The Temptation of St Anthony by Sidney Nolan

Tags

Australian art, billabongs, Black Mist, catharsis, Cooper's Creek, desertification, drought, Emu Fields, eucalypt, gamma rays, grail, Graves' Disease, isotopes, manus dei, Maralinga, Mount Hopeless, nuthatch, Regin, Rimbaud, Sidney Nolan, St Anthon's Fire, Temptation of St Anthony

Image: The Temptation of St Anthony by Sidney Nolan: NGV, Victoria.

 

Rimbaud: I sought voyages to disperse enchantments

that had colonised my mind.

 

Where the sun strikes and the prickly thorn proffers

no shelter and the cicada no relief,

there’s a dessicated torment and no

solitude in the desert, as Christ found.

Harsh glare distorts even a saint’s vision.

The reclusive can lose their perspective.

Gamma rays will cause some to lose their minds.

 

A goanna is my constant totem

and a huge dragonfly lures me to leave,

but Satan has monopolised the air.

 

If I kill the dragon; dip my finger

in its blood, will it reveal its secret?

Will it transform me into a prophet,

who may see the approach of The Black Mist,

or experience St Anthony’s Fire?

The drought has made the billabongs brackish.

The gold cache tempts for a month of Sundays.

 

The Manus Dei issues no blessing;

no intervention.  The struggle is mine.

The mind is its own place and my free will

may choose to receive the full stigmata.

 

I foresee The Darkening Ecliptic;

the universal diagnosis is

Graves’ disease – even for haloed beings.

Should I go to the wars and fight Regin,

or heed the nuthatches’ advice and act?

I must carry knowledge in my own grail:

the only way to be a dark hero.

 

My own survival strategy was the

weaving of eucalypt leaves, to combat

oppressions of desertification:

devil-delivered snakes, beasts, scorpions.

Yet each seemed to lack power in itself.

If I was confident and mocked demons,

might I reduce them to a puff of smoke?

 

The last man, or woman, on this scorched Earth

will carry in their bodies isotopes,

blown from Maralinga and Emu Fields.

The thunder brings no catharsis as yet.

Each must pass Mount Hopeless; find Cooper’s Creek.

The Red Chamber

Tags

Chaupadi, gahut, goth, Kalidasa, menstruation hut, Red Chamber, Saraswati, Vasant Panchami

Giclee Prints available of above image.

Another young girl’s death reported after being banished to a menstruation

hut.  She inhaled toxic fumes from a fire.

This poem is my outraged response to the barbarity of the practice:

 

 

 

My turn in this red chamber, wrapped in jute,

drinking bovine urine, for I’m impure.

I may not touch a plant, food, or a man;

I may not milk a buffalo, or bathe.

I’ve come here from menarche to this goth

and I’ll come here until my menopause.

 

I look at the night sky; try to count the stars;

wonder why Saraswati is angered

if any of us wants to touch a book.

She sits, pen in hand, on a white lotus

and leaves no trace of menstrual fluid,

her clothing as unstained as mountain snow.

The swan at her feet drinks milk at its will.

I’m told she is the best of mothers and

she dwells upon the tongues of poets too.

I pray she will preserve me from lightning;

keep all snakes away and send me to school;

pray that my mother will hand me flatbread

and not fling it at me, as to a dog.

 

Chaupadi.  I study my child’s face

and sip gahut to purify myself

from drunken animals who molest me.

I pray the rats will not come here tonight.

It’s cold – cold enough to kindle a fire,

but I must stay alert, for my sister

was found lifeless, smoke-choked, six months ago.

 

Tomorrow will be Vasant Panchami.

I hope the goddess will help my baby

to learn some alphabet, so she’ll read

how to rebel, without bringing bad luck

from past generations into the next.

Then her destiny will no longer be,

what we’ve all shared: the lowly cattle shed.

 

The Blood Moon has arisen over the peaks.

I pray for synchrony; for company

and hope that, at the chaupadi dhara,

I’ll meet another girl who’s not a ghost.

Oh, that Kalidasa would take a dip

with us one day and share our suffering!

 

Don’t sleep standing up. Just one more day now.

.

 

 

;

Time Marches On

Tags

Graves, Japanese poetry, memento mori

Photo of kanji by Jmettlen on Wikimedia Commons

 

Even our friends’ graves

will one day be ploughed over.

Grief diminishes

through time and we smile once more.

Calligraphy on

headstones will be eroded.

The deceased’s peers die;

his name is then forgotten.

The pines which are deemed to live

for a thousand years

are, in actual fact, chopped down –

disrespectfully,

or just pragmatically,

according to how life’s viewed.

St John the Baptist, Cirencester

Tags

Anne Boleyn, Benjamin, Cirencester, communion chalice, Dissolution of Abbeys, fan vaulting, farthingale, Gethsemane, Henry VIII, Herod, Salome, St John the Baptist church, wool church, Woolsack

(Anne Boleyn’s Communion chalice, donated by Elizabeth I’s physician,

is displayed in a niche in the above.)

 

 

Had her head been brought in on a platter,

she might have seen a vaulted porch, with veins

like gills, or fine tracery of brocade;

or diagrams of a nervous system;

or skeletal frames of hooped farthingales.

That narrow windpipe staircase on the right,

constricted as her white, extended throat,

might have reminded her of a Tower

and the futility of counting steps.

 

This holy place was built on virgin wool.

It was a fold for sheep, who stood before

shearers and then were led to swift slaughter.

Here is a wine glass pulpit, slim as waists,

pre-gravid: a stem for those who could grasp.

 

A Lamb prayed such a cup would pass from Him,

but had to drink it to the bitter dregs

and she had her Gethsemane as well.

Benjamin, caught with a stolen vessel,

was offered clemency – but she had none.

Her gilt chalice, though charged with sacred blood,

conferred no immunity,  nor did it

prevent Dissolution of the Abbey.

 

Criticism of a current favourite

did John the Baptist no favours either.

But the dancer in Herod’s court was sly –

perhaps more so than this sloe-eyed woman,

who ultimately was beheaded too.

 

May, the traditional time for losing

one’s heart to one’s love, was a nuptial month,

but also a month of execution.

 

Cherry tree confetti in the graveyard,

proleptic of this afternoon’s wedding,

has already been bruised and downtrodden.

 

You may sit on a Woolsack, or a throne,

and gain the whole world, or lose your own head.

 

(The engraved acanthus decoration

evokes immortality; lineage.

Though its thorny leaves speak of sin and pain,

it was an apt gift to a physician,

from the grateful daughter of Anne Boleyn.)

 

 

 

Cow Parsley Summers’ Lease

Tags

cow parsley, Shakespeare sonnets, Summer

hath all too short a day.

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart.  Words by Shakespeare – sort of…

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.

 

Adlestrop, Easter 2017.

Tags

Adlestrop, chicory, Edward Thomas, Evenlode, Gloucestershire, Jane Austen, Napoleonic Wars, Syrian refugees, wistaria

Adlestrop Church

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart

 

The Post Office is closed; a flyer pokes

out of a letter-box; thin rivulet

trickles down a bridleway, aiming for

the Evenlode.  A profusion of blue

chicory shivers in the breeze.  The church,

sanctified by its topiary cross –

reminiscent of Jane Austen’s necklet

which she wore as she left the rectory

on merciful missions to village poor –

stood firm during Napoleonic Wars.

Its roof vault is as azure as that sky

the poet contemplated on his brief halt,

when his depression lifted on hearing

birdsong, which trilled above the hiss of steam.

 

From trenches, could he see that cloudless square?

When someone failed to set the station clock,

did Time itself revolt at what would come?

 

 

Could we also be on the brink of war?

Yet pale Wisteria seems to conquer

fear and heraldic tulips blazon hope.

 

A yellow poster in the bus shelter

promises that all money raised

from a talk on Edward Thomas will fund

Syrian refugees – will help those ‘wontedly,‘

or wantonly, driven out of their homes.

Who will attend?  Some wealthy weekenders?

 

Thomas never actually made it here,

although his spirit is ubiquitous.

Pervasive silence invites us to pause,

in the name of Poetry and Beauty,

before all clocks are permanently stopped

and there are no more birds in Gloucestershire.

 

 

 

 

 

A rose is a rose is a rose…

Tags

a rose is a rose is a rose, Gertrude Stein, rose, Sacred Emily

 

Quotation:  Gertrude Stein, from the poem Sacred Emily

Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart

A Green Thought in a Green Shade

Tags

Buscot Park, Canada geese, Oxfordshire, Peto water garden

                      Yesterday at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire

                       Reference to Andrew Marvell poem

Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart.

All Rights Reserved

 

Blackthorn Beauty

Tags

American poets, Badbury, blackthorn, blossom, Joyce Kilmer, Nature poems, Spring

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart

 

I think that I shall never see

a poem lovely as a tree…

 

a tree that looks at God all day,

and lifts her leafy arms to pray…

 

Upon whose bosom snow has lain

who intimately lives with rain…

 

Poems are made by fools like me

but only God can make a tree.

 

 

Joyce Kilmer (1886-1914)