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, 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
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
I wrote about the creation of this poem back in March in a post called The Welsh Swagman…
The story of Trecefel, a farm near Tregaron begins in 1846 when, following his marriage, it became the tenancy of a man born 28 years earlier near Talsarn in the parish of Llanfihangel-Ystrad in Ceredigion. That man was Joseph Jenkins.
Bryn Du
Above Caron’s dark Teifi flow.
Beneath the white wood.
Beneath the black hill.
Sweet meadows and pastures lie
around a house
standing proud
over its land, over river waters
shining in the Spring sun as sewen
break the stillness of the surface,
over high-hedged fields
bountiful with sheep and cows, and
in proper season with corn and hay.
Beneath the black hill
men labour:
the land prospers.
The Master
I was born under an inauspicious star
in the longhouse of Blaenplwyf,
cursed even in my mother’s womb,
I was given a stony path in this suffering universe,
my mouth both my strength and my downfall.
I learned, in a minister’s school,
my letters
and, beneath the calling curlews,
all the farming that my father knew.
In a decade beneath the hill
I have made my farm a showpiece
in the county.
Now, my plough and my goose quill
are each joyous in my hand.
Before each dawn I walk
the fields and hedgerows of my land;
at day end the candle’s flicker
allows another entry in my journal:
The winter river consumes the land and
I waded shoulder deep
to save my sheep.
Six lost.
Betty
How the mighty fall:
too many years have I suffered
too many times have I left,
returning to my father’s hearth
in sad despair.
Once
our farm was the pride
of the countryside – it prospered:
in the early years at haymaking
neighbours helped our people
with the scything, raking and carting –
now our hay burns and our crops rot.
My man has lost his way
and we cannot pay our tithes.
I will not stay!
The Milford Haven and Manchester Line – the M&M Line – would connect the deep water port in South Wales to the English industrial manufacturing centre. Joseph Jenkins understood the advantages that the line would bring to agriculture and to the rural economy and gave his full support to the project, often delivering speeches and canvassing for support. He was even invited to address a House of Commons committee on the line’s benefit for rural agriculture.
The Cut
Age of steam!
I am persuaded!
I see
farms, the community
advanced by the markets
brought to us by this marvel.
I will lend my voice to the cause!
Our lives will be forever changed!
Age of steam!
Now my land is overrun!
Navvies work on the Trecefel cutting –
the workforce is tearing apart my land,
desecrating my hedgerows –
everywhere there is a mess.
Age of steam!
Steam engines pass in the fields
below the house –
y trên cawl signals our break for lunch.
Who can know what insecurity and depression, what darkness so often filled Joseph’s mind? In his diaries, he often wrote that the fates were against him – ‘I am kicked like a football in this world’ – ‘I do feel that my life has become filled with sorrow and covered in darkness’. And he hated his inability to abstain from drink. In December 1868, he wrote that he could see no sense or meaning in this life – ‘I have lost my way… Life is nothing but a catalogue of misfortune’.
After Dark
And then he was gone,
Cors Caron’s peat piled high in the yard
against the coming winter.
By night he left
quietly –
Bont Ffrainc led him away
to walk the railway line north
to Tregaron station.
He entrained for Liverpool and
gained a berth:
Eurynome,
goddess of meadows and pastures
carried him to Melbourne
Nothing
was left beneath the black hill
but the river, the meadows, the pastures
and the wife
Ophir’s Bounty
Did he believe
as those twenty-five years passed,
did he believe
as the Ophir carried him north,
his wife, his children, his farm
had kept a welcome in their hearts.
Perhaps
it was enough that Trecefel
might once again come to know his hand.
But he believed that he had to return: he knew
his heart was too deeply rooted in the land of his birth
he must be buried in his Welsh soil.
I am indebted to:
Joseph Jenkins. Diary of a Welsh Swagman 1869-1894.
Edited by William Evans. Macmillan Australia, 1977
Bethan Phillips. Pity the Swagman: The Australian Odyssey of
a Victorian Diarist. Cymdeithas Lyfrau Ceredigian, 2002
Unknown reader, be glad that I have opened the door and let out
the dust of my verse for you to see an age after the words first found form on the screen, or
perhaps I have let in your imagination so, turning, you can see a single almond
blossom, pink amongst its pale russet leaves, to tempt your words out
Unknown traveller, on this day, stay, venture out
and, before they fade, gather memories of your Spring in fragrant vases around the room, so
your thoughts today can grace some future verses you may set out
Do not press and dry the blooms