Moving on

JB's Birthday

When I was very small and still trusting
Your hand was all-encompassing and contained mine.
You made infinity a warm blanket
And night a safe place to hide.
Your hand swept the night sky, cleaned it.
You named the stars as you named your daughters.
And now that I am grown, and you are gone,
My sisters in the sky still come each night,
And name you.

Shooting star

Last night you fell from my firmament.
Krank und kaputt, you took a tumble.
I tried for silent months to hold you.
I stuck you up with force of will.
When that packed in I tried sellotape.
Superglue failed and so did all
The spiritual trappings and inner growth.
Pardon, forgiveness, understanding,
Yoga, rebirthing, meditation,
All failed utterly as cosmic glue.
You fell my dear, you fell directly
Through the handle of Orsa Maggiore
Resting on the horizon. That too failed
To hold your inconsistency.
Lubrified by your oiliness
You greased your way down through your own
Personal flipper and entered the zone
Marked “loser”. Just one momentary scoot
Of surprising yellow (sulphur my dear?)
Marked your definitive passing for good.
Your light has gone out, you’ve pressed disconnect,
You’ve taken the ultimate nosedive and I
Have no way of knowing if your brief performance,
Your spectacular, short and distinctly downward
Journey proceeds or if you’ll just
Disintegrate for lack of substance.
You taste so good, but melt in the mouth.
No nutritional value ever hit my cells.
Could it be you were never a star?
A meteor maybe? Spatial dust?
Little or nothing. Wasn't it just.

TENDER IS NOT THE NIGHT

Tender is not the night. Indifferent rather.
What right have the stars to signify and make decree?
Never, not once, has a star warmed my face,
Lit my path or resolved my plight, my plea.
Not once has a star led seed to birth, to light,
Whenever did strife, did life, cause a star to weep?
Did ever my joy find and keep a sibling twinkle?
Don’t look for my soul on the unprimed canvas of night.
Cold and predictable, distant, elsewhere, other.
Autistic, insentient. No message, no portent, no meaning.
Overrated by poets and children and pedlars of dreams,
To them we are nothing, dust for an instant then gone.
Leave the stars to the night, turn your back on the sky.
With or without them we’re born, we live and we die

Affinities

When someone was there first, and said it all...
I wrote the first poem this afternoon. Later I showed it to an acquaintance, a brilliant poet and scholar of Italian and English language poetry of all periods, and he immediately pulled out and read the second, superb poem (from his collection of over one thousand books), by Edna St. Vincent Millay.


SPRING

Hope springs eternal, mine lies dead.
Spring stabbed it through the heart, spring shot it in the head.
I spoke to hope, I begged it, I screamed at the wall,
I shot bullets of words, I watched them fall.

I watched as they ricocheted, I watched as they bounced,
Capsules of meaning never announced.
So fragile in your parts, so ineluctable the whole
Arrogant and absolute, you must take your toll.

Spring births eternal, it grips us by the throat
And mocks this bleeding cradle and blooms only to gloat.
Oh couldn’t you have waited, held your buds in pity’s grasp?
Left your seeds to sleep awhile and your bulbs in winter’s clasp?

Spring is the cruellest time, it seeps through the cracks,
Insinuates and permeates, unstoppable its wax.
Promising and comforting, an enormous cosmic lie –
How dare you offer apple blossom and leave this child to die?

I live in dismal autumn, cold, damp, dull.
Watching and waiting for the last leaf to fall.
Bring me bleak midwinter and water like a stone,
Don’t torture me with hope, don’t paint with pain my home.

Turn down your colours spring, your scents are too loud,
Your beauty is agony, a suffocating shroud,
Stop the earth on its axis, have the sun put out its fire,
Off with spring’s head, for spring is a liar.

Your presence here should bless this child and ease its every breath,
A rattle in a baby’s bed should not be that of death.
Hope springs eternal, and spring must have its way –
For God’s sake just shut the door, just leave, just go away.

Bhuidhe, per un amico e la sua famiglia, con preghiere, 8 luglio 2008
Bhuidhe, for a friend and his family, with prayers, 8th July, 2008


SPRING

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
in the collection Second April, 1921

Tree

“Of course,” said the man in the sober suit, “we’ll take care of the arrangements for the cemetery, tombstone, and so on. This is a this trying time.”
Jake’s daughter looked out of the window behind the man.
Jake looked at his daughter.
- No cemetery pet. I don’t want a cemetery. Don’t let them dump me in a cemetery.
Jake was still unused to the glorious technicolor of his thoughts since his heart had packed in. It had been years since he had been so wondrously free of pain. Years since he had been able to think clearly without his damn body getting in the way and clouding everything. Only two days had passed since his astonishing voyage into the light, bright, crystal snapping clarity of the blue winter sky. Such relief.
Jake’s daughter thought for a moment. Only two days since she’d last seen her dad. She still saw him on the hill, his white hair wrapped the wrong way round his head by the wind. She still saw him down at the river seeing if his daffodils were coming up.
“The cemetery?” she said, her voice unsure.
- Not the cemetery pet, it would drive me up the wall.
“I don’t think the cemetery is the place for us. What are the alternatives?” she asked the sober suit.
The suit was slightly taken aback.
“Well, if it doesn’t upset you madam, there is always the possibility of cremation. We can organise that. And we can organise for the urn to be buried in the Garden of Remembrance,” said the suit, a solution to this trickier-than-usual client in sight.
- Oh no, pet, not a bloody Garden of Remembrance!
“Thank you, I think we’ll take the urn home. And bury the ashes. Without the urn. Would you like it back to use again?”
The suit faltered.
“Without the urn? And the tombstone? I’m afraid it’s not easy to have a tombstone erected on private property.”
- I don’t want a tombstone pet. I’ll go as I came, with no tombstone. I don’t want one”.
“We won’t have a tombstone. We’ll have something else. We’ll have…”
Jake’s daughter cast about in her mind for the mark her father would want to leave. She saw him outside, on the hill, in the field, by the river. Not inside, but outside on his beloved land.
- Look out of the window pet, it’s there in front of you.
Jake’s daughter looked out of the window.
“We’ll have a tree,” she said. “A tree. We’ll plant my dad and the tree together and he’ll flower every spring.”
The suit didn’t speak. He coughed and made a few notes.
Jake looked at this daughter, in whom he was well-pleased. And he moved on, far away.
That night Jake’s daughter dreamed of her dad, smiling, in a field of daffodils. And she knew that he was well pleased.

by Moira Fraser

Lollipop Man

Your sweetness is catching,

Honey drips from my skin.

My breath is icing sugar.

My lips have grown thin



From sucking your sugar.

Sugared almonds my eyes,

Candy floss heart,

My syrup never dries.



Crystals fall from my smile.

Caramel gaze,

Toffee apple laughter,

Demerara days.

My Life on a Wall

What are you looking for?

I don’t know.
What am I looking for?

What are you looking at?

At nothing, at thirty years.

That space four metres up and two out where
Now is
Nothing
Is where my firstborn
In the howling viscous dim
Saw the twilight.

That pink is what I chose for my girl.
That dip is where she kept her treasures,
A cupboard top.

That space there is where her small hand
Reached, pulled and spread out its fingers
Looking with its touch in the dark.

Where is the stain of where
My one rage broke the
Coffee cup, hurling it from
Four metres up and three along
Against the wall?

The peeling shreds of paper,
The adult room.
That space there is where
We stood side by side and looked,
Looked at our wallpapered adult room
We’re big now,
We’re adults.
We have authority.
We have wallpaper.

Is this what they call gestalt?
Looking for form and shape where it isn’t,
Not seeing what is now.
You cannot see the two together.

That empty space where I could now shoot
A thousand uninterrupted trajectories
Knife straight,
Was once a slalom body-known,
My legs and arms and hands and feet
Slipped neat
Around the furniture,
In the dark, no eyes, not looking
I could walk the length of our apartment
And never once slam a toe against a table leg.
(Where did it end?)

Those lines, those were not space.
Those were walls, limits, non-areas,
Non-existent nothing now gaping raw and sore.
What am I looking for?

For RMS on his birth

Beat bright
little heart,
like Creole laughter
may the light
of dark eyes
lightly lit
be ever yours.

Beat quick,
little heart,
like the flick
of feet
bare and quick
on light-spun sands
in lands
you’ve yet to meet.

Beat strong,
little heart,
with the strength
of the wind-filled,
steady,
steely
Scottish sky.

The joy,
little boy,
the crystal peace of
sun-filled
Caribbean seas
be yours.

And yours,
little heart
the tender softness
of rain-soft
Scottish earth.