PIHW 5 Maundy Thursday - Choice

Sometimes you feel that you are living through important times, life-changing times – and sometimes you are.  I do not have a World War as part of my memory and those times where the world has allegedly changed I did not feel that I was an integral part of that process.  It was as if the change was something important that was going on outside my everyday experience and it could be relayed to me by television and the press, dressed up by columnists informing me about how the days we were living through were significant; I could read about it in books later and see the historic period that I had daydreamed through in its proper context.

     The 3-day week; the Miners’ Strike; The Falklands Conflict; The Cold War; wars various and international; the EU; Brexit; The Financial Crash and all the other events.  I went on working and getting paid.  What really changed?

     One feels that Covid-19 is something that must (surely) make a lasting difference.  People have died.  The whole of our way of life has been disrupted.  Our political masters have been at best inept and at worst criminally culpable.  Things cannot be the same after the crisis is over.  Or can they?

     The poem today considers memory and how we deal with it.  The horrific journey I made from Turkey to Wales in the 1980s was one that I swore I would never smile about; it was just too awful to be softened by time into something acceptable.  But it was so softened and has become something I can look back on and remember with affection.

     I am not saying that the present crisis is going to be something that we can look back on and smile, though I am sure that there will be funny aspects of it for individuals – as long as they survive.  And it is that survival that is a crucial aspects of the crisis.

     We are all involved in the crisis because we are in lockdown.  But I don’t know anyone who has had the virus and I therefore don’t know anyone who has died.  Every day we have statistics that point out the numbers of the infected around us and the number of the dead – but none of them are those we know.  So the crisis is real and at the same time unreal.  We believe what we are told but have no experience of what the statistics say.  So how, eventually, will we look back on this time.

     As we are literally in the middle of the crisis (geographically and statistically) we have a long way to go before hindsight can come into play.  But the poem speculates now.

 

 

 

Choice

I told myself I’d never smile

when I recall what I endured

on foot, by car, in taxi, plane and bus

to get from Turkey back to Wales:

English swearing, foul-mouthed scrum;

threatened Tarom Airway clerk;

German, shouting, lost it, gone;

Russian wanting to defect;

Cyclist, Czech with eyes on West;

baying crowds for Tarom blood!

Details thump back as I think

with anger, pain and disbelief.

But let the narrative go hang

on spoken scraps that I can list:

“The plane is full!  Join other queue!”

“There might be.  Another one.”

“No pounds!  No dollars!  Only lei!”

“Do you drink Vodka, and with Coke?”

“What?  London flight is gone!  Is gone!”

“Calmo!  Calmo!  Calmo!”

“An hour, or maybe two – who knows?”

“This ticket doesn’t get a seat.”

But I’m chuckling as I write,

the nightmare gentled into tale.

But.

Some memories will always hurt

beyond the smile of edited recall,

because it’s simply right they should.

Sharpness blunts with time, they say,

but the unwary, careless thought

can snag and rip the opening wound

(that never, ever, really healed) and

the old lemon’s squeezed again

in open eyes that bring the brine

to soak away the stubborn stains

hid out of sight, but not of mind

of deaths, mistakes, and nastiness,

chicanery dressed up as truth,

the lies, from grey to black and white,

and things that live in metaphor:

the accusations from faith past

of things undone and those things done

and there’s no health.

And how will we look back on this,

when we’ve decided where we are,

and just how is it we’re involved,

when all mortality is ‘over there’

and death is nobody we know?

Fooling futility

This poem is basically displacement activity.
     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.