Lynne Rees's Blog, page 2

Two haiku ~ haymaking

after the cut
the evening's
long shadows

the hay's first turn
the loose scent
of centuries




perennial ryegrassmeadow fescuetimothy

Haibun ~ Remade

 

Remade

In the early hours of themorning after the three-week anniversary of my fall, while running, I hear you get out of bed andcreak open the bedroom door, letting in the moonlight, and I call, can you makeme a piece of toast?

And when you return, minuteslater, with the thickly buttered slice, you ask if I want another, and I say, yes,and could I have hot milk with honey and whisky too? You laugh and say, youmust be feeling better.

And in that moment, I realise Iam, even though I still can’t move my left arm, or raise my shoulder and myelbow joint is like a swollen mound of risen dough, but hard.

We heal in small ways. Bread,milk, and honey. Kindness. And through the magical science of blood clottingaround the break, its meshwork of proteins plugging the gap, the immune system’sorchestra of inflammation, stem cells migrating from tissue, bone marrow andblood to form cartilage, more bone.

We are our own small miracles.We remake ourselves over and over. Tell me now of your own renewal. How yourose again from pain, loss or grief.

 

dislocation/fracture
we are so much more 
than  the bones ofourselves

Poem ~ Centre, As If

 

Centre, As If

Tempestuous is today’s word
 – a north-easterly pummelling
the dark green of the ocean, forcing
the palm fronds to lean inland.

Reckless, wild, turbulent: Word
offers me its synonyms, the opposite
to what I feel standing on the shoreline,
feeling the lick of salt on my arms

and face, the tiniest grains of sand,
as if I could be the eye of the storm,
as if I could be a pocket of calm
at the centre of all conflict. As if.

Haibun ~ Stop. Smile. Run.

Stop. Smile. Run.

run verb

1. move at a speed faster than a walk
2. pass or cause to pass quickly or smoothly in a particular direction

The first is a physical inevitability, the second is a choice, particularly how smoothly I pass through what lies round me, and in what direction. 

This morning there’s a breeze off the ocean, scattered clouds tempering the sun’s weight and heat as I run north towards the pier, keeping right, rather than left, passing walkers, strollers, dogs on leads, the sudden stop-to-chatters, loud phone-talkers, and, where the boardwalk narrows, a woman who shuffles from side to side, unsure of which direction she should go to avoid me until I stop in front of her and ask her if she wants to dance and we both laugh.

That, I think, is the answer to so many things: remembering to smile when encountering confusion and fear, my own and others, remaining still for a moment, before picking up the pace again …

breathing in the ocean moving forward

 

 

Poem ~ Searching for words (World Poetry Day 2024)

Searching for words

I know they shriek of cliché but
the miniature daffodils are, naturally,
all 'golden trumpets' and 'heralding'.

And my neighbour’s magnolia tree
does seem like an 'explosion' of softness
and light against the grey March sky. 

I can probably do better with
the broad bean seedlings:
after their tiny muscular heaves 

through the month’s wet earth
they are now shaking off their casings,
revealing their purpose. 

This is the truth of Spring,
its irrepressible pulse of growth, renewal.
What else can we believe in?

 

 

 

Haibun ~ How can I not love her

How can I not love her: that open gaze, the contentment of her small smile, her shiny buttons, her curly hair ribboned in the way she requested each morning - ‘two curls up’ - after my mother had teased out the overnight tangles with a large, pink, Betterware comb. 

I think I remember the day: the summer of 1963, my first term at Tirmorfa Infants School, a class at a time marshalled into the assembly hall, the photographer lifting his big camera as we each took our turn in the single wooden chair in the middle of that high-ceilinged room.  

You see that signet ring? I am wearing it now, 61 years later, after finding it last year in an old jewellery box studded with seashells, the silver band split from years of growth, after a silversmith repaired it for me. I cannot see the join.  

valentine’s dayloving all the peopleI used to be





 

Poems about and for ordinary people ~ Before

My current project of delving into the history of my hometown, through exploring the lives of 'ordinary' people buried in the church and graveyards there, generally favours the medium of prose to the tell extended family stories. But sometimes what I want to say fits into the shape and concentration that poetry offers - a measured and gradual revelation, down the page, of image and emotion.

When I first started writing poetry it was 'all about me'! I was totally unaware of the idea of needing to craft my experiences and language choices so they spoke to a (much!) wider audience. 

In 1992 I attended my first ever residential writing course at Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre of Wales, in Llanystumdwy on the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales. The course was called 'Poetry in Mountains' - and, true to the description, we were encouraged to write poems and climb mountains, including a couple of sessions of rock-climbing. And if that wasn't enough to make me fall in love with poetry combined with the natural world, some advice given to me by one of the course leaders, Terry Gifford, completely changed my approach to writing. 

'At some point, Lynne,' he said, 'Catharsis has to give way to communication.'

This wasn't just the proverbial light-bulb switiching on. This was a whole stadium of floodlights illuminating my understanding of, and relationship to, writing poetry.

My first poetry collection, Learning How to Fall, was published in 2005 and while I am still proud of that work, I can see how many of those poems rely heavily on poetic craft, the 'fireworks' of writing poetry, if you like: lots of figurative language, intertextuality, the punchy power of line break. These days, I'm more in Philip Larkin's camp, when he said:  

“One is constantly conscious of trying to measure the effects of what you have written on someone starting from cold who may not have the experience you have had. This may not sound very significant, but it does cut out an extraordinary number of things which are quite common in other poetry. It cuts out obscurity, it cuts out references to literature and mythology which you cannot be sure they know. It means you are writing fairly simply in the language of ordinary people, using the accepted sense of words and using the accepted grammatical constructions and so on. That is my own practice.” The Guardian from 1973.

'The language of ordinary people' is exactly what I need to write about the lives of ordinary people, lives that are often extra-ordinary: experiences shaped by the times they lived through, by the press of events often beyond their control. 

And here is a poem I read at Port Talbot Library in January this year. Over the previous year or so I had located and photographed the graves of all the men and boys at St Mary's, Aberafan who lost their lives to war. Both individual Commonwealth War Grave Commission Portland stone headstones and those memorialised on family graves. 

Simplicity, like truth, is a powerful thing. 

Before

We have gathered them here  – 
the men and boys whose names 

are inscribed on Portland stone
or memorialised on family graves 

because their bodies lie in foreign fields,
or were never found. 

We have conjured them
from their births and baptisms, 

from census returns for the streets
where they lived. We have met them 

as they were, before
their names on telegrams broke 

the hearts and fractured the lives
of families, of mothers and wives. 

Let us remember them now
before those cruel years 

obliterated so much light,
when they still whistled and sang, 

when they still had dreams,
when their thoughts were full 

of Saturday football,
or the local rugby team, 

or a pint with their dads, or sons,
at The Prince of Wales, The Avonvale 

or The  Craddock Arms.
When they were still holding 

their children in their arms,
or trying to win a kiss from girls 

they’d met on the sands,
at a dance or a market stall. 

Fathers, brothers, husbands, sons
before they fell. Here they are 

tipping the caps on their heads
or rolling up shirt sleeves, 

or cigarettes, slapping their mates
on the back, their smiles and laughter 

predating gunfire and shells.
And they go home

to those they loved, who loved them.
And us too, 

their lives and deaths,
we will remember them. 

 

Happy New Year - Keep dancing!

Together in 2024

By the time Tess and Claudia exhort us to 'Keep dancing!' we are too settled into our evenings, too comfy, to do anything about it. So how about us all doing it now ... putting down this card, getting out of the chair, or up from the sofa, taking the hand of someone we love, or even placing our own hand on our own shoulder, perhaps even over our own heart, and saying out loud, into the air of the New Year, 'Keep dancing!’ And look, here we all are, smiling and moving forward together.

Happy New YearBlwyddyn Newydd Dda

Haibun ~ Beauty, Memory

In memory of Joyce Rees ~ 1st December 1932 - 25th March 2021I don’t know why I decided to keep the two small, gold-rimmed, Royal Albert plates that were on display, in the same position, for years, in the old oak cupboard in the front room. After all, what use would I have for them, these bone china, fragile, smaller-than-saucer plates in my kitchen of plain white, dishwasher proof crockery? But … they share our evenings now. They’ve held a single welshcake, chocolate truffles, a crescent or two of frozen mango, and, more recently, slices of Waitrose’s, or Tesco’s, or M&S’s iced fruit cake, the ‘bar’ one, not the round one. They feel as if they were made for this – sweet, rich cake crested with icing and marzipan on a halo of pink roses and a flourish of gold. We can’t always know what will matter to us. Sometimes it’s worth ignoring the voices of logic and reason and, at the last minute, slipping beauty and memory into a small box and forgetting about them … until we don’t.late autumn sunlightilluminates a field of frostmemories of my parents

Poem ~ Saving ourselves

Saved
I have to stop and run back to take a second look at what I think I’ve seen through the trees – 
the horns of some monster, a bouldered head and shoulders of beaten silver. And there he is 
grasping a spear and a blade, Defender of the post and rail fence, fields and house beyond, 
Guardian of the small metal pig at his feet. There’s no one else here to enter the myth of him 
with me, no one to wonder at the heave of his chest as it rises and falls under a glint of moonlight, 
his huge head lifting to the stars, his fearlessness,  his sweet protection of the little pig. I imagine him 
striding across the fields towards my home, taking up position on the soft earth between the bare apricot trees. 
The monsters aren’t always who we think they are.We learn to save ourselves with our own stories.