Krishna Plays the Flute

Tags

abstract painting, Gerberas, Krishna, Shiva

I used to think this was Shiva, but now I am wondering if it is Krishna…

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart

The Windmills of your Mind

Tags

Alison Moyet, Dusty Springfield, Michel LeGrand, Noel Harrison, Sting, Windmills of Your Mind

like a circle in a spiral

like a wheel within a wheel

never ending or beginning

on an ever spinning reel

as the images unwind

like the circles of your mind…

Noel Harrison, Sting, Dusty Springfield, Alison Moyet etc

Music by Michel LeGrand

Pegasus Bridge 50th Anniversary

Tags

Arlette Gondree, Brahms Requiem, D-Day, Major John Howard, Normandy, Pegasus Bridge

It was an entirely fortuitous and serendipitous encounter.  Major Howard was

sitting at a table outside Arlette Gondree’s cafe. (Arlette’s house was the first

French home to be liberated.)

I was in the company of Major Michael Hickey, a military historian who

was with my choir.  We were singing The Brahms Requiem seven times

in ten days, all over Normandy, along with a French choir and the

orchestra of Basse Normandie.  We sang in different towns

and we sang in German.  The audiences were in tears.  It was an

emotional and healing experience for all involved.

Photo: 9th June, 1944.  Wikimedia Commons

 

Pegasus Bridge

Generous gesture – German flag festoons,

hoisted with the Allied banners.  Bunching,

fussy boudoir blinds. Here swooping platoons,

like death’s head moths, stealthily came gliding.

Across the bridge John Howard bravely strode,

piper ahead, deflecting sniper shot.

Now European coaches block the road;

the dispassionate stamp postcards they’ve bought,

sending snapshots of Hell to those who knew

the mark of Caen first-hand. Wish you were here!

He was: a fact to startle and imbue

those that have eyes to see and ears to hear.

The café’s bright umbrellas shelter all

from noonday’s heat, so one could fail to spot

cool nonagenarian. By the wall,

hero’s crutches propped, ready for action.

His longest day is past; his time now short:

German beer his major satisfaction.

 

Bye Bye B-52s!

Tags

B-52 bombers, Brahms, Cello sonata, Cotswolds

 

Off home now after drowning out the Brahms Cello Sonata in the local

Cotswolds church…

Celebrity Portraits

Tags

Amy Winehouse, Audrey Hepburn, celebrity portraits, Clarendon Gallery, Craig Alan, David Bowie, Marilyn Munro, Populus Series, Stow-on-the-Wold

by Craig Alan, from his Populus Series, featured in The  Clarendon

Gallery, Stow  (Cotswolds)

Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Chelsea Lovers

Tags

ceramic sculpture, Chelsea porcelain, National Trust, pastoral, Upton House

from the collection at Upton House, NT

Photo by Candia

Sheep May Safely Graze

Tags

Cotswolds, schaffe konnen sicher weiden, sheep

In my neighbour’s field…..

                        Schaffe konnen sicher weiden resonances.

Images by Candia

Centenary of Wilfred Owen’s Death

Tags

autorotation, Beaumont Hamel, Bois des Fourcaux, Bois l'Eveque, calvaire, Cambrai, Craiglockhart, del Gesu, Delville Wood, Dufay, dunnock, Hamel, Hebuterne, Last Tree, lynchet, Mametz, mandrake, Maricourt, Napier University, Ors, Queen's Hall, remblais, Sassoon, Somme, Steve Burnett, sycamore, The Branch, Wilfred Owen, World War 1 poetry

A re-blog:

A friend told me about an amazing radio programme about Steve Burnett,

in Edinburgh, making a Wilfred Owen violin from a fallen branch from a

sycamore tree from Craiglockhart Hospital, now Napier University,where

Sassoon and Owen met and discussed their poetry, before Owen

returned to the trenches and met his untimely death.

I listened to the programme and then felt compelled to write the

following piece:

 

The Sycamore Sings

Shall life renew these bodies?  Of a truth

All death will he annul…

(amended words from his poetry on Wilfred Owen’s gravestone)

 

Where a mother muted her offspring’s ire,

deleting his line’s interrogative;

where Dufay scored his music at Cambrai;

St Quentin’s corpse loomed from the Somme marshland,

to hallow the grandest basilica;

where guillotines did their grisly work,

fog lifted from shattered Bois l’Eveque-

new dawn drawing back night’s curtain of war.

 

On a towpath, a twenty five year old,

tried not to fret how he would cross the bridge.

Mesmerised by the autorotation

of seeds, he foresaw his own slow spiral,

where magpies croaked in blasted canopies.

Dark, stark poplars had been lopped long before;

the copses razed; the rides and lynchets scarred.

Mametz, Maricourt and Bois des Fourcaux:

sweet chestnut, lime, beech, hazel, oak, hornbeam-

mad mandrakes uprooted; bi-furcated trunks.

Sad remblais of Hebuterne (No Man’s Land)

absorbed shrill batteries near sunken lanes.

Calvaires bowed before continuous suffering.

In Beaumont Hamel, a single tree remains,

petrified. In Delville Wood, The Last Tree

stands like a gibbet. Sycamores survive.

They grow where other trees give up the ghost.

One such, at Craiglockhart, he could recall.

Again he heard the dunnock’s douce refrain,

singing for dear life, from lush foliage,

before its notes were silenced, once for all.

Fragments of father’s sermon rose to mind-

about The Branch, hope, regeneration.

Now, while still green, a supple slice is bent

into a tongue which will tell of all loss,

tears oozing like resin from a wounded bark:

man and nature in divine harmony.

In Queen’s Hall, it will sob and it will sing

of the pity of war – the air fleshily weeping.

And, one being dead, yet will be speaking

through a universal language of peace,

from a pattern once conceived by Gesu.

Two Musical Angels

Tags

angels, Cotswolds, St Lawrence, stained glass

                       St Lawrence Church, Lechlade (Cotswolds)

                         Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Bagpiper in Oxford

Tags

bagpiper, bagpipes, busking, Oxford

Bike for quick getaway!