Protected: Life behind a Window

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Protected: Thought control

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My last poem for Poetry Thursday

Here is my last contribution to Poetry Thursday. It’s not a response to the prompt but is a villanelle I’ve had around for a while and have just got round to finishing. I’m still not entirely satisfied with one or two lines. I realise that ‘Humankind cannot bear too much reality’ is a slight variation on a line from Eliot’s Four Quartets, but, what the hell, he filched enough lines from other people!

Time unwound

Time unwound stretches to eternity;
Paradox is the calculus of space;
Parallel lines meet at infinity.

Humankind craves longevity
With new body parts, a new, young face;
Time unwound stretches to eternity.

Some want more – immortality;
Years with a loved one in the same place.
Parallel lines meet at infinity.

Others place faith in an idol or divinity,
Doing good works or depending on grace;
Time unwound stretches to eternity.

Try not to think, avoid banality,
the dynamo of time is picking up pace
Parallel lines meet at infinity.

Humankind cannot bear too much reality
But also fears to vanish without trace.
Time unwound stretches to eternity;
Parallel lines meet at infinity.

Spinnaker Tower

Yesterday, I did something that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, I went to Portsmouth and climbed the Spinnaker Tower. It was a hot day – well, hot for England at 25 degrees. The drive took about an hour with me managing not to take the wrong turning at any stage of the journey. My daughter would doubtless say that having her with me was what kept me on the right path. Once you are heading for ‘Historic Portsmouth’, it’s actually quite difficult not to go the right way. Read more…

Haiku (4)

Osaka Castle

hosts historic Shoguns

blasts ear-splitting music

Haiku (3)

Outwardly stormy

inside a calm centre

creates a cocoon.

Haiku (2)

Between terrorist

and terrorised -visualize

a two-way mirror.

Haiku (1): Japanese garden

Still meditation
in a Japanese garden
provokes exertion.

The Day that Elvis Presley Died

Exactly thirty years ago Elvis Presley died. It was an iconic event like the deaths of President Kennedy or Princess Diana. Everyone who was around at the time, knows where they were what they were doing when the news broke.

I was newly married and living in a flat in Leeds when Kennedy was shot. In Princess Diana’s case, I heard about the car crash when my clock radio came on in the morning. I heard about Elvis over the radio at Southampton General Hospital having given birth to a second son a few hours earlier. It was an easy birth compared with that of his sister twenty months earlier. She was born by caesarean on Boxing Day 1975. I wrote a poem about that when I was doing a creative writing course last year and it’s to be published in an anthology at the end of October. It was a relief to be able to have a normal delivery, the same as I had for my elder son. I have tried to write a poem about my son and Elvis but it hasn’t got to a stage where I would want to share it. He’ll be relieved about that! Anyway, the baby of my family is thirty years old today.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GAVIN!!!!

 

The Other

At dawn, spies saw her stomping
along the promenade: eyes straight ahead;
hair shaped by drizzle to a skullcap of curls.

As the afternoon breeze ruffled the shoreline,
she danced in a shower of rain,
placed her toe in the pock-marked sea…

At dusk, a solitary dog ran back and forth
close to the water’s edge
trailing its lead in the sodden sand.

The fisherman snug in sou’wester and oilskin
never noticed the bundle of clothes
abandoned to the ebbing tide.

© Carole Alexander,2007