Story: 2020

I can Make a Fist - Towards the end of a year - 2020

Did you ever feel a baby's hand clench round your finger,

How tightly the grip,

The delight,

Neither of you wants to let go.

December slunk in,

Like a dog with its tail between its legs,

Sorrowful eyes,

Guilty,

Apologetic.

The forecast was snow, but, inevitably it fell as rain. We gathered up our packages and bundled them into the car. It's not far, just a few miles up the road but it may as well be Mars because we're not allowed to touch or even be anywhere inside with each other. It's a rule we're all considering to break.

Earlier in the year it felt easy; the weather was good, we could meet and go for short walks, look at each other's faces, listen to the tenure of your voices, the way you hold yourselves, sense how you're coping. The sun made it reassuring, we could get out.

But now as the shortest, darkest day approaches, deep winter closing in, the threat of flood, the inevitable cold, our confidence dissolves into the heavy rain and we stand in the car park, handing over the carefully chosen and wrapped gifts, my inevitably embarrassing cake, like contraband.

It's dismal and so we cave in and find refuge in the car, huddled and shivering. We make light of it, talk of the coming summer and hopes for travel; it's possible, if we get the right visas, maybe a vaccination, or two.

You're young and it's a special birthday, one that's been marred before by the death of your grandma; we're actutely aware of the sorrow hanging there in the air, but we make our small talk, sending our best wishes through the undercurrent of our words, our loving glances, hoping you will feel our pride in how you've coped, what you've become, despite the dismal failure of the day.

Waving our goodbyes, we're determined not to be too sad. Look to the future. We're here now.

It's a gift.

Tranquility

What is tranquility ?

I read it is the state or quality of being calm.

I think of the words I associate with this quality;

Peaceful

Quiet

Unruffled

Tranquil

Liquid

Buoyant

I also read that it implies;

absence of noise

absence of violence

absence of worry

and this causes me worry,

because I know this is not life

Life is not the absence of worry.

I would like to be tranquil

but not dead.

I would like to experience tranquility

in Life.

We search for it as though it was truth.

I search for it and I try to create it.

I try to imagine it in the midst of life

and so, I wrote;

Time was relinquished to the waves

and the billowing white clouds blown across

a bright blue sky.

The last train might come and go but

there would be a bus and if not,

there is a footpath.

Tranquility reigned now.

She sank back into the sand and fell asleep.

Chrysanthemums

Shared joy in a long-lived pot

Shines out bright

In amongst the flowery firework display,

The white light of love and loyalty

Strong and supporting the red of romance

The symbolic heart,

Complements yellow's sorrow.

The whole arrangement is in harmony,

A memory, a wish, a gift.

Time unfolds its flowers.

Kinds of Light

I'm looking out through my window,

The light lies flat upon the landscape,

Some of the greens remind me of

a place, a time when I felt flat,

when the brightness of life had left

everything forgot it had ever been

until one morning when you open up

the curtains and the sun streams in to show

the motes dancing among the dull furniture

I think about dancing too.

Epilogue

Jolie Laide

There she hangs, his masterpiece and her own,

Immortalised in paint, painted over until,

A finished moment masks all that went before.

This Jolie Laide, new illusion of truth,

breaks the old mirror of imagined beauty and,

Up rise a confluence of feelings

As we stand before it.

Distance

What are the things we need to measure ?

The distance to the moon

and back ?

Plus how much fuel it would take to reach it,

Then return.

Adding a little extra just in case.

Our height as we grow,

Make

some tiny lines on the door jamb or,

Take

some photo's every year

After you blow out your candles.

The circumference of our girth,

With

Our horror, delight or mirth,

Depending on what time of our life

We're having

A baby's length,

Their weight,

And ours,

The time between stars,

How long ago they might have been.

Today I am not measuring at all,

Like everyone else.

It's normal now to

Calculate the distance between ourselves by instinct,

And try to maintain it

As we move through space

Along with Time's exigencies.

Morse Code

Your

__ . __ . __ __ . __

. . __ . . _ _ _ _ . _ _ _ __

_ . _

on my window pane,

like rain,

heard again

and

again,

like Cathy,

tapping,

tapping,

the tree,

her conduit,

the night,

her dream,

landscape of loneliness,

open the window,

let her pull you through,

so you can be ghosts

on the moor together.

Time Line

I was an anxious child,

An unhappy adolescent,

An insomniac teenager,

An insane twenty-something,

A responsible thirty-something,

A depressed forty-something,

A resigned fifty-something,

And now I am a hopeful sixty-something.

I've come this far and the view is beautiful,

though ever-changing.

As long as the sun keeps shining,

The winds keep blowing,

The rain keeps coming and going,

and clouds race across the vast sky,

changing form continuously as they go,

I'll see life and its possibilities in their shapes.

P'i

Yesterday, in the garden,

the warmth of an unseasonable sun carrying gentle Rhodes jazz across to our neighbours,

the absence of the drone of traffic,

the birds resting in trees,

the world holding its breath as the music played on.

Today, in the kitchen,

the tree stands out through thick veils of cloud,

the drone of the central heating changes its tone over the relentless ticking of the clock,

the long tailed tits chase each other out of the garden,

the world still holds its breath as the time ticks on.

Tomorrow, has come and it's sunny,

the silence penetrated by the tap tap tap tapping of the builder's tool,

the train rushing through to the tunnel but no horn today, the track's quiet,

the birds', always somewhere, flitting and peeping and trilling the cool air,

the world's awakening and counting each in and out for a different tomorrow.

Held in suspended time, waiting for the end of the story,

everything sits heavy with meaning,

the brain paralysed by its own weight,

intuition vies with superstition,

dreams and nightmares write themselves in runes before our eyes,

We feel the sun on our skin and fear its heat.

Another now;

A figure in an overcoat, nodding in his chair on this chilly day,

Family long gone,

He's alone with his phone,

Sleeping some time away.

The stone cutting yard strikes up it's drone.

Here, we all sit still,

Within our Samuel Beckett's stage set,

Didi and Gogo are fixed far apart,

and we're grieving,

All of us lamenting Godot's tardiness,

Sometimes we lose our belief in his very existence.

Perhaps he is in our laboured breathing,

Each in and out Time's sigh.

Anonymous was a Woman

Pandemic Memory

During the Pandemic, anxiety, naturally, ran very high. Our future suddenly became very uncertain. I can remember feeling very sobered by the knowledge that the whole world was united in suffering and anxiety. The pace of life slowed as movement and activity was curbed, it felt like living under water, everything was arduous, painstaking care had to be taken with everything; the notion of kindness arose, meaning consideration for the well being of others as well as one's own. This was good, but it heightened one's awareness to the point of fear and imbued every day with a sense of trepidation. Sleep was no longer as restful as it had been.

I read somewhere some time before about people dividing sleeping into two halves in Medieval times. The first sleep, around 9 o'clock, probably linked to natural tiredness, or exhaustion, according to your standing in society, lasted for a couple of hours, after which, there followed a period of wakefulness, called The Watch.

During this short interval, people would do all kinds of things, some rather surprising like visiting friends in other houses apparently, according to research by the historian Roger Ekirch, others nefarious, like stealing or even committing murders, though thankfully more commonly, people would spend it in much more productive ways like attending to bread making, beer brewing and other preparations for the following day, or simply having sex, which is probably the reason most of us are here.

I came across this rather lovely piece which I read as a poem but later discovered was an aire written by John Dowland, Court Musician to Elizabeth 1 and it evokes the care and worry one might have about someone one loves in wakeful, fretful dark hours of the night. An exquisite lullaby, a musical spell with the intention of bestowing restful sleep on the person in receipt of it. It can be read, I think, both as a gift from John Dowland to his beloved benefactor, in the certain knowledge that she was unwell and likely to die soon, ( for she did indeed die soon after he wrote it ), but also as something Queen Bess might want to gift someone who she knows would be missing in her absence;

Anonymous was a Woman

I reimagined it to be written by a woman, or at least, imagined a woman, ( perhaps Queen Bess ? ) lying awake, unable to sleep for worrying about her lover and how lost he will feel without her;

In 1603 she

wrote a poesy;

Anonymous, a woman awake

in the watches of the night,

worrying, wanting

comfort

for someone she's thinking of.

As the wolf time arrives,

she has dispelled the

uht-cearu

with her patch of a poem,

and perhaps her sunne rise

saw a secret smile upon

her lips.

-

Home - a lipogram

The sun fluttered on the leaves of the trees that formed the boundary of the garden. Name not known,
unnecessary to the beauty, Gustav's Beech Grove would not serve the memory well, yet the
bark of those ones she came upon much later would very well serve the memory.

The hours up to noon were spent at play when the house would become full of characters and
spaces to explore opened.

The afternoon was spent underneath the blackcurrant bushes or on the garden brush, a horse, of course.
Or, treasure was dug. Holes not too deep. The wash pole marked one spot. One shell marked another.

Each day revealed the colours there; the whole palette, the broadest bow that moves from place to place
the weather moves the spectrum the greyest shades belong to the densest cloud.

Those days when her sky was a flat grey, no sun to seek out depth on the pavement, or soften the rough
red walls of the houses, nor the sharp edged dark green hedges.

The black square of our front room looms as we push open the dark green gate. Only the faded
pastels of the Hydrangea's old flower heads lend a gentle tone to the suburban drab of our

late March afternoon.

Shouldn't

You shouldn't have

If you hadn't

I wouldn't have

I didn't

You did

I did not

Oh yes you did

I didn't mean

You did

not

did

not

did

you

DID

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE

YOU SHOULDN'T

YOU SHOULDN'T

DONT

DONT

NO MORE

🌈

The pandemic was a difficult time for everyone in the world. Very few escaped its consequences. Here in the UK during lockdowns, people in care homes, flats without outdoor spaces and those in prisons, including young offenders institutions, must have felt the restrictions particularly acutely. At its nadir, I think we were only allowed out once a day for exercise and were not allowed to sit on benches in the park or lie on the grass in the summer. Children's playgrounds were taped off.

It was a terrible thing to hear and read that domestic violence and in particular, violence against children, had increased.

Even those of us lucky enough to live in places where we had enough rooms to be separate and on our own should we need to, with an outdoor space or garden to go and breathe fresh air should we long to, got very sad, even depressed and the relentless daily reporting by the government on the daily death toll added to this general mood of depression I remember.

🌈

Skeleton tree

At art college, I made a skeleton out of fallen twigs of Ash. They were just the right shape and size
and weight for gluing together with a gun. I had fun. Now I could put my knowledge of anatomy into
good use and I completed the whole thing and hung it in a wire bower. I suppose it may have looked
a tad macabre, maybe even jarring in that jaunty way skeletons have, their slightly humorous appearance -
why is that ? -
sometimes feeling like an afront when we present them at the wrong time.
I suppose I shouldn't have left the dear thing in the wardrobe of the flat I flitted from without paying
the last months' rent because it was outrageous.

Bumpy Ride

Here we are,

You and me,

Going along together,

It's so very bumpy.

I didn't mean to jerk you so,

It was a daft idea to take this ride,

When you were so comfortable inside.

Epilogue, a Ghost Story

How many stories begin at the end ?

She used to read all the beginnings of stories, then the ends, just to see how intention worked.

Life is loss,

Time is loss.

We have this feeling of going forwards, but, it's really a question of undoing.

What we have at our end is nothing.

Water and Stone

We're water and stone,

Rising up against each other,

Inclement weather regardless,

The violent drops of sharp rain

melt upon our surface.

The Heft of You and who came before

Your head in the crook of my neck,

How you tried to hold it up,

My hand on your back,

The softness of your hair,

The weight of you transferred from within,

To where I would carry you

Until your own legs would

along the rocky ways,

Where stumbling stones

always impede your path.

When you were born,

The snow lay deep,

Up to the tops of our bins,

No doubt even higher,

If you went higher up.

Full moon bright,

The Midwives expected lots of births that night.

The sound of the hum of the helicopters,

Soft as the murmered concern amongst us,

Safe in our beds with our newborns,

Grateful not to be arriving by air.

In praise of my breasts

I never had the kind of breasts that I could hoik up and squeeze together to form a pleasing cleavage.

My oldest friend once described my body shape as Maori, which I've relished ever since.

When I was young, the thing was to be thin and that preoccupied most of my girlfriends, though most of them never achieved that aim, loving food too much and probably not being so convinced of the goal itself deep inside. Not enough to forgo the food they were so justified in loving; chocolate, cake, chips and all kinds of other calorific things.

Me, I got into the idea of abstinence. I learned to love the empty feeling in my belly. It felt triumphant, defiant. It possibly echoed the emptiness I felt deep within that part of ourselves we tend to label soul.

I'd seen alot of things on tv. War generally. The documentaries about concentration camps in the War and news reports on the famine in Biafra in particular. I couldn't understand the spectral figures of the children walking on their sticks for legs. They looked like some conception of an alien to me and my heart hovered between broken and astonished at how we are sculpted by what we are allowed to consume and what we are denied.

I never wept. I never do at the things that affect me most. It goes too deep.

Like when my Mum kept watching the terrible disaster when the coal slag heap fell upon the little school in Aberfan. I watched in silence as the village kept vigil and brought the childrens' tiny bodies up so tenderly from under the rubble. My mother sobbed. It was probably the release she needed desperately from all the troubles she had endured herself as a child.

I learned to fast and control my intake.

I learned to take tablets to give me diarrhoea if I wanted to get rid of things I felt I shouldn't have ingested. And they were many.

One day, dragging myself up a hill to my hovel of a bedsit squat, I felt as if I couldn't go on. I went to the doctor and I suppose he misdiagnosed me, for want of accurate information.

There were years ahead of me in which I would allow myself, if not to fully understand, then to come to some arrangement with myself in which, my Maori-like breasts would feel beautiful to me.

Our lives, the film and the colours it would be,

from white to vivid technicolor and the whole palette

in-between.

Those days when the sky was a flat grey,

no lights to seek out depth in pavement

or highlight the grains of variation in the red

and orange brick behind

the sharp edged privet hedges.

Our window looms,;

a black square as we push the gate open on it's tight spring.

Only the faded pastels of the Hydrangea's dried out flower heads

lend a gentle tone to soften the suburban chill

of a late November afternoon.