 The Word is my shepherd, Rachel Clare A little boy is in a lift. He is wearing red shorts and a soft yellow t-shirt. He stands close to his silent mother. So close he can feel the fabric of her coat without her noticing. He is a fearful child and, as they descend, each floor carries its own clutch of catastrophe. She doesn’t say much. He says even less. When the door opens and the light comes in, he doesn’t race out. His younger brother does. His younger brother charges at the world, laughing, babbling, a fearless emperor of wherever he roams. He and his mother follow. They are off to the post office to cash a cheque. The post office, also a newsagents, is squashed beneath the block next to theirs. On sunny days the overhanging balcony devours the light and you are dizzy as you enter the shop. His eyes, always watchful, adapt quickly. He knows what he wants, he doesn’t know why. Whilst his mother approaches the man behind the glass shield, whilst his brother slaps at the colourful packets hanging from a rotating display stand, he steps, head down, to where the children’s books are layered. Glimpses of what lies inside drawing him in. His small hand reaches out and plucks a book from this compendium of dreams. For a moment, his eyes follow the black marks on its cover. He cannot make out the words, he cannot make out any words. He opens the book and begins telling the story of the book. He speaks gently into the silent air of the shop. For a shy boy, this is a Herculean act but he is lost. Clipping her purse, his mother turns from the glass and approaches his performance. Without looking up, without halting the fall of words, he sees her smiling. She stops next to him, listening. Then, her hand reaches out, takes the book from his thin fingers, closes it and places it on the shelf above the one he took it from. He wants to tell her that he hasn’t finished reading the story, but, he cannot read and she is heading for home.  A boy reading, J.H. Dowd We are born into a world of stories. Stories help us hoist shape onto a world that is chaotic, unpredictable, uncertain. Stories give us a place in the world and place the world within our grasp. Each family has - if it still shares words with each other - its repertoire of stories. In the repeated telling these stories calcify. For some, they are clung to, for others they are claustrophobic. Some of us struggle to climb from the crippling family narrative. We limp from it, slowly finding a way to walk in a story in which we are a richly drawn, complex, uncategorisable characters existing in a world with others who share our full humanity. If you look out the window today, you may think what's the point: why tell stories when the maddest, loudest, selfist voices are filling the air with their howls. Or, as the writer Elif Shafak puts it in 'Writing Is a Dog's Life' and Other Thoughts: What is the purpose of fiction, really what is the point of rolling up your sleeves and labouring to craft a delicate sentence, carefully selecting the ideal synonym, or perfecting the punctuation, only to describe imagined events and invented characters when the world outside is on fire? In her playful and poignant piece Shafak refuses to rise from the retreat of her bed, refuses the role of writer because "the world has gone off its axis." In her funk, she is visited by three writers, Jalaluddin Rumi, Albert Camus and Anna Ahkmatova and bemoans how much simpler things were in their times. Perplexed, they each recite their litany of an era's suffering: From plague to purges, from famine to foreign invasion, from cesaseless violence to political malaise and personal sickness. Chastened, Shafak peels off the duvet because: no matter how bewildering and debilitating our world, we write poetry, we write prose, we write our resilience, hope, empathy, and love for pluralism, nuance and diversity, we write our shared humanity through the chaos of our times  1000, Rachel Clare I have always told stories. I spent my childhood retreating from the world and constructing stories in which I could play a more active role than the one I had in reality. And, in which the world's axis may spin in a different direction. The impulse has never left me. Inside this ageing body, I remain a child, I remain a story teller. I keep returning to the playground. Language is a playground: Digging into the mound of words and throwing or placing them together, trying to swing from one phrase to another, sliding through sentences to the whoosh of musicality is a form of absorption, engagement, of being alive. This week I reached a milestone: One thousand daily poems. Every day, since the 26th May 2022, I have written a poem that explores something - an incident, an idea, a book read, a dream, an exhibition, an emotion - from the day before. When I told a friend last week that I was about to reach the thousandth poem, they marvelled at the discipline. It isn't discipline, it's a necessary delight. It's serious play. In celebration of the milestone I have selected six poems to post below. Maybe there's something in there to delight you.  Maria or Maria Friday 10th January 2025 She has two faces one is revealed in playful guise after her demise the other is dead in her living eyes breathe voice escapes yet the shape is shot with the desire for history’s excising there are no lines in her flesh to rouse the lines she must speak her collapse is a calling to life there she is as credits roll a real character hurt and happiness in a look that flies caged there she is why was she hiding behind a broken ode to fame  Three days left Wednesday 11th December 2024 We do not notice the darkening we are crouched in to small comforts laughter, the faces of others, another pint death pulls up a chair with an offer you’ve only three days left with this fragile breath, what do you do some say heroin is a house worth visiting others want to plunge in alcohol’s pool I would want more of this this sharing of laughter, language dancing between listening hearts, and us not noticing the darkness when it comes  Life, Love & Death in Sicily Tuesday 11th February 2025 After the Letizia Battaglia exhibition at The Photographers Gallery The world does not exist in black and white yet it does shade into the mastery of drama where good, evil, innocence and a brown, is it, bag of bread, clutched close to a child’s chest as she chomps on the torn crust offers some protection from the troubles of complexity, shoot, if everything could be parcelled up and labelled, knotted string strangling the struggle beyond naming, then I wouldn’t be such a mess, thank god for Letizia and the shadows which sounds like the name of a band, she sings bloody songs framed for us to sway before chapter and verse fat feet, hard skinned, the patina of a fathered land soiling her soul, there’s no easy ascension in colour despite the martyrdom of mopping, slopping, sautéing, baking raking through a child’s hair for lice and dreams most dreams are dead, murdered in infancy, a nation of ideology got there early, placing the gun in eager boy’s hand, who doesn’t want to be like the swaggering men who have stuffed death into a sack and dropped him, weighted, in to the Tyrrhenian Sea, they are blind to the constant pop of bubbles breaking the surface  A practical madness Tuesday 17th September 2024 The morning begins with murderous thoughts I know nothing about the drosophila melanogaster only my desire for destruction of the hordes hanging on the sherry bottle, sleeping on our painted angel investigating the cool enamel of the sink, they creep from damp sponge, like most battles the scent of futility seeps into the bloodlust in last year’s staging the whip of the towel splattered hundreds against mirror and white wall before the triumphant flick brought our source of light’s shade clashing with a fragile bowl under the drunken direction of a swaggering war god, both lost their shattering a sure sign my mettle wouldn’t shape a warrior rampant zeal has been swallowed by researched stealth, patient hands glugs of wine are shared amongst the jars, sugar sprinkled with spells a drop of washing up liquid to clog their tiny black pads the vinegar fly, the pomace fly the banana fly will die their fifty day stay cut short sozzled in the red of my Rioja  When the moon darkens Sunday 30th October 2022 Madness dances next to us all sometimes in murderous dress sliding along the platform before possessed arms thrust out and push us to unguarded rails others have brothers who run naked their chakra leading the third eye a merry dance amidst the traffic & then there are those whose silent descent is witnessed behind the closed doors of intimacy where lethargy & lunacy take turns at the sticks to drum the beat or let it fall fearful screams of the paranoiac slipping into silence, rigid, catatonic until the final chaotic outburst from where no one returns frightened shrieks score the quiet & hell is let loose until the ambulance arrives & dancer is bound in a jacket, straightening them out for a drugged absence there are no jazz hands in this farewell  A sketch Friday 8th September 2022 After Ferdinand Hodler His wife waits whilst he watches her die a model lover lying in death’s slow sheeting anguish is drawn in to the bed’s penciled grid as looking is dried into detailed drawing twenty times he renders her to stiff paper little flesh left, thin legs end in the heft of patent leather shoes, rosary beads snake the clenched hands that hold her weightless frame from flying to a final disappearing, tears cannot come, they will smudge the artist’s eye
9 Comments
|