Sitting

 

Today I am sitting, 

And suddenly I am my grandmother,

Rocking in her chair,

Her thoughts turned inward

for oh so many many years.

Secrets locked inside,

Stories told that held

Some truth,

Some lies,

Some things must be hid.

To survive.

Five year old me hides and cries. Her nightmares are a jumble of things she doesn't understand or recognise.

Twenty year old me has an epiphany - dod this, I'm off !

Sixty year old me stares in wonderment but also latent fear.

How did I get here, it's both beautiful and disturbing. 

There's something lurking.

Cold hands of stone, 

They rest alone

with all the sorrows they have known. 

It's perplexing when one's close family members have all long gone and left behind only snippets of conversation, short stories with misleading details and very few photogrphs, most of which are unannotated. 

I search and search my memories for truths and end up making them up for myself.

The past is a small fragment of something and I want to reconstruct it whole.

Pandemic Memory

You and Me - No Doubt

Today is my birthday and I'm remembering. That's what they're for, these days.

It's hard because the day is so beautiful, one of those last bright blue-skied days which begin with a mist that masks the view here until the sun warms the air and it all dissipates into a bright and lovely day, looking like Summer but with that edge that keeps you back from the brink of the dream it's not over yet and somehow it's appropriate, how can it not be, that you gave me Late for the Sky as my present and I receive Bryter Layter as another, still more in the form of seeds and pots to plant them in which fill me with such excitement and hope; two pearls, one for each ear and a caring hair cut cause me to stand and stare for some time. I want to stay in this present, but my presents and the date keeps prompting me to think back. 

I don't feel worthy of all these gifts but I vow to make myself so. I feel guilty about many things and top of the list is not studying things sufficiently. If I had to speak in my defence I might explain it's because I mostly feel inundated and panicked so unable to know what to focus on and also suspicious and wary of absorbing other peoples' thoughts. Strange perhaps for someone who enjoys the arts, but looking at what I've been prepared to absorb, there's a pattern in there which speaks for itself and lets me think for myself also. 

I think about how we can struggle to gain an identity and maintain parts of that identity which nourish us fundamentally, how that kernel of us that some others and the way our world has been structured seems to want to keep chipping away at.   From my point of view. 

I've always been preoccupied with how to be.  When life feels full of possibility, that's a luxury we can afford to indulge in. I enjoyed reading Sheila Heti's book, How Should a Person Be, reading it long after living through the decade she was writing about; one's twenties, when those of us who were and are still fortunate enough to imagine many ways of living and can even afford to try some out, though it was still a turbulent time in my experience, filled with a panic which reached a crescendo towards its end and even though one inevitably makes choices, some reluctantly, others involuntarily, one never ceases to question and review them throughout subsequent decades; that is, if we are fortunate enough to live through them.  Standing here, looking out at this day,  I feel somewhat stunned. 

Now six decades on from where this all began, I'm suddenly thinking how I've come to want to be in terms of a food, and I think it must be alot like a dried Hunza apricot. They're something I became extremely fond of when I was pregnant. They don't look very appetising, wrinkly, dark browny orangey things, and rather expensive, but they have this lovely little kernel in their middle, a tiny shell, which if you crack open, gives  you a very small nut, rather like an almond. It's said to contain a very rare vitamin and I got very hooked on chewing on the toffee caramel flavoured apricot and cracking open the nut in the middle to eat too. I ate alot of them before a good friend warned me that the nut also contained a very small touch of arsenic, not unusual in the kernel of fruits and probably not toxic in such microscopic quantities, but still, enough to make me pause and think about the way things might be both nourishing and poisonous and how the balance might be so finely held that it's very difficult, probably impossible, to quantify.

And I've just read that they are left to go over on the tree and picked when they have over-ripened, which adds to their allure for me. I'm squirrelling this day away. All it's sights and sounds and tastes are going into my store of amazing memories. 

First posted during the pandemic. It came out in a strange format which I found impossible to change, so I've republished it here, as a correction, and a reminder. 

After the 13th - A Cameo

When they emerged, they looked and spoke as if they had been drinking blood, slow and guttural, their faces worn, but quietly smiling, pale, faintly iridescent skin dimly glowing as if whatever they had been through had drawn on their inner energy but replenished it with something     other    somehow. 

Dream

Liminal

Audio dreams;

I am not blind but

There is something I cannot yet see

I hear you

The roar of the 

Is it water ?

Overwhelming us both.

I am

Drowning

With you

 

Guilt

The piano eyes me accusingly,

A blank page is spread invitingly,

Blue skies beckon longingly,

My radio sits silently,

And all the while the menacing clock's tick tocks.

Lost

 

Lost as the list that the wind 

Whipped from a hand

And dropped 

in a puddle.

That the author,

In a foreign land,

Holds in their mind,

Repeating and repeating,

Until it becomes a song. 

Home

My hat on the finial,

Shoes on the rack,

Coats on the hooks,

Your scarf on the chair.

A stray hair,

That mug you bought us for Christmas,

My father's pen,

A row of books all mixed up,

Chosen words,

The silence of your absence,

The sound of your key in the lock,

The one you love waiting,

Taking stock. 

Cinema 2

Blinking in the sunlight

The afternoon is blurred.

Behind us, lives another world,

Another story;

Magic lantern lit our faces,

Flicked us with its repetition,

Leaving us to wonder

As the lights come up. 

Home

 

House

Your black faced stone,

Roughly dressed and dusted

in coveted smoke.

makes me sad to see you. 

Taken from another place,

another not too distant time,

Heavy history transported,

Dismantled then rebuilt.

Dense with stories and breath, 

You weighed the trailer down. 

The builder took you away, 

Furtive like, contraband. 

                                                   -

 

Autumn's end - haiku series and poems

 From the balcony 

Burning brush paints Autumn’s hues

Church bell sounds the hour

Running out at night

Moon and Jupiter gleaming

The two old friends meet

Watching clouds go by Leaves fly high then softly fall Somewhere the geese call

Emptying my change Autumn leaves begin to curl A magpie’s harsh cry

It comes over me

Like dejas vu I feel sick

Hello Autumn

October lingers,

Shimmering in her red, gold and green, 

November waits 

on a cold grey stone, 

His blood stained poppies restless 

in their beds.

Learning to Speak.  First Words. 

Son

Your first word was  Ahhhh !  which you would say whilst pointing up to the centre of the ceiling of any room whenever we entered one together. Sometimes you were pointing to the light that was on, sometimes to one that was not, and sometimes because it was missing, you thought, in which case, you would search until it was found, your body swaying back in my arm, your arm stretched out, waiting to point at the right place. 

I can't remember how long it took me to tell you the common name for it.  My first child, I oscillated between teaching you what I thought I knew and what I imagined you should know, and letting you show me the nature of things, through your unencumbered eyes. 

So I think the big light, as your little sister decided to call it, was always   Ahhhhhhhh !!!!!!   between us and perhaps you've never named it anything else since inside your own mind because it's always there in the back of mine.  

Daughter

Your first word came long after your gestures and shouts. I worried it was because you were deaf but didn't want you tested properly because I wondered if the grommets so popular as a remedy for slow response to sound in small children those days might interfere with the natural development of your actual inherent capacity and potential, if that makes any sense to you at all.  Let it suffice to say that I was prepared to be patient and it paid off luckily - one day the blast of a plane overhead whilst we were at the top of the garden playing together startled you so severely I wondered if it had jogged your brain into paying attention to sound. You ran, terrified, inside and I had to coax you out over the next few days with games and lollies and lots of reassurance. Soon, you too would mooooo as well as point whenever a cow came down to the wall and moooooon also would escape your lips when we went in search of her appearance every early evening when Dada came home.