, then the horizon!

The sea is always there!

Don’t forget you can buy the latest titles directly from here!

Chris Armstrong

Categories
Poetry

The Absent Sailor

Sunset

Letters

Those love letters from the seventies
I could not bear to read again
and could not bear to throw

Those airmail forms
those tortured lonely twelve page laments
that I read and read so many times
in my cabin off Cape Town,
in Melbourne and Sydney:
So many words
So  much love

But in the end
They were just ash
And I scattered them

Ashes to her ashes

First published in Mostly Welsh 2019 (Y Lolfa) p.92

Categories
Poetry

A Winter Poem

Winter White

Winter white. The cold wind across the fields

spoke only of snow and wearied him

prisoner in the cottage where his impatience yields

no words on the cold and barren purity of the snow

white paper, no words longing for their page longing

.

for their precise moment to mark the dreadful whiteness

that had come with winter’s snow and the ice that followed it,

their precise moment when reality’s niveous brightness

might be dispelled by their generous rush of verse, of

words spilling sliding rhyming across the paper’s snowy prospect

.

A poem partially inspired by the final word in the final volume – Quinx or The Ripper’s Tale – of The Avignon Quintet by Lawrence Durrell.

Categories
Fiction

Gorillas, Children and Reading

One of the charities that I support is Nkuringo Education & Community Support (NECS) which was set up to support the school and villages of Nkuringo in Uganda – who hosted a group of us when we visited in 2014 to see the mountain gorillas of Bwindi ‘The Impenetrable Forest’. The charity – through its ever increasing membership has supported many, many children through primary and secondary school (which involves providing clothes, shoes, school books, bunk beds, desks and mattresses as well as paying for their education) and has gone on to support the building of further classrooms, a teachers’ block, and water tanks as well as providing medical aid and small loans for villagers to get a business started. There is always more to do! Following Covid-19 when money was terribly short in the village the school buildings have fallen into disrepair as the little money available had to be used for food. It seems endless. And there are always more children wanting to start school!

The page images above are from the group’s newsletter – a bumper issue following the first visit back by the Trustees to assess needs and progress. You can follow the group on Facebook as GO UGANDA NECS where you can read the entire Newsletter (Recent Media in the right hand column).

And please – if you feel the least tempted to buy a copy of The Dark Trilogy, remember that half of the royalties are going to the NECS charity.

Categories
Poetry

Notes for Book of the Spirit

For those who have a copy of Book of the Spirit, it may be helpful to look at the notes and annotations that I have recently made available. The short collection of poems merges the secular with the theistic, while the language borrows from religions and there are references drawn from religious works. The notes may help with an understanding of sources and references. The pdf files can be downloaded from the Resources page.

Categories
Fiction Poetry

The Sea

The sea is ever present in my writing – both in my prose and in many of my poems. I spent ten years of my life at sea and, both before and after that time, the draw of swimming or surfing continued to take me to beaches. I was lucky to have spent most of my childhood on the Gower in South Wales so had ready access to wonderful beaches. Perhaps that explains – to some extent – the sea’s tidal pull.

Much of the story… much of the two stories in The Dark Trilogy is governed by the sea and my times on it: Book II is a play for voices that covers my first years at sea, particularly the three years when I was learning my trade. And the sea is also present in a number of the short stories that will  be published early next years, perhaps nowhere more than in ‘The Endless Horizon’, but other stories too tell of ships in, or between, ports.

I am just completing my second full-length work of fiction – Trystan, which should be published sometime next year, and here, too, although I have set the action in a small town, the sea is very much a focus – always there in the background of the story.

And although the poems in my recently-published chapbook – Book of the Spirit – have another focus, lines in the first poem at least, do not escape the ocean:

…the future
becomes nothing but a sunlit ripple in the dark eternal wash of the sea
…

…until –
watching the sun sink below the horizon, time’s illusory rim, and the vast sea
that is the circle of our future existence wash its unknown waves to our feet

And the second poem picks up the theme:

And we are drops left on the shingle
Until the sea reclaims us for its own

I also have a longer collection of poems being published in 2023. Looking through the selection, I find that nearly 25% of the poems have some link with, lines about, the sea… including ‘Heatherslade’ – of which you may have an early sighting here:

Heatherslade

Where lies my blinding country of youth, that
cloudless demi-dream of some easy time
innocent of the weary world dark, time
fresh born beech bud green, time
joyous as the cuckoo echo across the fields, as
the eternal sea sparkle of the bay, as
I was eternal for a time?

And then was freedom in my world, and time
was mine in that sun lit sea wet summer
and the waves were mine, and the sands golden
at my feet as I plunging had the surf
roll at my will, and the slow day was a time
long pebble pooled in the rocks where the sea and
deep were bounteous for my pleasure

Sun hot days stretched time and heaven was the blue
eternal sea as the hazed horizon conjured wave on
wave to the shore to foam and darken the tide line
gold to darker amber, the swell the surge that gives
renewal to the ever changing sands, that gives
new life to the creatures it strands, that gives
me joy as I poise board in hands, that gives

my body wave born to where she stands