What I should be doing is getting stuck into my final piece of work for my Open University degree because, goodness knows, I have notes, references and books all over the place all related to my chosen painting which is the focus for the writing. But . . .
True to my dilatory self I have found hundreds of things to do rather than start the hard slog of getting a draft done. As a wise person once said, "The most important thing about a draft is, that it exists!" Once it is there, then the easier tinkering can take place.
I tell myself that part of my inactivity is my inability to locate a particularly useful (although in French) article that is specifically related to my painting. I have tried everything, up to and including a late night electronic conversation with the night-librarian (such things exist) on the Open University web site! Nothing. So I sit and sulk, and find other things to do.
One of those 'other things' is write poems. This one was a result of 'mining' the notebook, in other words looking back at notes about which I half remember thinking might have made a decent poem.
The inspiration for this poem came just as I went to bed, so I turned the light on, scrabbled around for a pencil and scribbled a few lines in my notebook.
With the recent death of an aunt, I am getting more and more aware that a whole area of shared experience and history is being lost - a concept that I have explored in a number of poems.
The knowledge that I was particularly conscious of loosing was of myself. I reasoned that my uncles and aunts all saw and knew me when I was a tiny baby: they knew me far better than I could possibly know myself. That idea bumped around in my head and I began to think about when I realised that I was me, so to speak.
I think that there must have been a memory of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead in the back of my mind, when one of the characters talks about realisation, I think it was of death and wonders why the first understanding of mortality was not an astounding event.
Anyway, this is the poem that came out of that late night scribble.
Fooling futility
a time
(that could return)
when I was just a
crying thing:
milk-sucking, nappy-soiler;
unaware I was alive –
though lustily around.
When do we realise that
we exist?
It ought to
be
momentous!
Causing us to grab mortality before
it clutches us, and lets us
sink past skinny fingers
to the pyramidal pile of dust
the wrong end of the glass.
But,
there again,
perhaps we don’t.
Exist,
that is.
‘Tho not quite sure how that might work,
I must admit I’m quite impressed
at the illusion I’ve made up
to fill the gap after
there was
The ambiguity of the title is intentional with 'fooling' working either as an adjective or a verb.
This is another of my poems where the lack of punctuation at the beginning and end is also intentional and part of the intended meaning.
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