Tardy blog and no excuse...

Whoops, I have been neglecting this blog only a matter of weeks after starting it. Very bad. My excuse is that I only have internet access at work, and I have actually had to do some work recently. At work. The humanity. Anyway, as it's Valentine's Day, I thought a love poem of sorts would be in order. I wrote this thinking of Sutherland, and it could really apply to any kind of love I think. Here we go:


Here, love, lie

Here, love, lie
against my heart’s open weave,
for it is the gaps in the wool
that make the warmth.
I’ll be your bed of bracken spread over the felted hills,
like the razorgrass cleaves to the dunes,
for you are that colour,
pale as sand, freckled
as a plover’s egg.

My land is not always wild, see
how the sky raises its birds
on its threads of milk,
how the sea cradles
its herds of seals,
my heart is hard as diamond
but it yields,
as moss to a nest,
at your touch.

On Language

A Petrarchan sonnet (iambic pentameter again with an  abba cde rhymescheme) this time and much more fun than the last maudlin effort. Have just noticed I might need to change the very boring and repetitive title! Can only get the last two lines to scan properly spoken aloud, so it probably needs some syllabic tweaking somewhere.
 
On Language
 
Exercise your brain, they say! And stave off
all time’s ravages, senility will
retract his ragged claws, and better still
you’ll tell the young ones they can all sod off
back to ploughing language’s threadbare trough
with txting, LOL!s and grammer errors’ shrill
I mean, it’s quite enough to make one ill
but choose instead to look askance and scoff,
because, as you know best, the rules apply
from here to kingdom come, although I doubt
you still address your friends as ‘thee’ or speak
as if upon the BBC, or cry
foul each grocer’s apostropheric flout;
the stickler’s house of cards begins to creak.

On Language's Infinity

Trying to mimic a kind of eighteenth century sensibility in this one both in tone and form, although the sonnet form itself is older - it's Shakesperean sonnet form, with an iambic pentameter rhymescheme of abab, cdcd, efef, gg.

I wrote it for my aunt, after we knew her cancer had come back, terminally. I never had the heart to give it to her at the time and I think I might have been right about that - it seems now to be to be too didactic. The living should probably not try to tell the dying what to think.


On Language’s Infinity

In language’s infinity I saw
our own immortality, for what thing
could ever dispossess us of that law,
now I can see the threads to which we cling
dissolve as stones abraded by the rain
no longer disclose the names they cited,
whatever their incumbents’ sober pain.
Careful words are by erosion sited
just in advance of meaning’s careless drift;
our luck is to catch sight of some small part
in the brief gleaming of the motes’ slow shift;
and hope this lets enough into the heart
      to crack apart the vain eternal plea
      and grasp the brief and glorious finity.

Icebergs

One of the things I tried to do last year was to get a grip on some of the different forms of poetry there are - rondeaus, villanelles etc, and I tried a lot of these out on poems written for my parents. Here's one for my mum's birthday, it's a villanelle.


Icebergs

I’d give you the dew at the break of day,
the sweetest nips of clover,
the icebergs calving in the bay

some rich and broken music you could play,
the smell when the rain comes over,
I’d give you the dew at the break of day

a linen tablecloth for you to lay,
a song from a bothy drover,
the icebergs calving in the bay

these riches for your birthday,
silver from your lover,
I’d give you the dew at the break of day

and glorious things from all the world away
here for you to discover,
the icebergs calving in the bay

the brightest flowers growing from the clay
a feather from a plover,
I’d give you the dew at the break of day,
the icebergs calving in the bay.

To the Rain

First of all some stuff from last year, because it never really found a home and maybe some of it deserves to have.

I wrote this last summer, in high spirits at the start of a new relationship. The relationship didn't work out, but I like the hopefulness of the poem.


To the Rain

Meet me in the park by the school
it’ll pour but I don’t care
what it does to my hair
with your hands in it,
it’s my second favourite sound,
and my second favourite smell,
you’re my new first -
I hope that means something
if only to prove it to the rain.

January light

Well, hallo there. I started a blog once before but never got beyond a draft of the third post. It was going to be a food blog (as you can tell from this blog's url) - reviews mainly with perhaps some recipes. Then I realised how many other people had (excellent) food blogs, with great recipes and reviews of restaurants I'd already been to on them.

I decided the world didn't need another food blog.

Today, I decided that I might need to blog something though - much more anonymously than the first effort was intended to be. Something like I imagine scream therapy to be - shouting into the dark, the ether, the cosmos, whatever, although not necessarily with the portentous overtones that that implies. Something new and positive for a new year. I'm not sure if I need other people to read or if I just need an archive that's at least technically public, rather than just saving things on a file on my PC, but I guess I might find that out.

The point of this blog is hopefully to write and post at least one poem a week for at least one year. I hope that (at least) some of them are worth reading.

The title's from my favourite poem of all, by the way. Enjoy, I hope.