Tuesday Poem: Alicia Ponder

Running away with a Christmas sonnet

by Alicia Ponder

Go kiss your prince beneath the mistletoe

And hang those stockings high above the hearth

For Christmas is the one day you can show

The greatest love of all and peace on earth

Still, I wish you would take your Christmas cheer,

Pack the day with bows and loving care

And bundle it so far away from here

And don't you mention Grinches, don't you dare.

For while the thought of presents makes some sing

And has the children dancing round the tree

Christmas makes me wish more than anything

That I could wash my hands and be set free -

Just wander off, enjoy the sunny beach

Forget the rules, and

lie

in the sun-drenched

sand.

Thanks Alicia for your poem. I love the way it slips out of of structure, and into a languid free-form where content and shape take on a perfectly relaxed ease... even sweeter to my eye no doubt, because I'm about to follow suit, and climb out of my rhyming couplet work life!

Alicia is a Wellington-based author and a regular on-line Tuesday Poem contributer. You can find more of her poems on her blog: anafflictionofpoetry.blogspot.com

Alicia's poems and prose also feature in 'Caught on Canvas', a popular art book about Wellington, and she has published several short stories in the School Journal, with more to come out next year in various places, including Australia. When she's not writing or coaching at Hutt Valley Fencing Club, she sometimes finds time to review the latest books at Rona Book Shop, relieve at Hutt Valley High School, and provide a taxi service for her two children.

Chrithmyth

I'm a stickler for writing things right. It actually feels good to own it out loud (even if I did play a bit loose with my grammar there.) I've been the boring parent who always responded "so much fun" to my children's enthusiastic "so fun". I've gaped at their father's loose edges around what's ok and what's not in the English language (he's a former English teacher, and loves languages.) That said, I have made some shifts these past years - wrestle, contort, surrender. One free-for-all zone is my telecom fone. (See?) ... except of course the 'you' word. That's still sacred.

The one other written word I hold onto with stubborn determination is Christmas (as opposed to the X version). This has taken some doing. I write with the speed of sound, mostly illegibly to everyone else, and I love getting to the end of a task as quickly as I can. But I hate the fact that this 'celebration', which does acknowledge a significant birth, has a popularised spelling that deletes the person - appropriately with an x, and usually a big fat capital one.

That said - I have been playing with a new spelling for this event. I've written it up there as my post heading. I think think this spelling puts some meaning back into what it is I'm experiencing. This sweeping madness, from which some of us take shelter, pull our hoodies over our faces, and others surrender and shop and get sick, is surely in response to a myth. It feels like it has mythological proportions. An unwieldy potent 'story', dreaded by so many, and with the power to disturb and unseat us, without showing it's real face.

Anyway, this year we're doing our wee bit to pull it out of the mist, give it a name and a shape that's human-sized. We're leaving town on Sunday and heading for a quiet spot in the bush down south for three days. We have not sent cards, not put up a christmas tree (though plan to locate a flowering pohutukawa by the end of next week). All gifts will be recycled (pre-loved by ourselves or someone else). And lunch will be simple. Merry Christmas.

Tuesday poem: Tackling the day

Some time ago my then writing group dished out half a dozen words at the end of our meeting and we agreed we'd stud a poem with each one - raisins in a pud of our own making. It's the poem I'm posting today, and it feels appropriate as a what... galviniser? - joke? - aspiration? as I stumble to the end of 2010, still ploughing through a ridiculous amount of workatwork, my faith eye on that checkered flag, which should be waving at me on the 17th.

(I'm not sure the compulsory words are readily identifiable, but there are no prizes for correctly guessing one of them.)

Tackling the day

Look at you

Slinking along

Grumbling across the day

With your nose in the falling dark

Before your last foot's

Left home in the morning

By God

Not me mate

There'll be butter and jam

On my bread

At sun up.

I'll devastate crust and crumbs

With a sure jaw

And flashing incisors

I'll take time to kick the rubbish

Where it belongs

Bullseye

I'll spread my shoulders

And pump blood

And draw breath

Like a gale

There'll be no slither

No slits for eyes

You just watch me

I'll show you

I'll show you foreshore.

On Feet

Sometimes words turn themselves over and peer at you differently. Same word, new relationship. Footloose did that to me recently. Me who hobbles about for the first circuitous part of my day - bed to bathroom to wardrobe to radio to jug for cuppa number two; 50, 60, 100 yards of round-and-about and at some point, somewhere in there, I'm limber-ish again. Too many hours with my knees under the desk, and back it comes, this gait that suggests someone whose body's getting old (how can this be?) Perhaps no surprise then that 'footloose' surfaced, and asked for a second glance. What is it - this anatomical freedom that goes with fancy-free? Springing to the surface - a memory of an unhuggable pretty-faced doll, small enough to hold in one hand, with every joint rotatable. (But be careful pam - she'll pinch you.) Surely footloose with its splatty - even promiscuous connotations - would be a tricky way to navigate the world. What I do like, thank you english, is the notion that feet have their own intentions.

Today I've flung both arms sideways and discovered some space around me. I've gone visiting blogs - and with days - sometime weeks of absence, have felt neither footloose not footsure - more someone whose ankles are snapped shut into rather cumbersome boots. Do I respond, all this time after the fresh delivery of these posts, or would I be leaving a clumsy, muddy footprint. Then I remember the magic of this zone: that I can dance or clobber in, leave no trace, but drink what I choose to, because the offering is there. (Thank you!) And I can make my own offering. Light feet, stiff feet, perhaps which is no matter, I can go out and walk the blogosphere.

Hummingbirds

There seems to be much talk about the brain these days. It's like deep science and the foreign language that describes it are being demystified so we can all get a reasonably accessible picture of what happens up there, if we so choose. As someone who will be hovering in mid-50's for not much longer, and whose memory keeps dropping small things (not pennies), there's some comfort in learning that our 'plastic' brains keep doing the business of spurting new connections and synapsing (new word for the people's neuro-dictionary), and is not a growing pool of dead and dying cells.

I haven't retained much detail of what I've read or heard about brains in my own lively jungle, but one piece of the information that has gone in keeps reverberating. Apparently the part of the brain we use when we talk about ourselves autobiographically, ie tell stories about our own experience, is that same part that's activated when we improvise music. I find this fascinating. All sorts of things spring to mind (thank you brain). One is the sheer beauty of the notion that as I recount my own story, I sing a song. Not necessarily a melodious or even-tempoed (sp?) song, but one that is spontaneous and creative - in much the way that dreams are.

I love this idea in relation to my work as a counsellor, when I sit with a number of people who are feeling their way into their own story, finding ways to articulate and integrate their own experiences - perhaps (with this in mind) not so much to make sense of them, as make a song of them. It also re-minds me of the unique facility we have as creatures to speak the stuff of our lives. (Elisabeth's rich blog is themed with this idea.) Linking it to improvisation, can we look at recounting our own life tale as an act of creative surrender? Like birds at sun-up perhaps, but with an infinitely variable tune, and the the dubious ability to choose whether we open our throats or swallow our song. (I've enjoyed Marylinn's eloquent exploration of this territory in her last two blogs.)

And finally - away from the metaphor and back to making music, it's good to know that for those times when there are no words, no right person to hear, there's something about the act of humming that's more than just a hum.

Withness

Recently, and a long way from here, (still milking that trip of mine...) a woman I had just met talked to me about her work as a facilitator in conflict resolution and team building in groups. She said something I've known to be true, but I heard it with fresh meaning: people will start to pull together as soon as they see what unites them. It has hung about in my mind. I've been enjoying this idea. Life is continually thrusting me/us into groups and small communities. As I mentally stretch the tarpaulin, plant the tent pegs wider, I start to create a shared space. I am surely then more able to be present and with those I am with - including those I may have otherwise been inclined to distrust or judge. (I can't help contrasting this with my own tendency to navigate my way to those who meet, match or mirror me.) I'm not sure how much sense this carries in writing it, but I tried this recently - envisioned the rim around the edges of a new group I was part of. It was simply an act of the imagination; an intentional decision that was not reordering the way I saw or behaved, but recognising the bigger place. Medic and therapist Naomi Remen talks about 'holding people large.' Perhaps this can also be applied to people in plural. These are small beginnings for me - grains of insight - but I'm wondering: is this the way to inclusive, gritty, meaningful community?

Tuesday poem: Deep Sea Swimming

This is a teetering-on-Tuesday poem. It is in fact Monday evening here in nz, but I want to post this before that whale called work swallows me up. (Starting tonight, but not lasting forever).

Recently Claire beckoned us to the sea, and that trail of thought took me back to this poem which I wrote at 40 - one of the first I ever wrote. I would now describe my immersion differently, but this was how it was then ...

Deep Sea Swimming

I'm out of my depth here

Who would have thought it?

You walk the world for 40 winters

Have children who rise to meet you face to face

You expect by now to stand on sturdy feet

Calves like plaited loaves

Gleaming above the water line

Baskets of fish and tools to catch them

Fair and square on each bent arm

The fanciful high tide of childhood

Going going gone

But no

There's water

underfoot and rising

An ocean tilting

Holding me not quite firm

My basket tumbles

Fish turn and flick

While I, wrinkling

in my shimmery world

Roll on my back

Ease my limbs

With unusual grace

A middle aged mermaid

Out in the depths

Her heart on the horizon

pm