The Warden’s Daughter

The poem has a mirrored refrain (Poefusion) and contains the words smooth, bottle and approach (3WW).

Her skin was smooth as ice,
Sadie, the warden’s daughter,
the only thing she offered me
a bottle of holy water.

All day she sat in her wheelchair,
with her poodle on her knee,
a bottle of holy water
was all she offered me.

Her muscles wasted day by day,
an insidious sort of slaughter,
the only thing she offered me
a bottle of holy water.

At last I could approach her,
buried under a lilac tree,
a bottle of holy water
was all she ever offered me.

Recycling

The Writers Island prompt this week is ‘desire’ which hasn’t resulted in any fresh inspiration on my part. I was also thrown a bit by the posting being opened with the prompt on Friday.

The only new year resolution I made was to try to do more for the environment in 2008. A visit to gautami’s blog, where she’s written a contemporary sonnet, reminded me that I have this one which I haven’t published on my blog before. The situation below, was brought about by desire.

There’s also a sonnet here

and another one here.

Demon Mailer

You pressed my start button on Valentine’s Day;
both software and hardware you loaded.
I tried to escape after you passed away
but my ‘shut down’ just hasn’t responded.

Your smiling face ‘hangs’ in every place,
your voice double clicks into every sound;
your remains reassemble in cyberspace;
a Trojan horse virus that can’t be found.

Instant messages signify this age
to all from small children to dusty dons.
E-mails and chat rooms caused you to rave:
The language [u] use is for morons.

You’re trying to trash my memory cache;
My poor little life is about to crash.

Tomorrow

she said that
she would do it
tomorrow – postponing
the decision
one more day

she knew that
she would not do it
tomorrow – prolonging
the situation
yet another week

at the year’s end
she gathered up
the scattered leaves
of unfulfilled aspiration -
a substantial pile

she blew on the leaves

- they levitated
to join the four winds

her breath spent
she contemplated
her wasted life

Better times to come

When I opened my curtains this morning, contrary to the weather forecast, the sun was shining. This led me to write a haiku with a heart warming vision. There’s a night time haiku on my disturbing the dust blog or a darker vision here.

after long absence

sun warms bare arms; fires

eyes to winter souls.

 

Left Out

The Irish barman
jokes with me in the morning
whilst we play darts.

My father lets me
help him place washed glasses
back on their shelves.

My mother lets me
place my hand so I can feel
baby in her tummy

My granny scolds me
for drinking milk from the fridge:
cold, unlike at school.

That night, my father
serves pints to the regulars
downstairs in the bar.

Upstairs my granny
delivers baby brother:
the midwife’s too late.

I’m left alone
weeping into the curtain
forgotten by all.

Rainbow

In a recent poll in The Times, Philip Larkin was voted the ‘best’ British writer since 1945. This surprised me because I had thought that writers like Larkin and Eliot were out of favour due to perceived fascist and misogynistic elements in their writing. Maybe the GBP has different ideas to the academic establishment. However, Larkin, who was a great favourite of mine when I was a lovelorn young chemistry student , was an old misery. For this week’s Writers Island prompt ‘Treasure’ I wanted to write a reply to the sentiment expressed by Larkin in his poem ‘Aubade’: ‘Life is first boredom, then fear/Whether or not we use it, it goes’. As usual, this is a work in progress as my progress is always slow.

At my beginning,
bands of rainbow.

First to trickle through
the hour glass of my life
the golden sand of childhood days.

Next comes the orange of adolescence
with its sudden eruptions,
forming little peaks and troughs.

A sudden rush of rampant red,
splatters on the sides of the glass,
followed by

the bilious green of forsaken love,
which settles above the scarlet.

Then comes a sprinkling of crystals; frozen
from the blue lagoon of my tears.

Only now in the indigo and violet years
when the flow is unstoppable
have I found the crock of gold – there
from my beginning.

Candles on the Moon

Distant long dead stars

glow like candles on the moon

observed on earth.

I don’t seem to be able to leave the moon alone. This idea has been with me for some time.

 

Moon haiku

Winter moon

in gossamer negligée

backdrop for seduction.

This is my first haiku in response to the prompt from One Deep Breath. I wanted to avoid the pathetic fallacy in the haiku. I changed from the moon as ‘overseer’ to ‘overlooking’, finally to providing a setting or ‘backdrop for seduction’. Rather than being actively involved, the moon provides a projection for the observer.

Over the Horizon

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
(From Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens)

For me ‘over the horizon’ means whatever is beyond our perception or which we cannot conceptualize. Wallace Stevens’s wonderful poem reaches out beyond the frontiers of poetry, philosophy, mathematics and language and can be looked at in many different ways. The galaxies and universes, I wrote about last week, are beyond my understanding. Songwriters, however, find love beyond the horizon:

Beyond the Horizon, behind the sun
At the end of the rainbow, life has only begun
In the long hours of twilight underneath the stardust above
beyond the horizon it is easy to love. (From Beyond the Horizon byBob Dylan)

I did a freewrite to try to discover what lay over the horizon for me and the direction it took me was unexpected.

Japanese fruit

Just below where the woodman’s axe
sliced to leave an artificial platform,
they clamour for attention.
(I’d have noticed if they’d been there the day before).

Theirs is not the doom and gloom presaged
by pumpkins or the imitative coral tint
of tropical mangrove swamps. The shape
of their fungal fronds and their radial energy
derive from chakra painted in persimmon.

A week later, they are unremarkable;
flaccid and dulled to burnt umber.

(Persimmon is an orange-red Japanese fruit and chakra is a Sanskrit word for the centre of energy represented by the wheel or circle.)

Our Earth

The following is the first draft of a longer poem written in response to the Writers Island prompt Earth. (There should be a new verse when the first line is repeated but there seems to be a rebellious ghost in the editor). In the next verse I will move from the macro-cosmic to the microscopic and concrete, sensual imagery.

In the scheme of things, our earth

is very insignificant. It is one of the smallest

planets in our solar system which is

part of a spiral shaped galaxy called

the Milky Way which is

just one of the billions of galaxies

(new galaxies with large numbers of stars

are being discovered every day)

in the observable universe which is

believed by scientists to be just one

of billions of disconnected universes.

In the scheme of things, our earth

is not very old. It is estimated to be

4.5 billion years old give or take 1%

over which time life has existed

for between 3.65 and 3.85 billion years

whilst the universe itself is estimated to be

13.7 billion years old. Who knows how old

the many disconnected universes,

large and small, might happen to be?