Thursday 6 July 2017

Pool play


By the time I entered secondary school I was taller than three-quarters of my grandparents, with only my mother’s father overtopping me.  On our first day in The Cardiff High School for Boys, we were lined up in order of height and then distributed to the Houses so that each one could have a ‘fair’ selection for their rugby teams!  At the end of the line, I was the second tallest.  And in case you’re wondering, as I was never exactly willowy, I was placed in the second row in the house rugby team and there I stayed for seven muddy years!

I am working to a point.  If you are tall and solid, the ‘dangling child’ years are limited and what I describe in the short poem that follows was restricted to a painfully short number of 'growing' years.

I can remember sitting on my father’s shoulders, and there exists a picture of me standing on his shoulders during one of our many visits to Barry Island beach.  But the memory that stays with me most concerns flying and the sea.

My especial delight was to accompany my dad into our bit of the Bristol Channel in Barry Bay, then put a foot into his cupped hands and be thrown over his shoulder into the waves.  I could happily have been flung for hours, but physical  (dad's not mine) limited my satisfaction.  All too soon I was too tall and too solid for my dad to pander to my aeronautical desires.

In school too, in gym lessons, demonstrations on the trampoline for example, always used the lighter, smaller, more manageable kids.  Not I.  I needed the teacher to ensure my safety and he was in shorter supply than fellow students.  Still, I would be lying if I said that gym lessons were my favourites, and I was generally quite happy to watch rather than participate.  But the memory of flung flight has never left me.

Sometimes in the pool I see fathers and sons engaging in what for me is only a distant memory.  It was noticing one such couple that was the inspiration for the following poem.

My parents would often tell me about my early love of swimming pools.  When I couldn’t walk but had elevated crawling into a juvenile Olympic sport, I was placed pool side in a swimming pool in Leeds and proceeded to make my determined way towards the water’s edge.  My father swept me up before I fell in, but he rapidly tired of thwarting my ambition to get wet.  He decided, therefore, to allow me to achieve my goal, suffer the consequences and thereby learn just why he constantly picked me up before I got to my destination.

I crawled.  I fell.  I spluttered.  I was rescued.  Lesson learned, I was placed poolside once again.  And proceeded to crawl towards the edge.  I had obviously decided that death was a reasonable price to pay to get to the element that I enjoyed!  As I am typing this more than sixty years later, you can appreciate that my father did not let me drown, in spite of my best efforts then, and indeed on one or two other occasions much later!

A child believes that mum and dad will always be there.  You can be thrown in the air in a blanket held by parents in a grandparents’ house; you can be held upside down by one leg and swung around; you can be held and be pretend-dropped and caught just-in-time - because your parents will make sure that you come to no harm.  It is the safe-danger of parents, like the safe-danger of thrilling fairground rides.

But your parents are not always there.  And belief is tested.  And faith strained.  And assumptions questioned.  Some trust games destroy rather than cement.

So the last two lines of the poem are perhaps a cautionary exploration of the implications of the word ‘play’ in the title.

As always, I welcome comments.


Pool play



A wriggling and excited child,
manhandled by devoted dad,
and tumbling down his father’s frame,
caught upside down in
incoherent glee.

A careful roughhouse,
ending with a tummy kiss,

and rest,

with hands on shoulders,
with bright eyes wet
with dangerous delight.
 

Wednesday 5 July 2017

An argument is

From time to time, usually prompted by vague feelings of guilt, I do a trawl through my notebook and see if any of the scribblings that I have written and ignored might be worth working up into a poem.  Sometimes it is some of the seemingly most unpromising of my thoughts that I take further.

Many years ago I had an argument with my parents which ended with my stamping off to my bedroom and my telling myself that this time, this time I would never forgive them for what they had done.  I can remember my fury and my sense of injustice.  I can remember details of my room in 25, Dogfield Street, Cathays in Cardiff and, even now I can sort of re-texture my childish anger.  What I can't do is remember what the argument was about!  I can feel the pain, but I can't remember the point!

Although I am argumentative, I do not like arguments.  I feel them too keenly.  Passionate debate is fine: high words and bluster - but real cross words, felt personal disagreement I find hard to take.

Given that, it was probably not surprising that I was deeply moved by part of the Holocaust gallery in the Imperial War Museum.  I mean I was moved by it all, but it was the filmed 'testimony' in the final section where a screen played a film loop of survivors of the camps speaking directly to camera and articulating their feelings that moved me most.

I remember one survivor responding to the questions of memory and forgiveness.  To explain the feelings involved the survivor described the experience via a metaphor of a rock thrown into a pool: at first there is the splash and the ripples spread out, then the ripples subside and the surface of the pool is still - but the rock is still there under the water.  A version of this explanation informs the short poem that I wrote.

Like my childish self, I can't remember the 'real' inspiration for the sketchy notes that I jotted down, and I have to say that the poem itself was recollection written in sun bathing tranquillity!  But though I was, you might say, content when I wrote it, there is an appreciation of unease that informs the lines!

Although the poem is very short, I have tried to compress thought into a wider ambiguity that the chosen words offer.

I think this is the first time that I have used a title as a line in the poem.

I didn't enjoy writing this poem, but I do enjoy reading it.  Which I find interesting.

As always, any and all comments will be welcome.



An argument is




liquid: mirroring.

Ripples from a carelessly thrown stone
gift surface substance.

Reflection momentarily obscures
transparency.

Water smooths.

And there, beneath the glass,
and in plain sight,
the lithos, like a monument,
remains for future
use.