Athena

Athena

Athena is the goddess of wisdom,
Surrounded by letters,
Pale colours, shy, reluctant.
Fireflies flicker at the edge of perception
as wisdom does, now to be seen,
now, elusive, faery spirit teasing,
now gone, hidden in legend.

As if the Earth’s book closed,
its pages feel tears falling in the night,
Darkness flooding senses, brings sensing
Stories told by leprechauns of Ireland,
Xapiri from the Amazon, datu datu of Banda,
Arabian djinns sing ancient lore
Athena are you there?

Are you here in Scotland?
the home of Otnasnom.
Will you sing the song of the selkie?
Will you let the world hear?
Cry with your last breath.
Pachamama. Peace. Now.

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The word “Otnasnom” is an invention of James Campbell, one of our writing group. It is the place introduced in the first book of his trilogy: And Hell Followed After: The Witch Hunters of Otnasnom [available on Amazon]. Isela shared this word jumble as a prompt. It comes from his work.

Push the Boat Out

inspired by Edwin Morgan’s “At Eighty“

Push the Boat Out

Thoughts of the boat belong by the sea.
Supposes the boat lies beached, sound,
corded muscle in the the arms can reach,
the sinews of the thighs can clench
while feet find firm footing on the pebbles.

The pebbles sound more redolent
of many shores than water or waves.
There are the days of whispering,
wavelets gently rippling, rocks rolling
in the ebb and flow of tide.

There are the days of lashing rain
keening wind, where waves rear
green grey heads before they crash
on the rocks thundering counterpoint
to the drumbeat of the water’s weight.

Which boat, which day, what water?
Is that boat the one that puts its prow
forward mind imaging a distant land?
Even a boat thinks longingly of shore,
timbers ready to rest on soft sunlit sand.

Let it Snow

 

Writing from the start of a phrase…  “let it snow” … two different poems emerged…

The land waits

Let it snow tonight, let the land wake in the morning
Knowing its multiple lives lie under
myriad crystals, stellar branches
that stretch hexagonally, intertwined.
Each six-fold arm enfolds, emerges
traps the air in its warm blanket
while the land rests, soil lying fallow,
hiding mycelia, lichen, microbes.
The invisible armies of life, are feeding roots
storing goodness, waiting for Spring.

 

Winter Joy

“let it snow” say the children,
Hunting in the boxroom cupboard
for plastic sledges, while parents mutter about slush
and look out last year’s hats and scarves and gloves.
Until, finally, everyone is in the park,
parents eyeing the grey sky, more to come,
and the fence at the foot of the hill.
while children eye coloured plastic and trackless expanse.
Waiting for that first mad crazy fearful breathtaking gasp
For the year’s first soaring take-off to ecstasy.

Life Time or The Space of an Hour

Two poems, written on the boat which takes an hour to go from Block Island to Point Judith, otherwise known here as “America”, and as it is December, the noise and chatter from many others present, seemed to be about “time”.   

Life Time     

Old Harbor Block Island, ferry coming in on a calm day

Take time, find time, 
make time, no time.
as if time belonged
as if there was a thing
to be collected.
Gloop or granules, sand
quantity of stuff 
to own possess hold
let trickle
through feckless fingers
falling soft 
on the floor of a life.

Time is no thing
just a measure
of actions, happenings
the work done or not done
the quartz flicker 
of thought seen unseen
glittering falling 
softly  on waking
jolting awareness
here opens the door 
to a life.

A short history of Time: The space of an hour

Sundial at Beijing Astronomical Museum

The boat takes an hour
that measure of space
where noise and chatter 
clatters its voice. 
That time is the same 
from the east to the west
occident, orient,
an hour is in place
a bit of the day.
Where did it come from?
I understand day
it comes after the night,
but everyone everywhere 
anywhere said
the day is too long.
We need to divide and 
two lots of twelve will 
be best to decide.
So that little measure
an hour of your life 
From Beijing to Babylon
Atlantis to Arctic
is always the same.
And I want to know
How on earth did they know?

Become a Stranger

Become a stranger

Shadow-self and Footprints

 

Footprints in the sand
Must have been made
Before the tide rose
Must have been made before the wind blew
To fill them with soft sand
Breezed from higher
To lower
To tell the passage of
Another person
Sometime in this place

In the grains of sand
Lie a hundred stories
From times beginning
From trees forests
Walkers lives now destined
Only from imagination
This stranger’s contemplation

Become a stranger in my own world
Go far away and then return
In space and time or dream
Feel a difference
force itself upon my eye
Which now must learn to look
Again. And then reminder
To listen, feel , wait
Without the memory or desire.

And there it comes
The smell of sea
Born again
Borne on the wind
Wound lazily over the dune
Deep glister and dark stone
Footprints. Not alone.
But living. New. Now.

 April 2012 at Block Island

Edinburgh Botanic Gardens

written October 2009

 

It is autumn

Edinburgh Botanic Gardens - yellow acer

Here this season

seeps into bone.

Expecting red

orange, grey, bronze

I am caught unaware

by translucent leaves

so yellow

against a height of sky

all light glows green.

I cannot bear to move.

Standing silent,

hear each shimmering leaf

ready its soft fall

dreaming a winter.

wish I was there this year too

Moon Tide

In June 2010, wonderful weather, some of us had a great idea to go down to the beach at the full moon and just enjoy, write, whatever… On the Saturday morning the clouds rolled in and by evening it was bleak, dark, rain threatening to soak us all too soon.

On the beach

Watching water meld to the grey sky

The moon hides full beyond more grey.

Nearer and nearer

The wave drops its sound

Reflects like melted steel

and is not flat.

Each inch the water spreads

Each rise and fall

Each foot of sand wetted gleaming

Whispers: Feel it pull.

Look down

And know

This moon is full.

Child Born in Guangzhou

One Child Born in Guangzhou

Between Tianhe and Dongpu
off the side of the main road
where what was once a river
lies the hospital.
Semi-tropical here, so walls
don’t go all the way up.
Stench from the once river
grey sludge over coke cans
thrown away instant noodle boxes
and some growth that once tried to be green
seeps through the heavy heavy air.

It is three concrete stairs
to maternity, the top floor
stairs open to a long corridor
greyly shining wet.
Water from the wallside tap
weeps continually over the cracks
in the concrete.
All the wards here have two beds
chinese beds like boards
sheeted with thin cotton duvet.

Ward walls open to the washroom
and that ubiquitous hole in the floor.
Clean clear water running.
One bed for a patient, another
for whoever has brought in
soup, magazines, hairbrushes, and,
of course, the ricebox
before lying down in the heat
their sweat running to join
the humid drops already drowning
what is left of air.

Hands grow more slippery,
the soup can more precarious
On every stair.
Reach the door, and then,
Her black chinese hair is long
and wet with its own shine
It falls across her sweat wet
shoulder to an exhausted arm.
Hair, eyes, arm, body, all cradling,
Holding her one, her will be only,
hot wet newborn son.

Written in 2008, and is another of my misunderstandings of what happens here. The parents of this child, relatives of my in-law chinese family are reasonably well off, and self-employed, so they accept the financial sanctions and have since had a second son. One law for the rich… etc. … alive and well in modern China.

China’s Profit

This was written two or three years ago – after the first interest in a new country had faded and the despairs and distress evident in its hugely capitalistic expansion become more and more visible. This week the artist Ai Wei Wei has written an article in Newsweek. I have been fascinated by him for several years, since a friend Hua Wei Fen gave me the chinese name Ai Qing, 艾 青 , because, she said,  “I am a poet who thinks about people”. I was too ignorant to understand this name or its significance at the time, but I later discovered that I had adopted a name that belongs to a real chinese poet from the 1940’s 50’s – Ai Wei Wei’s father.

 

All the tea in China

Could not begin to bring this country rest.

The ceremony turns its face

to greedy tourists

thinking the leaf picked at midnight

under a full moon

by virgins

Will taste better than the one

steeped in bitter envious discontent.

Certainly, it costs more.

 

Sometime I must put some of Ai Qing’s poetry up somewhere – in the meantime read an obituary.

Blackwater Security

This poem was written July 2010, I called it Blackwater, after a book you can find on Amazon or where-ever. However, I recently found a blog called Blackwatertown which is more in tune with my memory of a beautiful river in the North of Ireland. Now, it is just a word: one, a memory; two a new story from a troubled region, funny and respectful; three, mired in wrongness like this Blackwater Security which has shocked me so profoundly. 

Blackwater Security

Innocuous names, coupled
with others, imposing solidity,
thoughtfulness, security,
Even imaginative pull.

Blackwater
a river from cool northern peatbag
or, a night swing by the harbor, tide-full,
gleaming tar under wheels after rain.
Or, you could think literal,
sewer, stench heavy,
turd tide slime by the concrete,
necessary needful drain.

Now, Blackwater is obscenity,
distorted, twisted
monstrously created
from its own tortured training
in death destructions,
devious intelligences.

Devouring dollars,
straining credulity.
Funded by taxes
and government contract
Inspection, audit, enquiry
regardless it grows full-speed

A company of cancer spread
from the seed
of its origin.
Imaginary Omnipotence
False God.
Blackwater Security.

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from Amazon book description:

Meet Blackwater USA, the powerful private army that the U.S. government has quietly hired to operate in international war zones and on American soil. With its own military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, and twenty-thousand troops at the ready, Blackwater is the elite Praetorian Guard for the “global war on terror”– yet most people have never heard of it. It was the moment the war turned: On March 31, 2004, four Americans were ambushed and burned near their jeeps by an angry mob in the Sunni stronghold of Falluja. Their charred corpses were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The ensuing slaughter by U.S. troops would fuel the fierce Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this day. But these men were neither American military nor civilians. They were highly trained private soldiers sent to Iraq by a secretive mercenary company based in the wilderness of North Carolina. Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army is the unauthorized story of the epic rise of one of the most powerful and secretive forces to emerge from the U.S. military-industrial complex, hailed by the Bush administration as a revolution in military affairs, but considered by others as a dire threat to American democracy.