Mag 182

Tess Kincaid offers writers this underwater photo-image by Elena Kalis as the prompt for this week's Mag.



Prolonged Immersion

Rebuke, or pity? Spurning all life-skill guides,
overlooking shellfish jaws and stings that leave
sure swimmers keeling, she dived young, keen to prise,
eviscerate and string the seeds.
                                                       The first heave
mesmerised. Sea-tentacles and weed unfurled,
artful to drag her down. The laden wrecks
rebuffed her questing hands. The glass-green swirl
yawed, paused and shifted her past hope of land.

Meshed with slow swells she grins and glides,
adrift on moon-drugged tides, which at their flood
roll, roll her shorewards, till brine cold rhythms guide
this prisoner from deeps misunderstood.

In the sea's time, formless remains are hurled
naked, flesh gorged by seabirds, spent, unpearled.

.

ONE A DAY #17

The Poem a Day Challenge invites poets to pen a new opus every day during April. This offering for Day 17 sees me upsides with the calendar for the first time.

 Triolet

What startled me awake? The sudden chill

of Winter coming, frosting every pane?

Just when I thought my words were lying still

yours startled me.  Awake - a sudden chill

from knowing that your leaving soon would kill

the sunset's touch, and we'd not meet again -

that startles me awake, its sudden chill,

like Winter coming, frosting every pain.

Magpie Tales #141

Full Moon, UK. 29th. October 2012.
Tess's tender prompt, 29th. October 2012.

Pillow Talk 

Waking, he asks her "Was our first full moon

like our first kiss?" "No riddles," she says, asleep.

"I was just thinking, seeing how tonight

the moon is looking at us through the trees,

the sky blown clear, the lawn all silver frost -

this is just how it was when first we met."

Up on one elbow now, she shakes her head.

"I remember how it was pouring wet,

but if you mean our first kiss I'll forget -

of course not, though down memory's lane you've lost

track of our first full moon. Now if you please,

go back to sleep.  Or it could be your last!"

"Last kiss, or last full moon?" "You think too much!"

Just for a moment then their two hands touch.

"You keep the moon," she yawns. "Give me a kiss."

.

Friday Flash Fiction 30th.March

A little poem for the G-Man, and this sad lassie.

Seven Days

“Just for a week,” you said. “Just for one week,

no more.” But ‘Message received’ is never

now from you; no ‘Hi Pet’ on my mailer

makes my thoughts quicken, makes me smile. 

So many bleak miles and seas I endure

apart.  Who would have thought seven days

could last for ever. Or break a heart?

.

Old Negatives

I always wonder, when we're tasked to smile
and photographs shows radiant teeth and eyes
what's really in our minds? Here, for instance
you as a bridesmaid.  Does that rictus grin
conceal a secret envy for the bride
married today to someone you desired?
Or did Aunty Hit-the-Bottle drop her hat?

See what I mean?  Go further back, and here's
a schoolgirl, proud in her uniform. Green
I think you told me, green and blue. But you
seem awkward in your Dad's untidy garden -
(look at those droopy lupins by the gate)
shy and scared of what's ahead? First day,
new school, new dreams, new doorway into life.

And further still. Is that wrapped bundle you,
uplifting your father's heart as he lifts you
close to some unseen uncle with his Kodak?
Later - you, toddling in leggings, gloves, beret,
your curled lip saying "What's the fuss about?"
(Some days even now that same lip warns "Look out!')

But here's my favourite, this one before all.
Although your hands have somehow both been cropped
and those knees, too near the camera, look so huge.
But nothing, nothing can airbrush the laughter
that quite transcends the way the snap has fixed
you more than half a century ago.
A penny for  whatever coaxed this smile.
A penny to know again such joie de vivre
when all seemed possible - yes, even love,
and the choice that could be Yes, and should have been,
was No, was No. And laughter sank and stifled.


Posted in response to Kerry O'Connor's prompt at the Imaginary Garden With Real Toads

Friday Challenge

Marian at "Imaginary Garden with Real Toads" seeks poems inspired by music, asking "How can we use music as a prompt for poetry anyway." Readily, It seems to me. This poem, one of the first I ever wrote way back, has little in common with the quoted song "She's an Angel." - although I was once accused at a poetry evening of "being drunk when I wrote it."

Serenade For Tuba


Come up and greet my jolly, golden solace.

Through here! She voices best in gurgling bathrooms.

Stroke - she won't bite - her close coiled, shining cloisters . . .

A gin-crazed plumber, in to fix the ball-cock

swooned when his gaze rolled round those crotcheted pipings . .

Your smile leers massive, from burnished haunch reflected.

Fondle her foghorn face. I think she likes you.

Sit! Sit! I'll clasp her close and get her going.

I fell for her, my hippo, in a junk-shop.

She squatted, three-pound-ten, a chubby bargain.

A friendly welder patched one tattered buttock.

Ignore choleric thumps from upstairs neighbours.

My rondos resonating with their windows

enrage her cat which claws his potted cacti.

Ex-R.A.F., his tracer drills my ceiling.

Give him his way, he'd melt her down for bullets.

Have suitors, faint as simpering glockenspiels

stitched frills to hot-eyed love with lace flutes needling,

entombed their caverned lusts in lowing cellos,

or scraped and sidled with seductive fiddles?

I, triple-tongued and three crooked fingers pumping,

lip firm with lung in heartfelt syncopation

will plight a fat-cheeked troth that shakes the sternum.

Our mammoth blasts bring hearts' defences tumbling.

Lips purse. Trial puffs fan distant, dripping cellars.

Stirred echoes faintly wander spiralled sewers . . .

(This melancholy mastodon of music

fair uses up the Brasso, I can tell you.)

Now eggs of sorrow in her tin bowels hatching

trundle her ghostly, subterranean gloamings'
soar to the flaring spaces of her belfry.

And OOMPAH roars its challenge to despair.

Imaginary Garden WIth Real Toads.28th. September

Ella, in the Imaginary Garden set the poetic challenge which suggested this poem. 


In Alnwick's Bookshop


There on the shelves of dross a gleam of gold.
A first edition "Tree of Idleness"
unsigned, but then, we can't have everything.
Why should his verses swim before my eyes,
most of these lines I've known so many years -
bringing me now to all-but-public tears?
Is it his 'single pining mandolin' that
'scratches on silence like a pet locked in'?
Or images of distance, cloud, hills, rain,
his 'lack of someone spreading like a stain.'
Yes, perhaps that. These found poems find me now
sundered from home, from sleep, from all I love,
from 'where brown fingers in the darkness move'
To find this book, this small excuse for weeping.

Lawrence Durrell, author of the stupendous "Alexandria Quartet", is now all but forgotten as a poet. A pity, for his lyric poetry is moving, tender and always musical. "The Tree of Idleness" (1955, Faber & Faber) was his fourth 'slim volume'.  All the quotes are from the title poem.

Alnwick, a small market-town in the county of Northumberland, UK, boasts the biggest second-hand bookshop in the country - some say in Europe, in the town's disused railway station. It really is a knock-out and very well worth a visit if you happen to be touring or staying there. But you won't find a first ed. "Tree of Idleness" - 'cos I've got it!

Magpie Tales#82

Revenants


There'll come a day some day when you'll be there
again. Your eyes the same, the same small hands,
your brushed hair lifted by the night wind, laid
onto your shoulder bare. And you will say
"Now it is time, dear. We have waited long,
each in our place and time. And what was strong
between us we'll replay. Come now, come away."

And I? Lost between "You!" and "How?" and "Why?"
will half believe that you are no more ghost
than I, then, hesitating, know that we
both are ghosts now, and this, Eternity.


(Suggested by Tess Kincaid's picture-prompt for Magpie#82, and by another poem, "Revenant," remembered from my schooldays.)

Beach

The children wearing careless laughter come

to the beach. And we? With dry socks, Sunbloc,

ice cream and careful praise, we watch and pray

no waves of life wash their castles all away.


Jinksy's "In Tandem" picture by Margaret Bednar suggested this poem. 
Click the link to see others

Poetry Jam, 9th. May

Watercats offers "Birthday" for Poetry Jam's first ever prompt.

For Her Birthday

I found them one by one.

Cut glass, a chiming bell,

October's smoky days,

Mists shuffling in the sun,

Old wood with lavender,

Laughter where children run,

and hoarded them,

unmatched, unlit.

In time you came,

the thread to string them on.