One thousand ways of telling...

                                                     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