Jane Dougherty's Blog, page 68

The longest day

The longest day

This day will be long,
the blackbirds say,
and the golden orioles,

so we lie back
and listen
to their gentle songs.

We close our eyes,
as the sun clears the cloud,
and we make a warm darkness,

a matrix filled with an ocean,
wine-dark, salt-sweet,
where we drift

on rising,
falling,
waves of birdsong,

as if the world
was no more
than a dream.

Not a list, not a poem, just a long, protracted sigh.

My contribution to Day 21 of Paul Brookes’ 30DaysWild challenge.

I think we all know what we as individuals can do to help slow down climate change, famine, floods and mass migration for the poorest populations in the world. It’s simply that most of us won’t do it unless we’re forced.

I was going to post a very short, non-exhaustive list, but I won’t. We all know it by heart. Nor will I write a poem about saving nature, because poetry makes not one iota of difference.

There’s nothing that’s impossible or even difficult in being reasonable and humane. It’s not fascist or Medieval to stop wasting resources. It is simply the plain truth that our throw away clothes are produced in sweat shops often by children, that abattoirs are hell on earth, that those floating luxury palaces destroy everything they come in contact with.

And it’s depressing that we would rather believe in hoaxes, irrational conspiracies and whataboutery than scientific fact. In the end, it all comes down to whether or not we care

and whether we want
the books we will read to our grandchildren
to have elephants and badgers
on the same page as unicorns.

On waking with another migraine

On waking with another migraine

Day too bright to see the wavering trees,
the stink of unseen things too strong,
the pounding of hammers behind the eyes too loud,
to feel the touch of gentler heat on the skin.

I listen in the darkened room,
in the penumbra of shutters almost closed,
to a warbler singing quietly in the distant shade,
quietly and slowly, one note at a time,
falling at the phrase’s end, as if uncertain,
is the song complete, or is it not?

A pause, and he picks up the thread,
continues, with or without my opinion.

Later,
the hammers stilled,
the bird is singing still.

A Sea Wolf’s wish

Sometimes, the words go off on a strange tangent. Inspired by the random word selection in the previous post, there’s perhaps a poem in it.

A Sea Wolf’s wish

He makes a wish,
the lodestone showing north,
for the calming of the seas
and the calming of the storm.

The timbers of the deck are slick with water,
the sky as black as a whale’s dark throat,
and life has never seemed so sweet.

He needs no more wealth than his arms can hold,
needs only an oar to pull and a narrow ship
to take him home to the ones who are waiting.

His eye is fixed on the gap in the clouds,
the scrap of sky with a bright star showing,
and the trough of the waves is a passage grave,
the light at the end, a winter hope.

Through the fog of cloud
and the storm spray blowing,
the lodestar shines and the timbers crack,
the sound of the waves is his homestead weeping,
sinews shrieking and the snap of oars.

But the wish and the star and winter hope
find a path through the spray and the storm clouds breaking,
and he hears not weeping but bright, wild laughter,
as he follows the gulls and the guiding seals.

Random word generator

I’m posting this early for anyone who wants to use it as a prompt. I maybe won’t have time to write anything until much later.

House-tent

A poem for Day 18 of Paul Brookes’ 30DaysWild challenge. If you have a camping related piece of writing or photo, send it in.

House-tent

This house beneath the stars sits
knees to chest upon the hillside,
gazing down where dark is deepest.

We sit and watch together,
as the stars dance and moon rises,
through the window full of night-light,

and we gaze into the tree-dark,
where the stream runs loud in springtime,
and the owls scream loud at night-time.

This house with sky as coping
is my tent, beyond is untamed,
I can hear its wild heart pulsing,
touch the bat-winged night air beating,
and I taste the summer coming.

Songs after the storm

Songs after the storm

The woman storm shrieks about the hills,
though the lost child in nowhere in their folds,
no lightning light will show the way to the truth.

Cymbal-crash in the clouds
with the military brashness of destruction,
the pink of dawn a memory,
birdsong of first light a warning,

but I listen for the music of the trees,
the leaf-rustle in a cool breeze,
the murmured song of the stream,
for the anger and grief to pass.

In the lull, the trough of the waves,
I listen for the bright trills,
the flutes and strings of the birdfolk
to sooth the pain, sing tomorrow.

A cat called Raymond

He breezed in one day, cat-roared in the street until I opened a window, and in he jumped. Cool as a cucumber, an expression coined by someone who must have met him in one of his former lives. He was a beautiful, stripy tom cat with a tiger tail and a couldn’t-care-less attitude. He had arrived on our little street a few days previously, said the odd-job man who had a shed on the vacant lot at the end. Picked fights with the homeless cats who camped there and obviously decided he was a cut above the local fauna.
We called him Raymond, and he turned the house upside down. It was like living with a tornado, a flash of long muscular limbs leaping from one piece of furniture to another, massacring the children’s soft toys, peeing everywhere, letting himself into every room, cupboard and the fridge. Stole an entire chicken once.
We would watch him from an upstairs window as he made his way across the rooftops, leaping up sheer walls with the ease of a big bird, laying claim to his territory. Although he caused havoc, we forgave him everything, and when, exactly one year to the day he arrived, he walked out, never to be seen again, we were grief-stricken. We kept hoping that he would be back, picking his way along the garden wall, his tiger tail held high.
Four weeks later, when Trixie waylaid the children on their way home from school one afternoon and followed them, wailing, all the way, crossing the main road, we knew that Raymond had moved on.
Every stripy tom cat will forever more be a Raymond, a species all to himself, and we haven’t given up hope that he might still, one day, leap back through an open window.

Raymond

Tiger, Tiger,
somewhere in the night you made a choice,
stalked into a new story,
perhaps one more of many.

Perhaps you have a book now,
a frieze stitched in stars,
and if we look across to where the city lies,
we might pick it out
above the orange glow,
a constellation of nine lives.

Spring gone

Posting this one for Paul Brookes’ 30DaysWild challenge. I like the tender colours in it. The photograph was only taken a month ago but the wheat is already ripened and harvested.

Spring gone

I think I remember
the way the seasons rolled,
a great wheel turning slowly,
drawing up green shoots,

the way they unfurled into summer flags,
danced red and gold in autumn winds,
and lay quiet beneath the foggy winter trees.

I think I remember
green and damp and rain.

But the lurch of the machine,
no longer in control,
shakes the memories into the exhaust,
blown away like chaff.

Baled up

Baled up

It’s done
the binding tight
of every stalk and leaf
seed shaken loose to set
in this baked earth
renewed.