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Candia Comes Clean

~ Candid cultural comments from the Isles of Wonder

Monthly Archives: September 2018

Gallery

Autumnal Buscot

30 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by Candia in Horticulture, Nature, Personal, Photography, Sculpture

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

autumnal, Buscot Park, Cotswolds, Dahlia, Sedum

This gallery contains 4 photos.

Gallery

Dawn in the Garden this Week

29 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by Candia in Environment, Home, Horticulture, Nature, Personal, Photography

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Tags

Cotswolds, dawn, garden, horse chestnut

This gallery contains 5 photos.

Image

Orchids

27 Thursday Sep 2018

Tags

acrylics, orchids, pastels

IMG_0094

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Posted by Candia | Filed under art, Horticulture, Nature

≈ 1 Comment

Gallery

From the Garden Today

25 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by Candia in Environment, Horticulture, Nature, Personal, Summer

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

acer, garden bounty, grapes, mushrooms

This gallery contains 5 photos.

Meysey Hampton- a Sermon in Glass

24 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by Candia in art, Bible, mythology, Poetry, Relationships, Religion, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cotswolds, crucifixion, Dismas, Gestas, gold frankincense myrrh, Meysey Hampton, Paradise, paradox, Penitent Thief, Romans 5, Sheol, St Peter, wormwood

 Meysey Hampton church (Cotswolds) has stained

glass fragments pertaining to the crucifixion.  I believe they

were discovered in a barn, sold to the Paul Getty museum,

but have been returned home.

Image result for Meysey Hampton glass

I’m Dismas.

 

Who the hell is that? you ask.

And where’s the other rogue – the one who mocked?

 

If I say I’m The Penitent Good Thief,

does that give you a clue?  Through gritted teeth,

I am trying to process a promise

that I’ll be translated to Paradise.

I’d get there sooner if they’d break my legs.

I can hardly breathe for my fractured ribs.

 

At the cusp of salvation/ damnation,

I turned my face, to see He’d gone ahead.

 

Some think my pardon was an act of grace,

bestowed because I showed a flash of faith,

but others say it was a just reward,

because I stopped those bandits – and Gestas

(no longer with us) from nicking gold,

frankincense, myrrh from that Man’s family,

aeons ago, when they were fugitives.

 

I asked then that He should remember me,

should our paths cross again – one day they did.

 

Well, some say Christ Himself was a Good Thief,

since He stole us back from Satan’s kingdom.

Do two wrongs make a right?  I do not know,

but I am warming to the paradox.

 

Salvabitur vix justus in die

judicii/ ergo salvabitur.*

 

I’m a glimpse of your hope of glory.

Hey, you malefactors – just look and live!

Everything else is a heap of smithereens.

 

I joined Him in Sheol and freed captives,

but, for the life of me, I do not know

what happened to Gestas; nor where he is.

 

I was found, restored and here I hang now –

unbaptised, but, oddly, beatified,

waiting for my promised resurrection.

Uncertain of what was meant by ‘today,’

but first in the queue to meet St Peter.

Meanwhile, give me a sip of that wormwood

and, since He didn’t want His, I’ll have it.

 

 

  • Romans 5 v 7-9

For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die, but God commendeth His love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

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Bagpiper in Oxford

23 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by Candia in Humour, Music, Photography, Social Comment

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Tags

bagpiper, bagpipes, busking, Oxford

IMG_0010

Bike for quick getaway!

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Abide in the Vine

18 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by Candia in Bible, Home, Nature, Personal, Relationships, Religion

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

black grapes, Jesus' sayings, pruning, The Vine

IMG_0051

My first grapes!

Kept thinking about The Vine and the need to ‘abide’ if one is a branch.

I am a minor twig, but I want to be fruitful so I am not pruned and

thrown on the fire.

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Within without 2010: Turrell Skyspace

16 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by Candia in art, Arts, Personal, Poetry, Sculpture, Writing

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Tags

2010, alembic, basalt, Canberra, cochlea, gnomic, James Turrell, labyrinth, maharajah tomb, materiality, National Gallery Australia, oculus, operculum, portal, Skyspace, stupa, Victorian basalt, Within without

Based on the James Turrell artwork at The National Gallery

of Australia in Canberra…

IMG_6105

 

Within Without

 

We have chanced to wonder at the Skyspace

and find ourselves drawn down the sloping path

to the Victorian basalt stupa.

We enter through a portal, so smoothly,

as if flies had followed the labyrinth

of a cochlea, or had gained entrance

to the gentle spiral of a snail shell,

only to hear a quiet ululation.

The universe is made immanent and

we sit on a concrete bench, out of time,

searching for a cloud like a camel, or

a shape like a whale, but all is cloudless.

We are alone and yet we are connected,

within; without – experience distilled –

interior and exterior are

like the two vessels of an alembic.

Are we in a maharajah’s tomb, or

Pharoanic chamber? We are infused

by a laser beam of cosmic insight.

The world tilts on its axis and we see

segments of reality as they change,

until the sun adjusts its slanting beams,

casting a gnomic shadow on us,

branding us with a present awareness.

No clutter of materiality:

there’s only an uncanny sense of peace.

At some point the operculum descends.

Either our eyes, or the oculus blinked.

 

 

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Local Hero

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Candia in Family, History, Nostalgia, Personal, Poetry, Relationships, Social Comment, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

9th Dunbartonshire, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Blighty wound, Clyde, Clydebank, gas attack, Kilpatrick, King's Shilling, Picardy, shrapnel, Titan Crane, Wilfred Pip Squeak, Ypres

Pop

Robert- gassed at Ypres.  Lived to 90s

Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

My hero.

 

Photo- Stephen Sweeney.  Titan crane

 

The trench gaped to receive him at last,

over seventy years since he’d escaped its maw

at Ypres.  Other bombshells had been cast:

his daughter’s death at four; her hair as straw-

hued as bales bedded in Picardy barns.

She’d waited for him in the nether tier,

between the pewter Clyde; Kilpatrick tarns –

close to where he’d toiled as an engineer,

in ruts of rusty shipyards, hail or thaw.

 

I stroked Wilfred, Pip, Squeak in childish awe;

loved the sepia photo of Five Bobs;

marvelled that only one of them came back

to supplement the King’s shilling with jobs,

where the main goal was to avoid ‘the sack.’

It was little better than digging graves.

I used to ask him how he’d survived the gas.

He said he’d run away from its green waves.

I asked him to recount how lads would burn, en masse,

lice from their tunic seams with candle flame,

until they heard shells crack.  Then and I unrolled

his trouser leg, amazed he was not lame,

with that lump of shrapnel, which was pure gold,

as a Blighty wound, taking him away

from the Front line, to Palestine.

 

The cranes, his guard of honour, now gone too.

 

 

.

 

 

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Gallery

Buscot Park – end of season

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by Candia in Animals, Environment, Horticulture, Nature, Personal, Photography, Summer, Travel

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Buscot Park, Cotswolds, Oxfordshire

This gallery contains 5 photos.

← Older posts

My name is Candia. Its initial consonant alliterates with “cow” and there are connotations with the adjective “candid.” I started writing this blog in the summer of 2012 and focused on satire at the start.

Interspersed was ironic news comment, reviews and poetry.

Over the years I have won some international poetry competitions and have published in reputable small presses, as well as reviewing and reading alongside well- established poets. I wrote under my own name then, but Candia has taken me over as an online persona. Having brought out a serious anthology last year called 'Its Own Place' which features poetry of an epiphanal nature, I was able to take part in an Arts and Spirituality series of lectures in Winchester in 2016.

Lately I have been experimenting with boussekusekeika, sestinas, rhyme royale, villanelles and other forms. I am exploring Japanese themes at the moment, my interest having been re-ignited by the recent re-evaluations of Hokusai.

Thank you to all my committed followers whose loyalty has encouraged me to keep writing. It has been exciting to meet some of you in the flesh- in venues as far flung as Melbourne and Sydney!

Copyright Notice

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012-2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Candia Dixon Stuart and candiacomesclean.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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