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Monthly Archives: July 2016

maybe tidying the house

29 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by sallyevans35 in Uncategorized

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Many a poem tells part of a story. It’s something a poem can do, select an element of narrative and concentrate on that.  We don’t have to know what it was that might never have happened, in Maurice Devitt’s poem,  or why the two friends never met again, in Sarah L Dixon’s. 

Short poems can be packed so full of story. These can be big stories, the way people come and go from one’s life, the way family memories stretch into the past and future in Rona Fitzgerald’s poem. Or a story can be implied without ever being detailed at all, as in J C Elkin’s sonnet, a conceit and a simile of ‘S.S. Resentment.’

We are given a small anecdote about a little girl, with Mavis Gulliver, yet that anecdote brings us a whole world of character.

All these poems are short, and yet their stories have extensive backgrounds.

00doorway

Maurice Devitt
Maybe

if he had spent more time
tidying away his dreams
double-checked the mirror
let his eye sneak
an extra second on the swell
of her breast
to cut a loose thread
from his sleeve
picked up the phone
when he heard it ring
rustled under the stairs
for an umbrella
had trouble with the latch
turned back
for the lunch he had forgotten
seen one magpie
and waited for a second
maybe then
it would never
have happened

Originally published in Boyneberries

 

Our First Day

Sarah L Dixon
Our first day

For inspiration, I traipsed frozen ground
that Thursday in October ‘94
locked out of Chemistry – there, I found you, at the
end of the violent orange corridor.

Curled in the quadrant recording your thoughts,
thoughts of a future that won’t contain me.
Your confident smile pulled – a friendly force,
your flop of fringe invited intimacy.

We talked for three hours, easy together,
opened our journals, shared poems of our own
and mingled moments of childhood pleasure.
Rent-a- Ghost, Tiger Pig, Button Moon.

That Thursday in October ‘94
the only time we met, our only hours alone.
I thought we’d always know each other.

Standing on the Cast-iron Shore – Commended in Leaf Prize
and in 2008 Anthology. A response poem to Christina Rossetti ‘The First Day’.

00pegs

Rona Fitzgerald
Next

She wondered what was left after they had all gone
the children to their adult lives, university, marriage
and he to some adventure that they could not share.

She tried to remember the things she loved
skirmishes with Beethoven on the piano, exploring the Beats
and the Brontes, going to the cinema in the afternoon.

She was young then, supple, now there is time
endless time, she doesn’t know whether she can do it, alone.
For today, maybe tidying the house is enough.

Published in Shorelines, 2012. New Voices Press

 

00ship

J C Elkin
Adrift

I spy your pain vast as the briny blue.
I smell the creosote that seals your hold,
but don’t let enmity be what you rue
in logging a life’s voyage when you’re old.
S.S. Resentment is a mutinous ship
of blaggards bent on vengeance, lust and greed
since first its bow was christened in the slip
of poverty, abuse, neglect and need.
But pirate mates have nothing warm to offer
when sleet is raining down upon your soul.
The gold is locked inside the Captain’s coffer
each time the ship is headed for a shoal.
It’s time to cast your spoils into the foam.
Set sail and chart a new course bound for home.

First published in the Society of Classical Poets, Vol. 1, 2013

 

P1060555

Mavis Gulliver
Blue     
              for Olive

Your second summer
eyes wide with wondering
feet eager for adventure
a string of endless questions on your lips.

You danced with butterflies.
Common blues
blue as the summer sky
bright as your smile.

‘Blue,’ you said, ‘blue butterflies,’
as you watched them fly and settle,
fly and settle
on the wild thyme on the hill.

Later we saw hydrangeas,
huge heads heavy with blooms.
‘Look,’ you cried.
‘A bunch of butterflies.’

First published in ‘Shropshire Butterrflies’ (Fair Acre Press, 2011.
Ed. Nadia Kingsley)

Be verra feart

23 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by sallyevans35 in Uncategorized

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We’re looking at people poems today, and most of those I have to hand seem to be about women. Some are funny, while one, from Rona Fitzgerald, is very tragic. Sarah L Dixon gives us  one in the voice of a small boy, indeed in the speech of a small boy (she has a series of these). And there’s a wedding poem, not quite what you might expect, either the wedding or the poem, from Barry Fentiman-Hall.

A ghazal follows, from J C Elkin of North America,  with its very effective rhyme system and its subject of a middle-aged woman, for whom not too much sympathy is offered.

First, Wullie Purcell’s Scots poem Wicca Woman, a neat description of an indivudual and a type. In fact the poem becomes Scots half way through, and it is for the reader to work out why.

Thanks to all these poets, and to the others who have sent in poems which are waiting on file to make my future tasks more pleasant. To send poems, email to sally evans 35 at gmail dot com, giving publication details, which should be from 3 years ago or earlier.

And wouldn’t it be nice to see some more poems about men?

00frog

Wullie Purcell
Wicca Woman

She’s a slight demure woman
with a smirkle
permanently etched
The Wicca Woman

At a glance
a genteel
mid to upper classlady
Dressed neatly
Demurely
Angelic
The Wicca Woman

But beware
Be nice
Cross her not
The Wicca Woman

If her tongue changes
tae auld words
be canny
gie her room
The Wicca Wumman

An if her een hae a glint
En she luks et ye sqint
Haud yer wheesht
Luk onywhaur
But no directly et hur
The Wicca Wumman

Cos she’s got powrs
abune yer knowin
Afore ye ken it
ye’re a puddock
or hae plooks
Or worse
Sae dinna cross
The Wicca Wumman

Be feart

Be verra feart
O the Wicca Wummin

from Looking Through Glasses, Read Raw Press 2009

 

00Drumcondra

Rona F|itzgerald
Untitled

From 1966 until 1972, I cycled to school in Drumcondra passing the High Park laundry. In 1993 the nuns who had run the laundry applied for a licence to exhume 133 women who died while incarcerated there, as they wished to sell the site to a developer. They could provide death certificates for only 75 women. During the exhumation the remains of another 22 nameless Magdalene women were unearthed.

When I allow myself, I can still feel
A tiny hand, fingers entwined in mine.
I never wanted to let go.

But what life could I have given her
enclosed in a laundry where nobody
will use my real name.

There is no saint called Maebh,
we will call you Mary after
the mother of God

First published in Shorelines, 2012. New Voices Press

Frank Exchange of Views

Sarah L. Dixon
Frank Exchange of Views

You not Big Boy
You not lady

You not woman
You Mummy

My Batman
My Big Boy
My Darth Vader
My beautiful

My the boss
You no the boss
You Mummy

Stand back
My shut it!

My want cuddle
My the boy
My the winner
My doing a wee in the bath

You put pretty on ears
You look like lady
You not lady
You Mummy

from York Mix 2013

 

00wedding

Barry Fentiman-Hall
Stuff The Wedding

We had a big day off when I was small
Someone wrote “stuff the wedding” on a car park wall

 It was about a girl with big bloomers and a see through skirt
And a bloke with big ears and a nicely pressed shirt

As she walked up the aisle in a crumpled dress
We sat in the garden and had egg and cress

They duly produced an heir and a spare
Then she sat on her own and he lost his hair

They both got around and the babies got bigger
The spare turned out ginger and we tried not to snigger

It ended in phone taps and headlines and divorce
So she went to the shops and he got on his horse

Start the car Henri before we’re missed
As you wish your highness but I’m far too pissed

Run rabbit run, the Di is cast
As a reporters car couldn’t get past

Crocodile red tops cry their princess is gone
Dupes at the gates and Elton fucking John

All they give is a circus and they take our bread
And demand our obedience when they die or get wed

Here we go again wearing a familiar ring
Now it’s my turn to write “stuff the wedding”

first appeared in City Without A Head (Wordsmithery 2013)

 

00ghazal-1

J C Elkin
The Change

A goodwife at mid-life does strange things she would never have dared before –
selfish things, healthy things – sharing gripes never aired before.

More frank than polite for once in her life, she’s apt to cause offense
when her candor singes feelings that she might have spared before.

Known as an anchor, she’s nothing to fear by rocking the boat just a little.
She is who she is –confident, secure –spilling secrets not shared before.

The faster youth slips, the tighter she grips with diet, yoga, makeup
and clothes that flatter by showing skin she’d not have bared before.

Determined now to make up for lost time, she changes opinions grown stale,
and dares to give voice to future hopes that had nagged, undeclared, before.

Goodbye time-sink clubs, PTA and church dinners. She has other fish to fry.
Fresh faces aplenty can head up committees that she would have chaired before.

With renewed energy she tackles old dreams that she had once thought too daunting, challenged by age to pave time’s road where she’d felt unprepared before.

And as she roars off in her little sports car, Jane Eyre changes stations.
Life’s new sound track, maybe reggae or rap, blasts songs never blared before.

The Change (Kestrel, Fall 2011)

 

That big blue dream

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by sallyevans35 in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Bill Cushing’s poem for Miles Davis has to go at the end because it is so long, but perhaps it holds the key to a theme of dedication to ones dreams and ideals. Sometimes a dream is something simple and rare, as in Nat Hall’s poem, sometimes it leads to convolutions of family expectations and relationships. Will it be dead by the time you get there, like the star in Douglas Thompson’s poem?

And then things can go terribly wrong. Not much worse than they did for the pilot carrying Enola Gay to Japan in August 1945, and for those behind him who pushed science and aviation to their limits without properly facing the human devastation involved. In a week that has provided both comedy and tragedy on and beyond our news screens, we will take on board Emma Lee’s serious poem of that event we hope never to see repeated. And the similarly tragic end to a dream of someone who had taken risks to escape one terror and lost to another, in the poem by Gabriel Griffin.

It’s hard to see how we can possess our chosen dreams without understanding the failed ones. After the other poems whose subjects range from delight to tragedy and horror, I hope you will be able to enjoy the Miles Davis, um, improvisation at the end of the page.

Bringing you Keep Poems Alive generally weekly, I’ve made it for Sunday teatime after a busy week. Thanks to all the poets. Look them up and see what else they have done.

HAVRA

Nat Hall
Havra

There, there,
don’t hold your tears.
It’s in your eyes that big blue dream,
like suspended on each ripple—
holding hostage that small lighthouse,
a safe haven west on our side
where the sun slides
through silk & salt.
I taste the sea.
We moor our souls on that lone beach,
walk through tall grass,
those fields of jade—
me next to you,
sit on the edge of a headland
watching the world,
tomorrow fade
into the mist of that moment.
We share the food of our own thoughts,
a glass of love, sweet slice of life,
Atlantic sky—
we seek treasures in-between stones …
For all I know, the watermark of all your smiles
printed onto the horizon.
It’s in our eyes that big blue dream,
I still feel it back on mainland—
it tastes like salt there
on my lips.
For all you know,
I’m still drinking the Atlantic
like a long shot of
tequila.

First published in The New Shetlander, 2006, and
From Shore to Shoormal; un rivage à l’autre, BJP, 2012

Stars by Douglas Thompson-120716

Douglas Thompson
Stars

On clear winter nights my father
would take me walks around the town
and point out all the stars to me
naming them old friends which
had guided him across the world’s seas
pursuing Hitler’s U-boats
and brought him home to this:
the surrender of marriage
the defeat of children as he saw it.
He thought himself a failure somehow
measured against some vast never-quite- defined
scheme of greatness, to be a writer or an architect.

And here am I both now. The irony is not lost
on I who have no children. But there was he
with four, valuing none of them. Yet am I being fair?
There were the walks, the talks, the dreams.
I was a poor underage substitute no doubt
for the intellectual audience he craved
but all too soon became the only one he had
and then to my shame: even I stopped listening.
Left him to lonely meetings with himself
In urban coffee shops, writing me letters.

It’s like the stars I suppose, just as he explained it:
setting out to reach one, you’ll find it dead most likely
by the time you get there. We all miss
each other, and the point of everything.
And all we have is light, these mirages of memories
veils of doubt and gravity that tug at us with their love
as we slip beyond each other’s orbits.

But when I look up and see The Plough
I remember him, the way to find the North Star
and make my way home.

(first published in Ambit Issue 213, summer 2013)

 

hIROSHIMA

Emma Lee
6 August 1945

  1. Paul Warfield Tibbets, pilot Enola Gay

 If this bomb could be carried in an airplane, I could do the job.
Aged twelve I distributed Babe Ruth candy bars in a biplane,
ears ringing with the weird music of piano wire
on the wings, the wind like a lover’s breath.

Mom backed me. So I named the B-29 Enola Gay for her.
On the forty-first anniversary of the Wright brothers’ flight,
we began training. Our target was a bridge.
You can’t see people from six miles up.

We returned as a bright purple cloud boiled
upwards above an ugly mass of black smoke
that resembled a pot of bubbling hot tar.
We could only hope civilians were in bomb shelters.

  1. Hibakusha

 A sudden shout, “I hear a B-29!”
No time to get to a shelter so I dropped to the ground.

Morning became night, my skin shreds.
Burnt numb, surrounded by boiling clouds,

I couldn’t get up. I was at the cusp of adulthood
knowing I’d lost the life I’d planned.

I had stared death in the face
and witnessed the birth of my second life.

Heat: needed water. I stumbled to the river.
People were dead or zombified by shock.

It took ten operations to straighten my fingers.
Hours of movement to stop scars stiffening permanently.

Forty-three years on, I suffered breast cancer.
My wounds still scalded by hate.

If we had had the bomb, we’d have used it.
I learnt the enemy was not America, but war.

I am a hibakusha,
a survivor.

First Published in The Screech Owl (2012)

rocky-shore-336614_960_720

Gabriel Griffin
Lament for an illegal immigrant   

No moon, but fishermen
are used to that and the sea’s chanting,
the descant of the nets. The decks silvered
with sea verses, the minims
and trebles of fish hushed
into songbooks of ice.

Something didn’t sing, humped
in the net, thudding onto the deck.
Its ears heard no notes, its eyes
were blind to the men standing there,
its throat choked with words
that no-one would hear.

They let the sly octopus
sidle to the ship’s side, forgot to stop
the herrings’ arch and leap.
The sea moaned, the fish
slipped out of tune, the kittiwakes
hurled screeches like broken strings.

The men unfroze, thumped
what didn’t sing, what was lost for words,
over the hissing deck. Tipped what had
no hope, had never had a hope,
back to the sea. No word spoken, no
hymn, no prayer.

But the wrack in the nets wept. The sea
beat its fists on the boat. And the wind got up
and howled till dawn.

Miles Davis Banner

Bill Cushing

“Music isn’t about standing still and being safe.”
                       — Miles Davis (1926 – 1991)

listen
two weeks after you died
a quarter-million thronged
by the St. Johns River
to hear the music you had spawned
hoping to see you
but
even in death
you never looked back
they were all there
Hannibal Bird
Chick Jo-Jo
Red Jaco
Bean Dizzy
my favorite Freddie Freeloader
isolated
you
were a beacon
a flagship for messages
of the heart
back to the crowd unbowed
that proud dance-walk
announced by muted horn
that spoke
and broke
through all the bull
and told us about a place
Miles
ahead of everyone else
you spent a lifetime
thinking for yourself
speaking to every generation
playing it all:
jazz blues
funk rock
fusion
categories took
a backseat
to creativity
and rhythm
space
and feeling
spirit
I remember fourth grade
picking up a horn
then laying it down
rock and roll was my world
what did I know
seven years later I heard
it was in the Garden
where you brought me back
to music
I walked all the way home
Miles
from that train station
my head pounding with sounds
frantic-fast as the subway
I spent the night on
those African rhythms
you used decades
before anyone else
even thought to
filling my head
letting me know
I’d have it all down cold
if I could walk
as cool as the notes you heard
coming from
Miles
you had that thing
that style
that spark that was
a blue flame
jumping
off a gas stove
igniting everything everywhere
touching the genetic
resonant
frequency
in all

Published in Stories of Music, vol 1, from Timbre Press (2015): Holly Tripp, editor

 

These Hands are Mine

06 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by sallyevans35 in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

 

Poems this week are about dreams and  wishes, also the viewpoint of age, and how experience follows us round. Mavis Gulliver’s hands speak to her of her life. David Whippman writes of the place of coffee in his personal memories, especially  those of desire.

Harper Lee is an elderly lady in Angela Topping’s poem: the Mockingbird has been singing for fifty years as Harper Lee lives on. 

Sandie Craigie looks in the mirror and sees ageing although she is younger. (This is one of Sandie’s few poems in standard English.) Sandie stopped dreaming, dying at age 42 but the majority of us dream on, and wish on. These hands are ours.

I’m adding a fifth poem, sonnet-style (it has only 12 lines) by Maurice Lindsay, written when he was in his eighties and published in Poetry Scotland in 2008. The poem is a memory, recent or distant, and it is happy, quiet and calm. It’s there to remind us we dont ever have to give up.

To submit, please send poems first published at least three years ago by email to sallyevans 35 at gmail dot com.

Posts are normally published at the weekend, anything from Friday to Sunday but we aim to have different poems up every Sunday for your perusal.  I have been distracted rather pleasantly this last week so we are late for last weekend but early for the coming weekend.

 

00Hands

Mavis Gulliver
Hands

accepting
that these hands are mine
is hard
     impossible
to track
     the change
from dimpled chubbiness
through varnished elegance
            to these
these hands
look so much older
than I feel
palms
    a maze
a labyrinth of lines
knuckles
    prominent
in thinning skin
index finger’s
   swollen joint
            arthritic curve
middle finger
      ridge rubbed
by the pen
but still
      they write
connect with memories
       strive
to keep the flow
make sense
       of a lifetime’s
            living

IOTA, Issue 81, 2008

wait-1052487_960_720

David Whippman
Caffeine Dreams                               

Latte, mocha,  were my champagne.
I splashed them across the bows
of every proposed adventure,
each anticipated relationship.
In cafes and friends’ apartments
we sipped over travel routes.
And how many times I looked into girls’ eyes
through the steam of cappuccino.

Everything sank on launching:
we trekked no further than a second cup.
And “Come back for coffee?”
turned out to be non-Freudian.

These days, Proust-like, the smell of roasted
takes me back to those days of potential,
little of it realised. Still,
I know a good espresso when I taste one. 

This was published a few years ago in a coffee-themed anthology


 

00HarperLee_2007Nov05

Angela Topping
A Garden for Harper Lee

Of course there’s a mockingbird.
It’s been singing for fifty years,
a different song each time.

There’s an old oak tree for shelter,
The earth is cool underneath,
the trunk too thick for embracing.

There’s a path to the house door
lined with purple and yellow primroses
The ragged lawn’s daisy-dotted.

No one plays in the tree-house now
Jem and Scout grew up, moved out.
Magnolias are banned like sad memories.

Arthur Radley loves this garden
though he never walks there.
He can only peer from windows.

He misses the children
but keeps close his memories
in his mind still watches their play.

First published in Paper Patterns, Lapwing,  2012

00mirror

Sandie Craigie
Mirror

And I…care not for vanity
nor idle conversation
around the word –  ME

And you… in all your depths
can but reflect

Yet I have fallen for
your clear persuasions
that what you show
is all there is to see

and you… through time
have drowned the child in me

Yet somewhere in your eyes
I saw a young girl
but time has stolen,
I have grown old

How foolish now.
I came to you, believing
Oh Mirror, you
I thought you knew my soul

written c 2004, published in Coogit Bairns, Red Squirrel Press.

00horses-1069419_960_720

Maurice Lindsay
Night Incident

Your ponies are out, the man at the front door said.
They’re grazing in a field down the loch road.
We put on clothes to face the dark spring night,
and set out in the car, carrying torches.
Half way down the road to the loch two eyes
looked up from grazing as we crossed the fence.
Cautiously, so as not to disturb
the beasts, under cover of darkness, we crawled
closer, then lit torches. Two roe deer,
disturbed at eating by the sudden light
rushed past us. Then we called the ponies by name.
Out of the darkness quietly they came.

first published Poetry Scotland 2005

 

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