Tuesday 19 January 2016

Where are we now?

In my defence I did not know that my chosen title was a Bowie song before I used it!  I thought that it had a sort of old-fashioned charm of many of the privately printed pamphlets of the early years of the twentieth century where questions were being asked about the direction that so-called civilisation was taking.
     This title is the result of a meditation on the word 'Animals' and the relationship of that word with what we regard as human.  My initial ideas were, to put it mildly, cynical, and I was thinking about what should have blighted the years of my early teens and cast a shadow over the rest of my life: the ticking down to midnight of the atomic clock of destruction.
     I have always thought it is difficult to hate a species that, after having developed a weapon of mass destruction, could then deploy this weapon in a strategy called MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction!  The 'red in tooth and claw' savagery of Nature has never, until our own time, seen one species have the unique capability of wiping out all life on the planet.  And we are the civilised ones!  As opposed say, to a slug - which, as far as I am aware, has no plans for world domination and is not much preoccupied about those who have!
     I was also thinking about the sorts of questions that we ask ourselves (and our parents) and how we deal with the answers (or the lack of them) in our everyday lives.
     I started my notes thinking about memory and using the cliche of a bridge in time.  I hoped to breathe some life into the cliche by thinking about the quality of remembering comparing the more immediate memory of childhood with the more measure and self-deluding memory of age and contrasting a simple plank bridging a brook with a more 'engineered' bridge in age.
     All of the thoughts above went through a number of drafts and note making.  Another major component in this poem was sheer frustration, as things did not work out as I expected them to.  After a dozen drafts I am at least partially satisfied with the present poem.
     I like the opening two lines and I think that the idea that we sometimes spend more time on the shaping of the way of getting back to what happened rather than the reality of the events that we are trying to remember, is something which I am conscious of when I think of even the simplest of events in my childhood.
     I suppose the ending of the poem retains some of the cynicism which was a bitter starting point for my first thoughts, though I also think that there is a 'saving' ambiguity in the last section which gives pause for thought.



Where are we now?



I.
Bridges built to yesterdays
grow more ornate with age.

The simple, slanted, childhood plank,
rough, solid wood, across a brook,
to link the then with now.

(Harsh grass with broken reeds
and sickly-sweet wild garlic crushed
beneath footfalls of day-before.)

II.
Hour-gone experiences
glitter-flit like dragon flies
catching recall’s gleam and
coruscating ripples
smoothing over stones.

The childhood “Game of ‘Whys?’”
that force the questions
parents find so hard to play:

why is the sea so blue,
when drinking water in my glass
is colourless?

with quick responses like:

I’ll tell you later;
God just made it so;
it’s Science you may come to understand –
at length; and anyway the colour’s nice.

The comfortable words that we are told
that hide the ignorance
sustaining lies that
every answer is out there:
in institutions we don’t know;
in libraries of tight, shut doors.

III.
With time the streams push rivers
through the lakes where blurred
shapes move and twist;
a moment’s light of underbelly
flashing white among dark narratives
is glimpsed, but hardly recognised
from spans, suspended, engineered,
to keep a distance soundly safe.

IV.
There is no special sanctity
from Ur to Angeles
can stop the double helix
twisting human eyes to mirror-gaze
the regimented worlds of ants,
communities of bees –

and realise our place.





This is slightly longer than the usual length of my poems, but I felt that the complexity of the subject matter asked for a more considered response than a short lyric.


Monday 11 January 2016

Obey

This poem is part confessional, part autobiographical and part observational.  I'm not sure about the proportions, but the themes are there.
     I suppose that each generation looks askance at how the next is bringing up children and, even if you have no children of your own, it doesn't stop you having opinions.  Just look at ministers of education around the world to see that actual knowledge of teaching is obviously seen as a serious disadvantage to the successful carrying out of duties!
     Perhaps it is because the Christmas holidays this year in Catalonia have been unduly (!) extended so that the kids have not gone back to school until today, the 11th of January, that has encouraged me to think about the behaviour of children.  
     It is indeed true that you cannot remain impervious to the daily drama as child after howling child is dragged away from the swings in the outside part of the leisure centre cafe by exasperated parents.  It is also inevitable that you think of your own behaviour when you were that age.  Or at least you think about what you think was your behaviour at that age.  Whatever the truths of the situation, it is one - if only because of the sheer noise involved - that demands some sort of response!
     Living by the side of the sea, we also have a number of sellers who display their goods on sheets which can, in a moment (when the police have been seen) be gathered up and taken away out of the sight of the eyes of the law.  At the moment the objects for sale are sports shoes and mechanical toys, but during the high days of summer we were urged to buy baseball hats with the brand 'Obey' writ large on them.
     It was a combination of memory, observation and need to say something that prompted this poem.



Obey



I was, it must be said, unnervingly
polite when I was small.
When still too young
to understand the means,
I realised how ruthless
being nice could be.

My ready smile and fluent speech
(in accents unattached to who I was)
got me what tantrums never did.

I left the Roath Park swings when I was told;
agreed time limits for the saving
of my castle on the Barry beach
against the boringly relentless tide,
and always said my ‘please’ and ‘thank you’
without prompt.

Outside the house, in streets
where I was free to roam:
in Dogfield and in Malefant,
in Tewkesbury and Robert too,
my father’s whistled rhythm
(one-two and one-two-three and one)
would bring me back at once.
Just like the dogs we later had –
though Labradors were more
recalcitrant than ever Stephen was!

And so I watch the modern kids,
whose parents now
negotiate, cajole and plead
and often are rebuffed
with what looks like imperial distain!

But parenting’s an easy hit
when you have raised
no children of your own
to make your aim unsure.
Instead, reliance on the partial
memories of what you were
steady the telling shot.

I watch a girl ignore her parent’s call
and use her toddling sister’s wanderings
to justify her staying on the swings.

I watch three boys kick at a ball,
and then play on, ignoring
all their fathers’ shouts.
They deign to make faux turns
placating parent protest
allowing gesture, once again,
to take the place of fact.


And at my present age,
and distant from the young
(yet old) remembered self,
it’s tempting to assert
‘Obey’ has just become another
brand on baseball hats
(and always worn the wrong way round)
and that the concept is as distant now
as those delightful, winsome smiles that
creased my infant, knowing face.




The italics and bold print are intentional, as is the extra space before the final stanza.
     There is a sinister feel to the last line which I think is exactly what I was aiming at!

Wednesday 6 January 2016

Two flies

This is the second poem I have written about flies!  I sometimes think that I go out of my way to find the least likely subject matter for my poems, but I also have to admit that the subject matter arises naturally.  Well, as naturally as anyone who constantly makes notes in a little book can be thought of as doing something natural!
     This poem is the result of using material from two notebooks based on two observations.  As I was writing about the second, I had remembered writing about the first, and so it was only 'natural' that I should try and link the two in a poem.
     This has taken a number of drafts to get to this stage and the final few drafts jettisoned four lines which I had stubbornly kept in all the previous drafts in spite of the fact that I knew that they did not really fit.  I made an abortive attempt to fit two lines in a late draft, but had to admit that the poem was better without them!
     In my previous poem, "Flies", I wrote a couple of lines which I remember whenever I brush an insect from my skin, "they tickle-foot their / filthy way around".  The present "Two flies" do not get to touch me: one is on a cafĂ© parasol and the other fell on my notebook and, I thought was blown away, but turned up the next day, dead, when I started to write the next day's notes - preserved in the pages of my notebook.
     Flies represent 'Other' fairly well.  They are irritating; they spread disease; their ways of eating are repulsive and they have strange eyes.  What does the world look like to them?  After all, they belong to a group of creatures that, for the most part, do not take much notice of the mild irritant of humanity which barely rates a notice on what is, after all, their world rather than ours.
     I am not sure if this poem is anything more than observation, but I was conscious that, while I was writing it I was thinking about perception, opposition and arrogance.
     Donne was diminished by any man's death; should we feel the same way for a fly?  Or for any living thing?  A reductio ad absurdam would mean we should be mourning for bacteria and disease when we use medicines to cure and kill!
     All of these ideas were running through my head when I was writing and perhaps the poem needs a period of settling before I can understand if it was what I was trying to say.
     Anyway here it is for your response.




Two flies




Through my conflicted eyes
I think the animal no more than stain
on cream and taut expanse of parasol.

But then I think I see a gap
between the body and the cloth
where tiny legs must help it
hunker down against the air.
            For it: a cataclysm
made of tautened, windy stuff.

How does it stay secure in draughts
that agitate the pages of my book
and pennant the red-ribboned mark
above the current page? 
            What anchor can it find?
And what, exactly, does it see from its small
vantage point, compared to my inclusive gaze?

Surely its view is only rippling wave,
an undulating plain of woven just-off-white,
and curved (so like the world it will not see)
within the compound of its eye.

And now: a different thing.
Another fly has tumbled
to my notebook page,
with splintered wings of cellophane,
to catch a glimpse of autumn sun –
            and then is gone.

What did that see before it dropped
and fell, breeze-scooped away?

But I discovered that it had been caught,
composed, by the unfilling space
of empty lines; by notes and poems
not begun throughout the waiting
white of the next page

And dead.  Quite dead. 

Compressed – not smeared.
Its body free to move from line
to line, responding to my hand,
and waiting for a pen
to build a tomb.




Who knows what other 'Fly' poems I might write!  I have to admit that the next, if I go by my notes, will be on Christmas decorations hanging from trees!

All comments welcome.