Jane Dougherty's Blog, page 6

National poetry month day 28

Here is my poem for Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic challenge. You can see all the images and read the poetry on Paul’s blog here.

Star-babies

We have our roots in the stars,
deep in the tendrilled spaces
where the light is black,
where the darkness sings.

Deep in the tendrilled spaces,
dust settles, moth-winged
scraps of eternity,

where the light is black
and velvet-soft.
Nurseries dream in rainbows,

where the darkness sings
lullabies of silence, wiser than any stone
carved by human hand.

Erased home

I’ve already posted this poem, a duet between myself and the purchaser of my childhood home. I thought the erasure form would be appropriate to extract another poem from it. I don’t know how to get the ‘erased’ effect, so I’ve just picked out the surviving words.

Home(s)

1.
I can slip into my childhood home at will, each room, the front room carpets, the old one and the new, the hall lino before and after, winter evenings sitting in front of the open fire, children’s programmes until the news then supper, the crayon drawings on the bedroom walls, the cellar stone-flagged and warm.

2.
The décor was tasteful, in places, clean, except for the scrawls and scribbles up to six-year old height around the children’s rooms, comfortable, worn, fireplaces that needed blocking up, the cellar so much wasted space. Outdated as large families.

3.
The garden was a paradise, bee-full, butterfly-floating where the cats roamed and we hid
among apple trees and flowering shrubs jungle-dense, perfumed like Arabia.

4.
The plot was large, but so much work to get rid of the jungle and install order. Ripping up the stone walls and paths was a major operation and levelling the sunken gardens that were full of flying insects, attracted by the banks of plants.

5.
I go back to this place in dreams still, climb stairs, Turkey-carpeted, my room papered in orange and yellow flowers, from the window I’d watch magpies and starlings on the yard wall, tractors and milk carts rattling up the track from the farm, cows in the field, a fortress, impregnable.

6.
Once the yard wall was knocked down we could still only get in one car, and no street parking, no street, and the rooms were too big, ceilings too high, the garden never really looked like anything, too long, too much lawn to maintain.

7.
We didn’t stay long.

8.
I never left.

Home-slip

Home, the old hall,
before the fire,
stone-flagged rooms,
fireplaces so large,
was a paradise where apple trees
perfumed sunken gardens.

Flying back in dreams,
I watch magpies in the field,
a fortress once,
nothing left.

National poetry month day 27

This is for Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic challenge, art and poetry all posted on his blog here.

Prisoners

We are all prisoners of something,
roots trapped in other people’s lives,
budding promise clipped by circumstances.

Freedom is a word, a human word,
trapped between the pages of a dictionary,
unfree as a caged bird,

as the swallow’s death-defying journey,
an unalterable programme,
do or die.

We buy time, pass it, waste it,
ignore reality,
run from the inevitable,

treading in a frenzy
the relentless wheel
of our humanity.

National poetry month day 26

Today’s poems and artwork are all on Paul Brookes’ blog here.

Trees

Born when the stars hung low to warm the earth,
diamond drops glittering among giant ferns,
rooted now in columned stone, irrigated
with water-memory, silent as midnight,
a trailing blackbird song, the scent of honeysuckle,

~trees still spring from source~

anchored ships in earthstorms, never sinking,
arms spread to conjure rain and roosting birds,
crows’ nests bowing among the flapping sheets of cormorant wings,
flying with the clouds, tossing their heads in tempest winds,
singing with blackbird voices to the immutable stars.

Blake clasps the violinist’s hand

For the NaPoWriMo prompt.

Blake clasps the violinist’s hand

His mother named him ‘The Jew’
so he would never forget,
so no one would ever doubt.

She named him for a sword,
burning bright in the darkness
of the rough, unabashed beast,
that crept down the centuries,
deepening to vile black.

Rootless, he still flowered
in the man-fashioned world
when bigotry and prejudice slid insidiously,
in the corner of the eye,
the twitching of curtains,
to hatred and the ultimate horror.

As putrescence gnawed the heart of humanity,
he drew his bow of burning gold,
wanderer, he soared on wings of song,
until he saw the clouds unfold, Jerusalem rebuilt.

In Berlin, this arrow-flight ended,
as it did for so many before,
but this time, in a blaze of glory.

I am my father’s daughter

Just for you, Punam, I tried. (for dverse)

I am my father’s daughter

so don’t touch me while I am sleeping,
don’t watch me while I am eating,
and never comment on what I am creating.

I make music from words and colour them
with found pieces of sky,
the lost buttons of cloud coats,
the sizzling sanctity of stars ,
the dripping juice of peaches.

In my dreams I make mountains of molehills,
climb to cloud cuckoo land,
weave wonderlands of speedwell
sew sequins in their tails,
so let me sleep,

and perhaps if you keep still and silent,
I will paint you the broad sea
and windswept cliffs, gorse-coloured
and scented with skylarks
and the wild songs of seals,
where I think my father walks.

Comfort

Comfort

My dog is sick.
Unlike me, he doesn’t complain,
he doesn’t swallow pills,
groan and hold his head.

He curls up in his bed and sleeps
until the beast in his stomach goes away.

I stroke his ears,
he raises an eyebrow,
and I stifle a cough,
trying not to disturb.

National poetry month day 24

This is my poem for Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic challenge. To see the artwork and read the poetry, please visit his blog here.

Pre-history

The forest is so old, so green,
sometimes it seems to encroach,
crouch in its green skirts, limbs hid,
and birds flit like flies,
old stone flakes into slippery slabs
and our feet find no purchase

~moss being of the time before history~

the forest did not grow for us,
has no use for us.
We try to catch falling blossom
snatched by the wind,
find only discarded feathers
we gather like treasures.

Haibun for late spring

For the dverse prompt.

Sparse rainfall, little more than dew-baths, feeds shallow new roots, and colour riots, running across meadows and climbing into late blossom, bursting in the first roses, dawn pink-peach, ubiquitous yellow, blue on sunny banks. There will be nothing left for the trees, the woods and bracken, not this year, the stream tinkles in its tiny voice, its roar a memory of richer years.

Beneath parched earth
fire smoulders—last year’s blaze
unextinguished.

I had a dream, and this is how it went

For the NaPoWriMo prompt. Not at all sure this is what was intended, but I had this wild and lovely dream this morning and wanted to write it down.

Painting by J´´ózef Chelmonski

I had a dream, and this is how it went

I was in my parent’s house,
the house I know so well,
unchanging where it stands
in its granite memory,

and I had in mind to make a stir,
shake up the little world of fields and cows,
the track of blue and green and shiny stones,
the elder tree beyond the wall,
starling-noisy, their cocky vulgarity,

so I took a bag of sea salt,
grey as North Sea waves,
brine-sticky crystals that winked
with deep sea stories,

walked to the top of the track
and tossed a handful in the air.

The wind that warm day
came out of the sky and
swirled them into snowstorm life.

I tossed some more with each step
back down the track,
made grey the sky
and dense with flying flakes.

I shook the empty bag into the wind,
its roaring voice louder than
starling chatter, tractor drone,

the house a blur, the wall, the gate,
and someone shouted,
Come home!

But I stood at the gate,
warm amid the storm of feather-flakes,
listening to the tumult of the wind,
and smiled.