01 Friday Feb 2019
Candlemas Bells White Purification Snow Piercers
Milk Flowers
Naked Maidens Good Christians Ice Lilies
Mary’s Tapers
February Fairmaids White tears Death Flowers
Eve’s Comforters
Morning Stars
Pentecost Flowers
Mary’s Teeth
Dewdrops
Shrove Tuesday Fools
Flowers of Hope
Dingle-Dangles
Snow Bells Eve’s Tears Mary’s Tears
Candlemas Lilies
c Photo and poem by Candia Dixon-Stuart
14 Monday Jan 2019
Posted in Arts, Poetry, Summer 2012, Writing
Tags
boteh, braes, Burns, Caledonia, cloths of Heaven, dragon's teeth, Ferguslie, Mount Olympus, Paisley, peesweeps, Robert Tannahill, Scottish poets, Skylarks, weaver poet, Woodside
The man who threaded words together, like
silk yarns in a Paisley shawl, showed respect
for his woven jacket and removed it,
carefully, with his silver watch, before
quietly lying down in a culvert,
no longer walking iambically.
A lass singing his lyrics ambled by;
muffled clacks from cottage shuttles faded.
The lava tide which slumbered in his soul
erupted and he saw Mount Olympus
and heard himself ask the gods for a bard
in Caledonia. They said, Not one,
but two are granted: Burns and your good self.
In fact, your verses, like sharp dragon’s teeth,
when sown in the ploughed minds of your peers,
will multiply the poets of your land.
Where the peesweeps and the shy skylarks soar
your resting place will be; no unmarked grave
will contain you: this tunnel’s mouth no stop
for such as your unlimping lines. And now
Paisley Buddy, you are transformed into
the waft of wild mountain thyme on the braes;
the arabesque of a bent cedar tree;
the elongated curve of a boteh,
such as you might have patterned on your loom,
or incorporated into a phrase
now echoing in the winds of Woodside,
or whispering through fogs in Ferguslie.
Tannahill, you wove the cloths of heaven
into Scotland’s literary fabric.
Photo by stephencdickson – Wikipedia
20 Tuesday Nov 2018
Posted in Education, Nature, Photography, Poetry, Writing
Tags
Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart
(The lengthened shadow of a man
is History, said Emerson
who had not seen the silhouette
of Sweeney straddled in the sun).
From Sweeney Erect by T S Eliot
11 Sunday Nov 2018
Tags
Fry's Five Boys chocolate, Great Barrington, Great Rissington, Lest We Forget, quatrain, Remembrance Day, shrapnel, St John Baptist church, villanelle, Windrush, World War1
Photo by Candia Dixon- Stuart
A re-blog from 5/11/16
I visited the church today as I wanted to somehow commemorate five
brothers who were all killed in World War 1. Their youngest brother-
Percy Soul- died of meningitis after the war. He was the sixth son.
Apparently some villagers were annoyed that Mrs Soul received financial
‘compensation’ for her five sons’ deaths in service.
Unbelievable!
Later she moved to Great Barrington. She had three daughters who must
have been traumatised by the loss of their brothers.
I kept thinking of Fry’s Five Boys chocolate, for some reason and I checked
that it was in production when the boys were young. It was. I hope they
were able to enjoy this childish luxury as they ran around the fields,
scratching their names on the beams of a barn. Maybe not, if they were
relatively poor.
(Photo by Kim Traynor, 2013. Own work of enamel sign.)
It was freezing cold today. Inside there were wall monuments to others
who had died – centuries before. One girl had only been 19 when she
expired.
There was a little trapped wren inside and an aspiring organist who
arrived for a practice. I don’t know how he could have attempted to play
with cold hands!
Anyway, I went home and thought I’d try a villanelle. The rhymes are
limited, but there are 5 tercets- one for each brother, maybe. It ends with
a quatrain, where the rhyme feels a bit anti-climactic. But then, maybe it
suits the content… All ready for Remembrance Day. Let’s Not Forget.
The Lost Souls of Great Rissington
So, she wouldn’t stand for God Save The King,
though all five sons lay down for him and died.
For each life she pocketed a shilling.
The candle in her window kept burning,
watched by a girl who’d never be a bride.
And a mother and three sisters crying
was no salve for the sharpness of Death’s sting.
Over the cow-common, The Windrush sighed
and, in a drawer, telegrams were yellowing.
The candle guttered- a Soul was leaving.
The Roll up yonder couldn’t be denied.
No bugler registered this sibling.
In a village barn there is a carving-
names of hopeful lads which emphasised
desires for immortality. Living
in a peaceful hamlet? No, perishing-
even a twin had no one at his side.
While some entrenched neighbours were gossiping,
lethal as shrapnel and more exacting.
(St John the Baptist Church, Great Rissington
Photo by Jonathan Billinger, 2007)
04 Sunday Nov 2018
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.
21 Sunday Oct 2018
We tried to see it at Odda’s Chapel.
Was that a wing, a halo, or just damp?
Our epiphany was not forthcoming,
for all our straining interpretation.
We went to St Mary’s adjacent church.
A child on the path pointed out a sign:
‘To the Angel’ – it wasn’t evident.
Then we walked across an apse’s ruins;
squinted upwards; craned our necks.
The elusive angel was always there.
20 Saturday Oct 2018
Posted in Community, History, mythology, Nature, Personal, Poetry, Relationships, Social Comment, Writing
Tags
Atrebates, Badbury Clump, Belgae, Catuvellauni, King Arthur, Marasnius oreades, mercenaries, Mons Badonicus, mycology, Voltigern
Photo by Lord Mayonnaise, 2012 (Bolton)
Mushroom Observer. Wiki
Ancient boundaries:
Atrebates, the Belgae,
Catuvellauni.
A whiff of Arthur,
as he defended this land
from the foreigners –
those mercenaries
whom Voltigern had welcomed.
Was Mons Badonicus here?
I stumble across
some pushy Marasnius
oreades, which
rejuvenate with raindrops,
blown in from mainland Europe.
Challenged, they go underground.
They know coasts are never clear,
but invasion is a fact.
They are here for the long term.
18 Thursday Oct 2018
Human compulsion –
to be drawn to Vantablack;
to plumb abysses
of consciousness, as the man
who plunged down a hole,
painted by Anish Kapoor.
Should artists foresee
some will interpret the world
so two-dimensionally?
Lost in abstraction,
this viewer interacted;
tested his viewpoint.
Curiosity leads to
empirical challenges.
07 Sunday Oct 2018
Posted in Animals, Environment, History, Nature, Poetry, Social Comment, Writing
Tags
Australia, bilbies, bush tucker, dingos, Dreamtime, Mungo Man, Pintubi trackers, quennet, sedimentation, wattle, Willandra Lakes
Willandra Lakes area, NASA image
post Dreamtime terminal decline Willandra Lakes
bush tucker
Wattle seeds emu eggs dried basin
flightless birds
widespread bushfires preserved footprints wandering child
missed spear
Pintubi trackers
one-legged man
lake sedimentation
bilbies and dingos
empty cranium
covered traces
widespread footsteps bush child dried lakes
Dreamtime seeds
24 Monday Sep 2018
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.
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.
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.
