A Clerihew For Our Times

Tags

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?

 

 

Snowdrop Quennet for Candlemas

Tags

Candlemas, quennet, snowdrops

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

 

 

 

 

The Man Who Threaded Words

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

 

 

Shadows

Tags

Autumn, Emerson, shadows, Sweeney Erect, T S Eliot

 

                        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

The Lost Souls of Great Rissington

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)

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.

The Deerhurst Angel

Tags

angel, apse, Deerhurst angel, epiphany, Gloucestershire, Odda's Chapel, Sculpture

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.

Badbury Clump

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.

Descent Into Limbo

Tags

abstraction, Anish Kapoor, Black Hole, Descent into Limbo, Vantablack

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Mungo Man

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