Pegasus Bridge, D-Day (50th anniversary)

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50th anniversary D-Day, Benouville, gliders, Horsa Bridge, Major John Howard, Normandy, Ox and Bucks, Pegasus Bridge, The Longest Day

Candia (2nd from left; with Major John Howard (2nd from the right)

Poem to follow…

£70 million plus – is it worth it?

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Ashmolean, Jeff Koons, Rabbit, record price, value judgement

Jeff Koons’ Rabbit

Ashmolean Exhibition, 2019

Happy Easter!

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Christian persecution, Easter, Easter garden, Sri Lanka

Thoughts and prayers for all affected by the Sri Lankan attack earlier today.  Our happiness is mingled with grief and outrage at the inhumane treatment of our fellow human beings.  Father forgive them, for they know not what they do…

Photo by Candia

 

Bye Bye B-52s!

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B-52 bombers, Brahms, Cello sonata, Cotswolds

 

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

Cotswolds church…

A Clerihew For Our Times

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Beckett, clerihew, Mrs May

Oh, Mrs May,

what are we to do when there’s only one day

left, until we’re floundering,

jusqu’aux cous in merde; unable to sing?

 

 

Dog Toys

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Boris Johnson, dog toys, Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, political satire, Theresa May

as seen in an Oxford shop window today!

Photos by Candia

Centenary of Wilfred Owen’s Death

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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.

Anderson, July 7th, 2015

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2015, Kevin Anderson, Wimbledon

 

Practising his serve.  Obviously paid off!

                      Photos candiacomesclean.wordpress.com

Rennie Mackintosh-‘Resurgam!’

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acrylic, Art Nouveau, charcoal, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, emulsion, Glasgow School of Art, pastel

 

Salisbury Collage

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collage, found objects, poisoning, Salisbury, Skripal, spy, subliminal, trefoil radiation symbol

I have never noticed that there is a kind of ionising radiation

trefoil symbol on one of the buildings in the roofscape.  Unintentional,

I’m sure.  In line with ‘found objects’ and the subliminal, I only saw it after

I had pasted it on!