Pelted with Petals? Or Stoned to Death?
This may be the beginning of something. It is too soon to tell.
If you visit regularly you may have noticed a long silence. Truth is despair has bitten deep, not the summer despair that lifts hair, or dries the laundry, but the piercing knife of despondency. The mistake may lie in reading the paper, a habit resumed while waiting for the tricksy muse, who has taken itself off on a leave of absence, and is probably wind surfing off Marbella.
This morning there was death in Yemen with hospitals barren of remedy, Kurds against Kalashnikovs in Turkey; Putin on the Path of War and Ukraine begging for U52s. Refugees in Kos begging for kos ( food where I come from), or papers, or better both; Cameron was fiddling in Europe on consent to withhold benefits ( what ARE those exactly?) and a bearded Sandal tipped to win and make better friends with Hamas or Hezbollah in this land with that reputation for sanity!
Why would anybody write? Spitting against the wind just seems unintelligent. So I stopped.Then I did a bit of meditating and the muse sidled in and stuck out a tongue. So I wrote a poem. You can have it if you like…
Words- They Are the Poet’s Fault.
Those who blow word-winds
as easily as paring a pencil,
have never sucked the lead of life…
So they say.
If you had drunk the deep of grief
you would not cascade
a bright loquacious literature.
You would slide silent through pine in the night wood
whittling the matchstick moon
sliver shiver a slow-sleep dawn…
to ignite a blaze.
Had you loved and lost, longed, or watched skies burn,
had a mother bent with labour,
a child with legs thin as a crow’s cry
you would stay quiet, though your eyes would speak.
The currency of clever sounds
is the splashing of a weathered tap
where water is not harvested
in the cellar of the house best left.
To make explicit hangs a carcass for dismembering,
a cleaver phrase glistens,
tendons of a life extinguished hang in the air,
coagulate words drip to the floor’.
See? That’s about it for now.
I have also read a couple of restorative books that have nudged out despair and are claiming the right to be heard. Whispering. Maybe next time I’ll bequeath them to you?
St Sebastian [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Rose By Melbelle (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
