In Spring this old magnolia puts forth
White hands held up in prayer, is
One hundred saints on one worn trunk,
And passers-by lift up their faces.

Oh birdie, I would have shown you it,
And you, just old enough to see,
Raising your own white hands, so tiny,
Astounded at the sudden brightness -

Your absence underneath my heart
Still haunting me in all things perfect,
Weightless as just one hand praying,
My clenched fist in the midst of glory.

January Daylight

Is cold one day in five, is wet,
Is kept awake by gales,
Is astonishingly still by dawn.

Is grey as a tupperware box, is clear,
Is an arctic glass-cold summer,
Is thick with salty water,

Is shrunken, swallowed in dark, is brief,
Is seen through windows only,
Is gone, with an escort of street-lamps.

That’s your lot for today. Like I said, still busy.

Damn those Management essays.

(Photo courtesy of Ramson)

At dawn of day the apple-thief
Comes dancing in her leitmotif,

Slotting each foot in a previous slot
Made yesterday in the orchard plot,

Returns again to where left off she -
The leafless, branch-bent apple-tree -

And among the windfalls idly browses
Safe from guns so near the houses.

So dainty-legged, her sister-beast,
Reducing apples was reduced to feast,

And seeing her pause, I think in pain,
Oh, she the apples, we the gain

Posting on the first of January was naturally out of the question, as I only got home from my parent’s residence [not a typo, just the one parent at said residence - Ed] at An Hour We Shall Insist Was UnGodly and I think I went as straight to bed as possibly consistent with eating dinner, faffing about and pretending to do laundry. The second, I had a migraine. The third, I went to work. Which was, as ever after a prolonged season of lie-ins, bloody knackering. And anyway, I was sleep-deprived, as the husband was unwell and therefore uninclined to lie still and breathe quietly, and I had migraine hangover, which consists of deep, persistent dorkishness, inability to spell, and tendency to walk into door-posts. Today, husband still tiresomely not in charge of his own respiratory passages, but I’ve got the hang of this coherent thought thing again [hah!].

And so, to prove it, here is a little New Year poem for you all. Lucky you.

Arbitrary

The date, the hour of sunset, midnight.
Weather. Floods. All arbitrary.
The right-now so-dark well of the year
Rises high above and out of sight

And yet begins afresh. It’s here
At the starting-gate, so arbitrary,
We each eyeing the climb ahead,
Denying or feeling or succumbing to fear,

Here, that we believe, and it is said,
Is our redemption, arbitrary,
While the endless sunlit year spreads out
Chance after chance we could take instead.

I assure you, despite the extreme obviousness of above title, that it arrived well before the rest of the poem. And then the first two lines. You could say it is the poem that is obvious, in turning its own title into a motet like that.

I was temporarily uninspired to continue, and left the two lines lying about on a jotter somewhere. And then, of course, yesterday I was still awake considerably after midnight [see above] so I tried to bore myself to sleep by considering my two lines, and ended up setting myself a little technical exercise – a strict rhyme scheme, the repeating use of the word arbitrary. And it says a lot about my general keenness at work at the moment that I spent over an hour the next afternoon polishing and fiddling with the results. So there you have it.

On comparing this poem to the nameless one about Christmas in the previous entry, I note that am clearly Mistress Grouchy-Pants these days. [Heigh ho].

No snow, no frost, again this year,
No ice nor sleet nor hail;
The south-west wind brings in the rain,
The rain brings in a gale,

And twinkling Santas, reindeer, stars,
Strain against their ropes -
Not dreams of warmth and food and light,
No need for self-same hopes,

No dark, no cold, no starving night,
And this not one bright jewel,
No candle held for sun’s return,
No hopes to dash – oh, cruel -

[Methinks she has inhaled hard in the vicinity of Emily Dickinson.]

It is very safe to say that I have spent entirely too much time writing ‘practice’ poems, designed, say, to exercise one’s ability in the teeth of Spenserian stanzas on the set subject ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. But I was technically writing a PhD at the time (don’t ask [Oh, please don't ask - Ed]), so it’s hardly surprising I spent hours and hours on this kind of thing instead.

At night the rain is snapped out by the gale,
A waterlogged white sheet spread through the air
And pinned to grass and sky just like a sail
Whose trailing edge is tethered to my hair.
It pulls me forward, astray, without a care,
A sailing leaf, a fishing-boat, a bark.
Lost under seas of stormy sky I dare
Go home the long way through the roaring dark,
Across the streaming grass, across the tree-bound park.

Above the oaks the air lies two miles deep -
A mass of wind and water roiling by -
And all the darkened houses crouch asleep
Beneath the roaring oceans of the sky.
On watery nights like these we humans lie
Or safe indoors or stray beneath the rain;
A few of us can hear the weather’s cry
And walk abroad despite the anchor-chain
That lets us run yet brings us safely home again.

At last I went away from the wet trees
Between the rushing walls of rain and light
That streaks the rain. The street-lamps that one sees
Are saffron gate-ways splitting up the night.
They mark me as I come back from my flight
Into the elements to loose my soul
And wash it clean in storm-winds like a kite.
So wet and wild into the house I stole,
Still fierce with gales and oceans, bright-dark night, and whole.

Now, is this a fairly good poem, or an utterly shit poem? We’ve all looked at it for hours, and we can’t quite tell.

*Outburst of sobbing*

[As much as I enjoyed it, I also did it because I thought your poetic development over the past seventeen years might be of some little interest.]

You have got to be joking. Poetic development?

[Well, from very formal, if astonishingly sentimental, adolescent maunderings, to aggressive sub-Plath free verse, to very formal, if completely anal, adult reticence]

*Long pause*

Now, look, it is possible I have a great deal to say on the matter, at some point, if all else fails, but I have just spent five hours on an assortment of trains, and while I did indeed get a seat, it was near a man who drank beer, belched, and whistled, so, if you don’t mind, I will pour myself a very large gin, slap the Editor upside the head, and go to bed.

Good, I say. Good. I don’t care for this ‘generating content’ lark.

How about another spot of juvenalia, while she can’t burst in and stop me? She wrote this one when she was barely 18, and falling in love with her future husband. Also blond, by the way.

Everyday I love your absent image
Hurts dully; and I have never cried for a man before,
I have never cried,
Though you are missing,
Though
Without you I am only myself,
As self-sufficient as glass, not
Needing an image to reflect,
Without beholding being nothing.
And I burn for your superimposition, I
Burn for the hands and voice
That make me ring through like a glass bell that
Ring me like a stone into clear water,
Alive,
To frighten silver fishes out,
Away from the sun-pierced centre,
Away from the shiver of bubbles,
Away from the place where only we are
Necessary as air or water.

Reed has long since given up vers libre, as she now finds it affected and embarrassing (oh, she’s so going to kill me when she gets home!). Me, I don’t know. A certain lack of counting syllables and considering rhymes for ‘orange’ can be excusable, surely? In any case, whoever brings Walt Whitman into the argument first wins.

No yawping, barbaric or otherwise, by order of The Management

But as she’s not here, and left me in charge, I think I shall do something truly evil (heh heh heh) and dig out her early poems. And, oh, look, here it is, perfectly preserved (in turquoise ink, mind you) – the first serious poem she ever wrote for her own satisfaction and no one else’s.

She was fifteen when she wrote it. Not only fifteen, but fifteen at an all-girls’ boarding-school. And above all, not only fifteen and nunnish, but she had just lost her virginity to a handsome blond boy, and while she did indeed spend a few weeks feeling crazy in love, and while that particular memory is still one that makes her smile smugly to herself (lucky bitch), said blond boy did wander off into the hazy outer distance shortly thereafter. He was but the first in a series of handsome blond muses. What is it with Reed and blonds? She prefers brunettes, or even bald men, if you consult her list of uber-crushes*, but invariably ends up going to bed with blonds.

So, the first serious love-poem of her life.

Remember, she’s fifteen. Be gentle.

I shall spill my heart out to the winds,
I shall misspell love-poems for none to see,
And in the stillness of midnight,
Breathless and blinded by moonlight,
I shall make your name a rhapsody.

I shall spill my heart out to the winds.
I shall turn and see your eyes change colour
Like water, like a shadowed lake,
Blue and green the rippled wake,
Like the first hushed breath of summer.

I shall spill my heart out to the winds.
I shall beg of them to let me rest
Curled like a petal in the peaceable dawn,
Part of a rose, still folded and warm,
At the heart of the quiet, my head on your chest.

*(Oh, very well, Johhny Depp, David Tennant, and Patrick Stewart)

The man is patient, kind and good.
Yes, there were others I have kissed
Who seemed to promise that they would
Be one of patient, kind, or good,
So I should make it understood
That there’s a reason why they missed:
This man is patient, kind, and good,
Unlike others I have kissed.