Re-entry and a Tuesday Poem

Hello.

I’m finding it a challenge to modulate my voice. Is this too loud … too soft…? I’m speaking again into this place after a time of absence. Life’s gone on of course, in all its hurly-burly, but part of me has been very quiet.

Research shows that the longer a person holds back from speaking in a group, the less likely they are to begin. Yep. So here I am, tumbling back into my blog, needing to start again this …logue. Suddenly wanting, really wanting, to overcome this curious sense of shyness, this inhibition that feels like it could grow big, and cause me to shut shop here at cadence.

Silence has been a theme for me for a while. I’ve had a love affair with it in recent months. Recently, I’ve been up against its other face. No longer the lush darkly folded place of presence (the fur coat route to narnia), but a place that seemed thin, reedy. I remembered a poem that I wrote a few years ago. Then too, I’d become aware that my own inner sound had altered - a sense that somehow my internal orchestra had gone quiet. It made me wonder – where did all the instruments go?

PICCOLO

A piccolo is playing in the hollow of my neck

The orchestra has vamoosed

The performance pit is empty

The piccolo is upstairs, playing on alone

The cello spat the dummy

Is sulking in the corner

Fretting on some score

The double bass has lost heart

It knows by holding still and turning to wood

It can pull off a vanishing trick

The trumpet has given up on noise

And is napping with the mute

On a bed of black velvet.

The violins are awol

Cavorting in a field

They may not be back

The piccolo is not holding its breath

PM

Tuesday Poem: Dear Reader

Dear reader

I am afraid

That the act of writing a poem

Might force me to take a position

Or make a confession

Or both

I know that I should avoid

Adopting a stance

I may regret later

In a world transformed

By the scurrilous germination

Of early spring

Or some new fashion

Oh reader

How I wish

We could simply go there together

Without all this language and paper

And geographical space

Between us

Forget poetry altogether

And take our clothes off

I don’t want to write a poem

To avoid having to make a decision

There is a time for writing a poem

And a time for mowing the lawn

I don’t want to write a petition

Or to pamphleteer on the pavement

Like one of those earnest, hard-working

Well-intentioned people

That nobody likes

No unnecessary paperwork, please!

Dearest reader

I must confess

I am afraid

To be here in my poem

At all

All I have to offer

Are some minor details of August:

Rain

The huddled masses in retreat

Songbirds celebrating the concrete-coloured sky

Cameron Birnie

(Another poem by my son - thanks cam.)

Tuesday Poem

Irish Pipes in the Forrester Gallery

The ceiling is libidinous
It curls and swells
and holds
lightly to decorum

The floor is knotty
But sound and square
It promises
to keep behaving

49 chairs are in position
They were prised open
An hour ago
They are not comfortable

Under a man’s arm
A bag is filling up with air
Pipes hang over his knee
Skinny and awkward

His fingers cradle a hollow bone
The bellow is breathing
Dust molecules, huddled in corners
Turn to face the music

The chairs roll onto tiptoe

The ceiling cups her breast

The floor forgets his promise.

Pam Morrison

Tuesday Poem

Regrets: I’ve had a few

Imagine saying it over again,
This time against a backdrop of lush orchestration,
A swollen reservoir of strings
And the twittering of flutes overhead.

Imagine saying it over again,
This time with an open hand.
I realize the trapdoor is about to open beneath me
When the sky begins to resonate with canned laughter.

Imagine saying it over again.
I could have just told her the true things,
Aubergine clocks and double-breasted werewolf suits and so forth,
All the while gnawing a dinosaur bone,

And still she would have dispatched me
With those baffled refugee eyes.


Cameron Morrison Birnie

Tuesday Poem

Mother at Ease

Fat as a roll of pork
mother is prone
cupped in canvas
and perfectly pitched to 30 degrees

She wears a wig
She is clad in black
Her jovial mourning frock
is laughing from hip to hip

That belly's a rotunda
The band's packed up, gone home
Hands splay across the roof
Fingers, soft as savs
tap to the off-beat
of a remembered saucy song

Out from the swollen folds of skirt
calf nestles up to calf
calm as lovers
after a tempest of love or hate

Small feet, moored at the ankles
have lost their mast and rigging
But see - their prows are at the ready
set to sail to different countries
somewhere east and west.


Pam M

I wrote this poem at a time when being mother was a defining role in my life. I wondered about other shapes 'motherness' might take.

Affluere: to flow to, to flow abundantly

An online dictionary describes fluency as (being) capable of flowing; capable of moving with ease and grace… Ease of expression, and ease of movement yes, but more than that – the facility for doing so. Gift, as the saying goes, is born out of hard graft, in a sobering10:90 ratio. Another dedicated somebody has also gone mathematical, claiming that it takes 10,000 hours to gain mastery, with the underlying suggestion that anyone can get there, if they have the grit. One of my offspring has taken this to heart, and is off at a jog, though still in the early miles of the marathon. As for me, I look and am daunted. Is there not a route to fluency via my own wellspring? A being place where the bubbling water will unknot my limbs and my larynx.

My recent experience reminds me, well … no. A traveller who is multi-lingual has been staying for the past fortnight on a helpex scheme where guests help out in exchange for board. One of her gifts to our household was to talk to my partner, daughter and myself in either Spanish or French. I watched my daughter enter the dance of conversation. She was ‘capable of flowing’ with accompanying gestures and laughter – the hard-won fruit of her solo stint in Central America. Partner JB also, after months of regular propping of self with Spanish text books, also did the biz, but with perhaps more perspiration. I entered my child self, wobbling on one foot - able to stammer a simple sentence en Francais, but lost in the response.

I’m not that interested in languages I tell myself, and it’s true. I am interested (deeply) in developing fluency in music, but hold that at bay for reasons I’ve not yet plumbed. But here I am, on my blog, in the medium of English. I have fluency here, as do all who happen to be reading this. We do have language. We can speak, and we can choose not to speak. Is this a case of love the one you’re with? All I need was laid down when I was a toddler. Here I am with an ocean to play in. I can decide what words in what order. I can choose when and to whom. Seven years ago I ditched journalism as a career, and told myself I would never again write to someone else’s deadline. This blog is my own; my one (kind of) public container for my thoughts to take expression through writing. I’ve been away from it for two weeks; wondered if, and when and how I would return. And here I am back again. Fluency in this medium of English: a constant, whether my words are in ebb or in flow.

p.s. I have learnt that affluent is also a noun, meaning a tributary into a main river source. It seems to me that affluents are riches indeed. May there be many for me and thee.

moths and myths

I have two stories in mind as I launch my blog boat today - one is true and one is made up. The true story took place when my son C was a small boy. I had settled him into bed, and as I stood up, I told him that I was leaving, but God would be with him. His eyes grew wide. "Do you mean that God is here in this room?" I smiled and nodded, happy enough to give this glib comfort so I could return to my book. His face took on a look of panic. He pulled his hands out from under the bed cover and slapped them together. "Here", he said, with solemn intensity - "I've got him. Take him away." I cupped my hands around his, separated them off with care, and carried God out to the hall where I flicked 'him' into the dark like a small moth. Done!

The other story was one that I heard recently. It went like this: God was in heaven with the angels. God was badgered day and night by prayers from humans, always asking for this or that. The angels noticed how tired God looked, and said they would find a hiding place so God could have some peace. They took God into the heart of a forest, to find a place to rest in the soft dark undergrowth. But soon the clamour returned. The prayers had found God, and they were as noisy and demanding as ever. Then the angels said: "We'll try another hiding place. We'll take you to a cave. It's high in the mountains; its opening is hard to find. The humans will never find you there." But the same thing happened. No sooner had God arrived, than the prayers and petitions came pouring through the gap in the rockface and into the cave. The angels thought and thought, then one of them spoke up. "I have an idea: we'll hide you in the human heart. Hardly anyone will find you there."

Banished in one, scuttling for cover in the other, god is present in both stories in fascinating roles. Where does god reside? Can we find him/her - catch god even? Do we want to? Over the years my theology, once reasonably sturdy, has fallen away. Now, with a sweet pile of twigs remaining, I am standing in the open, feeling curious and responsive. I hear about, am drawn to the idea of divine encounter, espoused by those who have embraced spiritual exercise such as silence and meditation, and by those who are impelled into creative expression (surely branches of the same tree.) Yesterday I posted a ted talk on youtube where author Elizabeth Gilbert invites us to loosen up and cock our ear/heart to the divine muse - the genie that lives outside of ego. She relates the story of a poet, now in her 90s, whose divine daimon would come at full throttle - an earth shuddering, thundering horse-like creature. My son likens his poetry writing to vomiting; the creative impulse a spasming affair, where the body pitches and the formed poem is expelled - sometimes at astonishing speed. I loved reading vespersparrow's experience as described on her blog - an intensely delicate, heightened sense of encounter, that indicates she is about to write.

As for me - who knows, but I will keep faith. After all, I have carried god between my palms. In the meantime, as Elizabeth Gilbert so beautifully puts it: just keep showing up and get on with the job. Ole.