WB dominated my thoughts,
His ‘Bee loud glade‘
Buzzed through my mind,
Bringing such longing ,
To go far away to that
Special place.
2022
WB still dominating my thoughts,
Another century indeed,
Now I have my own,
‘Bee loud glade’
No plane, no car, no sea to sail,
Just an open door to,
A special place,
Where the bees buzz,
In the lavender,
Landing on the Lilly pads,
In the cool greenness,
They sate their thirst.
We truly have had our
Wings clipped,
Our horizons
Narrowed.
The world holds
Its breath,
Yet there is a
Solace and a
Quenching to be had,
If only we can find
Our own ‘Bee loud glade.
You arrived in a blast of winter ice And snow flurries The church clock chimed midnight Shortly after your first cry Tuesday’s child is full of grace I whispered and so you were.
You stared at me as if to say I know you I have heard your voice I have lain beneath your Beating heart I have felt your Love even before I Became me.
Now you are mine and I am yours for ever You grow into This impossibly beautiful Creature and I know That one day your loving Trusting gaze will light On another.
We are at that place today And as I watch you shimmer And sparkle among the Flowers and candles Within this sacred place I will say a silent thank you For all that has been and Is yet to come.
A very touching new poem from friend of the blog, Molly Rosenberg.
Arklow
A deep gnawing in my heart An urgency pressing into my thoughts A deep desire to return to the land and people From whence my blood has sprung.
A short air space away. Maybe a journey through Glassy green waves as In the old days.
I crave the sound of those dear voices Long to laugh with them and hear The stories that only they can tell And I can hear again and again.
I need to go before it is too late Before the shadows are all that are left The memories of sandy days, The cows down the back lane The chickens by the gate.
The smell of gorse and salt. Blackberry and apple Soda bread and breac Just memories that I Can almost taste.
But it is the people That I am missing The need to be with Them grows stronger As the days and years pass.
Here’s the latest poem from our occasional contributor, Molly Rosenberg.
Being
Humming birds hover Incessant flutter of wings Frequent sips of nectar sweetness Vital for the life they lead But I just want to be. Life mapped out Months in black and white No room for diversion Another concert Dinner Party Event On and on Like waves pounding The soft silvery sand
A line drawn On the beach In my head Call a halt Shout STOP I want to retreat Need to retreat To save me.
Calm, tranquility drips Like honey From the Humming bird She returns to her nest To rest and just be Like me.
It’s that time of the year again. Clocks have gone back, the temperature is beginning to drop and we are all bracing ourselves for winter. The landscape is unrecognisable from the bright summer days, yet every season has its magic and its mood. Autumn, a sensitive time for nostalgia, for poring over memories by an open fire, for meditation; a season which John Keats has indelibly marked forever as a time for poetry. And so we are pleased today to present a new poem by our dear friend, Molly Rosenberg.
Autumn Thoughts
Through gold Through ruby red Burnt orange Amber glow
Like us the magnificence of beauty reaches its crescendo, as the array of colours overwhelms the Ravensbourne Valley. It takes my breath away. So short a time like our youth so fleeting.
Fluttering Drifting Crunching underfoot
Beauty turned to nuisance now like us when our purpose is served, all will be swept away.
The sharpness of the air pricks my cheeks. I wrap myself in the softness of cashmere. Relish the feeling of summer feet now clad in suede as I tread lightly through these golden autumn days.
This week I have been revising a book of poetry that has been 18 months in the writing. Sections of the poem have been read by a very good friend of mine, Paul Taylor. I asked him as he was reading to mark the text wherever he found the lines confusing or simply dull. I am now working my way through the pages, sometimes rewriting passages he has marked as uninteresting or simply cutting them out if they no longer seem relevant to me.
It is always useful to have an editor, someone who can be trusted and whose judgment is based on wide reading and long years of experience. On this page I would like to express my gratitude to Paul for the task he undertook with great enthusiasm and completed with great professionalism. The lines below, written over a year ago, nevertheless echo a poem submitted to the blog mid-August by Molly Rosenberg. According to Paul Taylor, my short poem is actually a metaphor for love. Who knows?
Wild blackberries
Wild blackberry canes
barbed brambles
heavy with fruit
thrive on the steep banks
of the railway cutting
goodness that grows
innocently
out of the soil :
but easy access to them is barred
by dense patches of nettles
so the berries gather dust
ripen and then fall back
into the undergrowth
to be eaten by birds
and by the large colonies of fox families
that have pitched their tents
at various stations
along the line
David Hockney, A Bigger Splash (1967), acrylic on canvas. Click to enlarge.
I have chosen David Hockney’s painting, A Bigger Splash (1967) from the Tate Britain collection, to accompany a new poem by Molly Rosenberg. The connection is perhaps rather tenuous, but both the poem and the painting deal with absence.
In Molly’s sensitive poem, a personal loss is registered and there is a tense equilibrium between the absence of one life and the presence of another. Hockney’s composition, however, captures the sad, dreary perfection of a Californian day by the pool. Here the pastel colours are deliberately drained of life, and the hard geometrical edges of the draughtsmanship are used to highlight the lifelessness of the scene. What is missing from this painting is the richness of life, there is no hint of a body anywhere. The splash that occurs is tantamount to an attack on the vapid soullessness of the scene, an act not of vandalism but of defiance and rebellion, a yearning for life.
Missing out
Glint of shining Aqua At times almost blinding. A boy figure stands At the edge of the pool. Elongated limbs that will stretch With the promise of years to come. The grandchild he so longed for, yet never saw. Impatient, he left before age could claim him.
Corn-coloured hair ruffled beneath the surface Drifts like weeds on the riverbed. Honeyed limbs, silky smooth Bejewelled with crystal drops. He’d have held your small soft hand in his. Delighted as you tightly clasped your arms around his neck.
London has some of the finest publicly owned museums and art galleries in the world and it is all too easy to take them for granted or to dismiss them as mere tourist attractions. Access to these great institutions is currently free, and so it should be. These facilities are great learning resources for children and for adults. Art is an essential human activity and has probably been with us for as long as we have had language. The representation of consciousness, of feelings and ideas is fundamental to our sense of identity, whether it be in words or images. That we are complex beings is to be applauded: it is this complexity which generates great drama, great music, great poetry and great art. We are the only species in nature to ask questions about what we observe in the external world and what we endeavour to understand when we look introspectively into our hearts.
Traipsing round Tate Modern last Sunday, wet through to my soul, and disappointed that the Pollocks I had gone to see were not currently on display there, I needed a piece of art to raise my spirits, and I found several. In particular I was struck by the ethereal beauty of a painting by Dorothea Tanning, À mi-voix, a title which in English means ‘in a low voice’, almost a whisper. This beautifully executed canvas took my breath away, and there is so much that I could say about it, but I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to say that at its heart I see two figures, male and female, bound by a central spinal column, expressing a love that is so delicately intimate it need not be shouted from the rooftops. But maybe that’s just me! Don’t take my word for it, go and see for yourself.
Dorothea Tanning
Artist and writer Dorothea Tanning was born in the United States in 1910 and trained as a painter in Chicago. She was associated with surrealism early in her career and she was married to fellow artist Max Ernst for thirty-four years until his death in 1976. Among her friends were Man Ray, George Balanchine, Truman Capote, Virgil Thompson, and Igor Stravinsky. Throughout her life she was always busy busy busy, into everything: painting, printmaking, sculpture, set and costume design, and her work was exhibited in the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Philadelphia Museum. In the late 1990s Dorothea turned to writing poetry and two of her poems are presented below. She also wrote an autobiography entitled Birthday (1986) and in 2004 published a novel Chasm: A Weekend. In an epigraph to one of her poetry books she quotes Montaigne : “it’s hard to be always the same person.” She died in 2012 at the age of 101.
Be perfect, make it otherwise.
Yesterday is torn in shreds.
Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes
Rip apart the breathing beds.
Hear bones crack and pulverize.
Doom creeps in on rubber treads.
Countless overwrought housewives,
Minds unraveling like threads,
Try lipstick shades to tranquilize
Fears of age and general dreads.
Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,
Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.
Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise
You and the werewolf: newlyweds.
*
Sequestrienne
Don’t look at me
for answers. Who am I but
a sobriquet,
a teeth-grinder,
grinder of color,
and vanishing point?
There was a time
of middle distance, unforgettable,
a sort of lace-cut
flame-green filament
to ravish my
skin-tight eyes.
I take that back—
it was forgettable but not
entirely if you
consider my
heavenly bodies . . .
I loved them so.
Heaven’s motes sift
to salt-white—paint is ground
to silence; and I,
I am bound, unquiet,
a shade of blue
in the studio.
If it isn’t too late
let me waste one day away
from my history.
Let me see without
looking inside
at broken glass.
johnjosephlyons 