Jane Dougherty's Blog, page 26

Poem in Visual Verse

You can see the image here. I’m posting the poem below because there was a glitch in the formatting on the site and the end doesn’t make sense. The poem took longer to upload onto the site than it did to write. Not very format-friendly.

Haibun for mid-winter

For the dverse prompt.

In this cold heart of winter nothing is red except the robin’s breast. White the bladed grass rimed with frost, heron-grey the heavy sky and black the tree boughs. But look beneath the crisp-layered leaves, and seeds are already shooting, so frail, pale as underbellies, yet spring colours in the making.

Beneath a sky of flying
flakes jays and rootling pigs
plant oak forests .

21. (seven lines)

21.

In the crisp of last night
they danced around the house
the bristle-boars that got away
when the guns roared in the woods.

They danced here in the dark
and in the crisp of this bright morning
we see the tracks of our fears.

Endechas

Paul Brookes chose the endecha for last week’s poetry form. The endecha (usually plural endechas) is a poem of Medieval Spanish Jewish origin, a lament intended to be sung. The stanzas are quatrains, of 7 7 7 and 11 syllables, rhyme scheme xaxa where x is unrhymed. It can be a full rhyme but is more usually consonance. I wrote one of each, a full rhyme endecha, and one using consonance instead. Since the poem is intended to be sung, it matters that the lines follow a rhythm which led me to write a third endecha where I tried to place the stresses so that the final eleven syllable line breaks naturally after seven syllables, leaving the final four syllables as a sort of plaintive echo. Given the origins of the poem, this seems like a reasonable interpretation.

Those who are gone

I can hear you in the wind
in the way the fox-bells chime,
the keening of survivors
the harrowing, dearth and the sorrowing time.

You were all around me once,
in the warm breath of the spring,
In the flight of birds, too high
to see their bright plumage, hear their voices sing.

You were young and old, lovely,
rainbows, storm-light in your eyes,
you sang the words, I listened,
to the ever-changing torrent, always wise.

Now there’s snow in the meadow,
no bird-sound, but all around,
the touch of dead hands wringing,
lips that murmur in the dark of holy ground.

Years turning

When will I see you again?
In the greening of the year
or at its turning? When snow
lies cold, unforgiving, and I wait, yearning?

For the years will keep turning,
russet red then green again,
and the road remains empty,
though my wishes throng the trees, leaf-stars aging.

To have wings

Black these cold and lightless days,
dirt-grey the clouds, sun rayless,
white the frost that furs the dead
leaf litter, that lies deer-scraped—brown and rotting.

I wish a bird would lend me
the magic of feathered dance
night or day uncaring, I’d
toss these sorrows in the sea—watch them drowning.

The word

She said she wasn’t going to write another novel. That part of her life was over, page turned, book closed. Not that the ideas had dried up. They were still there, little larval things like glow worms, squirming in the dark at the back of the drawer where she had locked them. It was difficult to close her ears to their piping voices, to refuse the siren call that would start with a scene, an opening line, an image bursting from silence into a multitude of sounds.

But if she listened, that single line, bursting into life, would inevitably and irrevocably, become a story line. The squirming thing would sprout fins, a tail, scales that glinted, wings, feathers, galloping hooves, and there would be no stopping it until another story was finished, revised, edited and revised again, and then…

And then? It would be another story on the pile of stories that nobody wanted, that towered and tottered and threatened to submerge her. So she had said, no more. Enough disappointment is enough.

She tried to ignore the squeaking glow worms, but it’s hard to be on your guard every minute of the day, and in a moment of inattention, she heard the word flung at her by an insistent larva. She heard the word and immediately slammed the drawer closed and turned the key. Inside, in the dark, the little voices were chanting in triumph. It was just one word, but it was an important word. The most magical word of all. The word was a title. And if there is a title, there is inevitably a story.

She was there again, on the brink of another world. She held a word, like a star, and felt the star tug. She dug in her heels, but the brink fell away in a cascade of unstable rock fragments, and she was falling, soaring or drowning, in an ocean of sky. The star tugged imperiously, and she knew she was on the point of giving another year of her life to a dream. Would it matter if, once again, she was the only one to follow where the hazy path led? Probably not. She had a word, the first. A title. The rest would follow if she let it.

When there is silence,
the silence of the scratch
of gravel beneath a shoe,

a dog barking
in the blue distance,
too far away to be real,

the fluttering, rustling, the whoosh,
the pitter-pattering of the rain,
rushing towards us over the hills,

we hear then the voice
of what we were, what we are
and what we will be,

and the deep blue silence
is suddenly filled with the beating wings
of a thousand birds.

Hope

Inspired by the random word Oracle.

Hope

Looking for signs in the cold grass
ant-clamber through stalks
and roots hoof-scuffed and scraped

looking for bees
in unopened flowers
bats in frosty air

and the secret scented
air pockets of summer trees
beneath these black boughs.

Hope flies among the heavy clouds
grey as bombers limping home
over the dead horizon

swims the swathes of rippling branches
buds tight but longing to burst
in shoals of blossom.

It seems absurd to sleep
when the world is stirring
deep-earthed and restive

searching for a light so long
in piercing the wintry gloom
that makes a wild ocean of the sky

for pearls and sea glass glowing
with the memory of past summers
golden days silver nights.

Random word generator

It’s gloomy, grey and cold still, no sun, so here are some words instead.

Sea songs

The Oracle gave me a disjointed poem so I loaded more words, carried on and decided they were separate poems. When the fifth poem brought me back to the beginning again, I stopped. She always knows.

Sea songs

1.

Sea
you
I soar into beauty
leave behind those
who have less than this
the heaving waves
that swallow those in the troughs.

2.

It is a lie
the ache will not stop
music fill air cool with summer winds
blow the pain
into the great grinding wastes
out of sight.

3.

The singing leaves a sticky taste
the too pink dress
glittering with too many diamonds.

Her mother should have stopped her
they say
as if she would have been satisfied
with bird-feathered evenings
the honey-sun dripping into the purple horizon
her hair blowing in the soft wind.

4.

The swimmer
colour of peaches and evening skies
becomes the red woman of my dreams
the one who watches for those
who fall among the trees
bare and hungry with winter
gathering their misery.

5.

You
I
together
I am still me
though mists confuse the boundaries
and I must shout to be heard

my cry rings out
strong as the black rock
beaten by the swell spray
the heaving waves of the
sea.

20. (seven lines)

20.

Waking to a different grey
unfrozen air still
with the breath of uncertainty
change perhaps

and in the stove
last night’s embers glow
leap into red-tongued life.

19. (seven lines)

19.

Beneath his eiderdown
dog huffs in sleep
the muffled bark of dreams.

Cats curl
boxed
no need of blankets
to dream like tigers.