Hagley Park

I wanted to get a photo of the cherry trees bravely flowering under the bare branches (see my previous post), with autumn leaves fallen all around them. That's when I discovered why I havent been taking so many photos lately. It's cold. and damp. There are large stretches of the park where there is no parking, or where all the parking is full of commuter cars getting free parking for the day and walking to work. So I had to drive to where I could park, and then walk. I drive past the end of the park every morning, and often see beautiful light effects looking to the east where the sun breaks through low clouds like mother of pearl. But thats in a "no parking" area. I did see nice light effects there yesterday morning, but by the time I walked back around, there was nothing but even grey cloud.

Oh well. Here is one of the cherry trees - almost finished flowering now. I wonder if it will set fruit? The photo doesn't really do justice to the fact that all the other trees are in the season of autumn or winter.



And this is the last photo I took for the day - it had just started to rain again. I realised that not only do I not like the cold and wet, my camera doesn't. So the photo was taken hastily before "red umbrella lady" disappeared from view and before I put the camera away. I was disappointed to find that it had come out blurry. Maybe it evokes the rainy day better that way. What do you think?

Winter

Some days in winter start crystalline with frost, and then become bright and clear. Today was not one of those days. Today was gloomy and grey. It was a driving-to-work day. By the time I was on my way home, all the cars had their headlights on even though it was theoretically not dark yet. I drove through the park. Some trees were bare, others were still half clad, like ragged old bag ladies.

Strangely, there are small cherry trees blooming in the clearings under the large oaks. I think maybe they have been raised in greenhouses and recently planted out, confusing them about the seasons. They looked way too pink and pretty huddling in the gloom. I wanted to tell them they shouldn't be out after dark. I wanted to tell them to go home, their mothers would be worrying about them. Instead I drove on home. I hope they survive the frosts.

It's Cold...

In the morning I jump out of bed and straight into a hot shower. Then before I can get too cold, I put on bra and panties, a thermal singlet (vest), a brushed cotton shirt and brushed moleskin trousers, a wool/angora vest* on top of that , then a woollen cardigan, shoes and socks. Before I leave the house I add a woollen coat, thick sheepskin gloves, and a woollen bobble hat.

At that point I'm ready to walk to work in the frost, and if I walk briskly enough I arrive warmer than when I left home. Or, I'm ready for a game of strip poker in a warm house. If I can find one.

*I'm trying to be trilingual here. New Zealand English, UK English and American English. Hopefully all my readers can figure out which garments I am describing.

Making a Difference #2

As I said in a previous post, I have decided to make one change in my lifestyle each week that will benefit the environment. This week I have continued to walk to my new job on Tuesdays and Thursdays (thus benefitting my waistline and mental health as well!). My new focus this week is on packaging.

I noticed that our local branch of Lush had a promotion on their solid shampoos. By taking in one empty plastic shampoo bottle for recycling, I was able to get a free sample of solid shampoo, which needs no more packaging than a small piece of paper. The shampoo seems more expensive than the brand I usually use, but if their claim that you can get eighty washes from a hundred gram bar turns out to be true, it will turn out cheaper.

Lush is a wonderful shop to walk into because it smells delicious. They aim to use as little packaging as possible - besides solid shampoos, you can buy solid conditioners and solid deodorants. The latter are free of chemicals such as aluminium, and I intend to try them when it's warm enough here to actually need any.

Links:
There are stores in many countries with associated websites, but if you go first to their US site you will find links to all of them - just click on the national flag.

Poetry Thursday: Winter

This is my first completely fulltime week juggling two jobs. It's just light when I leave, and dark by the time I come home. We have had frosts the last few mornings, so I stride out wearing a woolly hat, sheepskin gloves and a warm coat. This morning I hung laundry out before I left. The cold bit into my fingers and made them ache. When I arrived home I found that P was planning roast pork for dinner, so I baked some muffins and biscuits to take advantage of the oven being on (one of my power saving measures). After dinner it was my turn to do the dishes. Now I'm ready for bed. So I am posting an old poem from six or seven years ago which seemed appropriate as I gazed at trees in various stages of dress as I walked to work this morning. Many are completely bare. But this tree in our garden is still covered with beautiful scarlet foliage:



(I think it is a liquidambar, though P. claims it is a maple. But then, all the other maples have lost their leaves already).
Strangely, in the park I drive through on my way to my other job, there are newly planted cherry trees and they are all covered in blossom. But the cold tells me it is definitely winter, not spring. Definitely the time of year for warm flannel nightgowns.

Into Winter

The oak struts
across the stage of the sky
She flaunts her red garments
and tosses them at her audience
winking over her shoulder

The slender birch in the corner
slips her yellow dress from her shoulders
and climbs into bed

While the pines on the hill
keep their prickly green nightgowns
buttoned firmly up to their necks
all through the winter

**************************

More Poetry Thursday here

Head in the Clouds

The temperature has been plunging in the last few days, but on Saturday it was sunny and it was forecast to be fine for most of Canterbury. So on Sunday morning I set off north for an orienteering event with another club member. This is one of our further away maps, about an hour and a half drive from Christchurch. Within an hour we had run into heavy drizzle turning to rain. By then, however, we had committed ourselves so we continued.

Orienteering events are not cancelled except for extreme weather conditions such as hurricanes, or snow chest deep on the course. (This is not for the protection of the runners, of course. It's just that the controls would blow away in a hurricane, and in chest deep snow the first runners would leave tracks that would give an unfair advantage to those who followed!) So I donned thermal long johns, a polar fleece sweater and a waterproof jacket and set out. The more fit and athletic club members were much more lightly clad, stripped for action. It was a score event. A normal event sets a course to be completed in as fast a time as possible. For a score event, you go out for a set time, and visit as many control points as possible within that time, choosing your own route.

It was held on a farm in rolling to steep hill country with outcrops of limestone rock. I climbed up from the start/finish tent to the top of one of these outcrops, from which I later took this photo:



ran (or rather, walked) along the limestone tops:



then across a gully, up another limestone outcrop, then across a valley, collected some controls around the hills on the other side, and finished down through the pine trees in the first photo, visiting the final (for me) control at the end of the pond before returning to the finish.

I had chosen the 60 minute option (choices were 45, 60 or 90 minutes) and returned with a minute and a half to spare. So I was well satisfied that I had neither wasted any of my time allocation nor incurred penalty points for finishing late. And the rain had more or less stopped, though it was still very cold.

Runners finishing along the farm track in the valley:



In the evening I watched a documentary on the possible events when the world's petrol supplies start to run out - possibly as early as 2016. Scary stuff. And the next morning I picked up the newspaper to read about the opposition to a very large new wind farm being planned in the south of the country, in Central Otago.

I do understand that there is a great love for the landscapes of "Central", which are bleak in their beauty. And I am not well-acquainted with the particular area where this project will be located. Still, some of the arguments don't seem to be valid. For instance, there is a suggestion that wind power is too expensive and that global warming is better mitigated by more effective emissions filters on fossil fuel power stations. However, whether or not they burn cleanly, you can't generate power from fossil fuel power stations if the fossil fuel has run out. And as for the cost, as it gets scarce, the cost of petrol and diesel will skyrocket. I love walking in the hills, but personally, I don't feel that wind farms detract from their beauty.

The documentary claimed that there would be a very difficult time while we adjusted to much higher fuel prices, and great scarcity. And that then when we adjusted life could be "rather nice". Personally, I don't see it. Yes, we will have to slow down, and not rush here there and everywhere. And that could be "rather nice". But I can't see that it would be "rather nice" to be unable to get to a hospital when needed because there is no fuel in the tank. Or to find that greater numbers of people are freezing to death in winter. Or many of the other possible problems.

In New Zealand at the moment we have around 50 - 60 % of our electricity generated from renewable resources (mostly hydroelectricity and geothermal steam). At least in that respect we are fortunate. In other respects, being isolated and dependent on imports in many areas, we are not so fortunate. It would seem to me that the more electricty we can generate from renewable resources, the better. And at least you can build a wind farm without drowning a whole valley, as a new hydroelectric power station does.

Shameless Lions

I have adopted a lion from the Shameless Lions Writing Circle, created by Seamus at Shameless Words. He is one of 48 lions from Lyons, France. I first discovered this writing circle on Chiefbiscuit's blog, and was wondering whether to participate when I spotted this fine fellow among the lions not yet spoken for. Of course I knew straight away that he wanted a home on my blog, where both patchwork and poetry are welcome.

I have named my lion Florian, which seemed a fitting strong and masculine name, with a touch of the floral.

Members of the circle have been asked for a piece of writing - poetry or prose - maximum 48 words, to celebrate their adopted lion.

Here is mine:

Don't snigger. I am not what you think.
The women who made me had little,
but they chose only the best pieces
for me. They knew what it was
to fight. They sewed fierceness
and strength into every stitch.

Making a Difference

I have a new job in this street:



It's my third this year. I still have job number 1 which is 18 hours a week. Job number 2 lasted two months (no, I wasn't fired, it was meant to be temporary) and now job number 3 is for 20 hours a week which means Wednesday and Friday are job number 1, Tuesday and Thursday are job number 2 and Monday is half of each.

(Just to be clear: some of you thought I was doing three jobs at once - no, I was doing no 1 and no 2 together, and now I am doing no 1 and no 3 together. In both cases, the two jobs add up to a fulltime job which is no more than a lot of others do, but still a shock to the system after fifteen years of fulltime motherhood, a few years of study, and about eight years of working parttime)

Busy, busy. Strangely I don't feel more tired, I feel energised, although I am getting less done outside of work. But the hours I do have are more productive. And I feel useful, as we really really need the money. P. still hasn't found a job, and unfortunately I can't earn nearly the hourly rate that he was earning, but part time accounts jobs are way more abundant than full time IT jobs.

The new job has its compensations. For instance, I get to walk there along the river and through this reserve:



Since it's the middle of winter, I leave home just after sunrise and leave work just before sunset. Sunsets like this one:



Actually, this is Thursday's sunset, which wasn't nearly as spectacular as Tuesday's sunset, but I didn't have my camera with me on Tuesday.

It feels good to be able to walk to work for a number of reasons. Firstly, because it helps the environment. In fact, I've been wanting to make an environmentally friendly change of some sort each week and blog about it. Not to be smug about what I'm doing, but as a way of making myself accountable. Especially since I wrote a couple of weekends back about how the answers are never simple.

I do believe that it's easiest to make changes when there is self-interest involved. I had been enjoying walking on the hills all summer, and now it is too dark to do that after work. And I'm not a great fan of jogging on roads and footpaths, I find it too hard on my knees and heels. The walk to work is just about the right distance - around half an hour each way. That's an hour's walking each day, though only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

So, the title of this post refers to making a difference in a number of ways - making a difference to the environment, making a difference to my weight and fitness (I hope), and making a difference to the family budget. And hopefully, I will see some more spectacular sunsets.

Poetry Thursday: Summer Break

The ladies at Poetry Thursday are taking a summer break. This doesn't mean no Poetry Thursday, it just means no prompts, so we are free to talk about poetry in any way we wish (which we are, anyway, since all their prompts are Completely and Totally Optional).

It seems a bit strange to be having a summer break in winter. But then, our winter has been a bit strange so far - remarkably warm. In Christchurch it was six and a half degrees (Celsius degrees, which are almost twice as big as Fahrenheit degrees) warmer on the first day of winter than on the first day of summer. In summer there was Antarctic melt water coming up the coast, and bits of icebergs floating by. So perhaps global warming will mean cold summers for New Zealand. I hope not - I hope last summer was an aberration.

Back to poetry. The Montana New Zealand Book Award nominations have been announced - this is New Zealand's major book award. There are three books in the poetry category, and three in the "best first book - poetry" category. So I decided to borrow them all from the library and see what I thought. It just goes to show how popular poetry is (or isn't) that I was able to get all three nominated books in the poetry category straight off the shelves, without placing a request.

The books are "The Goose Bath" by Janet Frame, "The Year of the Bicycle" by James Brown and "One Shapely Thing" by Dinah Hawken. By next week I may have read enough to give an opinion on them. The awards are for books published in 2006, and judging by two poetry books that I have bought this year, I suspect that 2007 is going to be a better year for New Zealand poetry. We'll see.

In the meantime, the James Brown book reminded me of a workshop our small poetry group arranged with James Brown a few years back, when he was Writer in Residence at the local university.

One of the things we talked about was list poems. I can't actually recall any titles or authors of the examples he gave - I do remember one was a very moving list of "things found on a roof" written shortly after the events September 11. He had us write lists, and then we each contributed one item from our list to a sort of group "pool", after which we wrote poems containing some or all of these items.

The items I used were, as I recall, Wellington, a ginger cat, white curtains and the book "Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex but were Afraid to Ask".

Here is the poem, which relates to a trip I made back to Wellington, the city where I was born and grew up (and where Peter Jackson's film studio is located):

The Whole Story

“Remember the house in the bay” she asks,
“the only one with any flat land?
Peter Jackson bought it. Sometimes he lands a helicopter there.”
I know the one. It’s across the road from the beach
where we used to keep our red dinghy.
I’ll walk round the bays and take a look,
maybe I’ll stop at the dairy and buy an Eskimo Pie.

The cottages nestled against the cliff haven’t changed,
except for new paint, and the four wheel drives outside.
A curtain flaps at a window. On the sill a ginger cat sleeps
beside a book that offers “All You Ever Wanted”.
I reach the dairy. It’s now a café crowded with people.
I turn back. A jogger pounds the sand.
My sister says she once saw Michael J. Fox there,
but it’s only an anonymous short man.
Back at the open window I find the cat has jumped down
into the nasturtiums. Now I can see the whole story:
“To Know About Sex But Were Too Afraid to Ask”.

A Winter Walk

We are having a long weekend here - happy birthday, Your Majesty! (I believe her real birthday is in April, but the first Monday in June is when it's celebrated in New Zealand. I think June was the birthday of an earlier monarch).

The warm weather we have been having all autumn is continuing, though it cooled down a little over the weekend. Still no rain. The first day of winter (June 1st) was 6 degrees warmer than the first day of summer! And I think I spotted cherry blossom when driving through Hagley Park - I need to stop on the way home from work this week and check whether my eyes were deceiving me.

Yesterday I went for a walk up the hills with my camera. I'm a bit tired of the standard "view from the top" or "landscape with sheep" shots, though. So I looked for something else.

The way the sun caught these grasses took my eye. It's a colour shot, though it came out almost monochrome.



I clambered up a bank to get up close and personal with the remains of an abandoned car:





I've had trouble photographing spider webs. I realised that of course, the autofocus on the camera doesn't "see" the fine web, and focuses on the background detail instead. I need to get out the manual to find out how to override the autofocus. In the meantime, I fooled it by holding up a finger and locking the focus on that, then removing my hand before I took the shot.



My favourite "rock with a personality", which I've photographed before



but not from this angle, in which he looks rather sleepy:

Sunday Scribblings: Town and Country

Anyone who reads my blog regularly will have a fair idea of where I live by now. Do I live in the town or the country? Well, here is the view from the back upstairs window of my house:



Those hills are only about ten to fifteen minutes walk away, if I want to walk in the countryside. On any weekend, there are probably as many people walking, jogging or mountain biking on the hills, surrounded by sheep, cicadas and magpies, as there are on a city pavement.

In the other direction, on the north side of the house, it is about half an hour's walk to the edge of the city centre, where there are libraries, cafes, museums and art galleries. I'm a city girl at heart. But it has to be a small scale city, one like this in which the countryside seeps in and around and through the city, with green spaces everywhere. This way, I have the best of both worlds. I can be in touch with the natural world without the hard work.

On musing over the phrase "town and country", I realised that they are not two different things. They are both two aspects of one thing - places in which man has tamed the landscape. In the city, it is mostly a built landscape. In the countryside, it is a tilled and cultivated landscape. I think "country" and I see fields, fences, crops, domestic animals. To me, there is "town and country" and then there is wilderness. Those special places that we can go only as guests. Tangled forests, rugged mountains, unmodified grasslands such as savannahs, tundra and prairie, and the great frozen stretches at the North and South Poles. These places are shrinking, but they are precious, and we need to cherish them, even though we don't feel at ease there.

More musings on "town and country" at Sunday Scribblings

(This is my 300th post. I'm amazed!)

Awards and Competitions

It seems it's award and competition time of the year. (But then, perhaps the season for awards never really stops). In the news, firstly, a New Zealand girl reached the semi-finals of the United States national spelling bee.

We didn't have spelling bees in New Zealand when I was a child, which gives me mild cause for regret because I would have done rather well. They seem to be a new phenomenon in the last few years. And the winner of our national contest gets sent to Washington to compete there, which I think is a little odd for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because it's the United States national spelling bee, not the International Spelling Bee. But secondly, because we don't spell things the same. Presumably Kate swotted up on words like "plough", "theatre" and "favourite" before she went, learning to spell them as "plow", "theater" and "favorite". Or more likely, these words are too simple for the contest anyway.

Apparently Kate's "heavy accent" gave the judges some problems - they debated for several minutes whether she had said "g" or "j" when she spelled "jardiniere" - finally they had to ask her for another word that began with the same letter.

Come on now - New Zealanders don't have heavy accents - it's Americans that have accents! Given the regional variation, New Zealand accents can't be any more difficult. Just unfamiliar, I suppose. We hear American accents of all sorts on TV so much that we are used to the differences.

Actually, my favourite spelling story relates to a New Zealand family that lived in the States for a couple of years. Their daughter came home from school and announced she had scored 19 out of 20 on her spelling test. "Over here", she said, "they spell Revolution with a capital R".

Also in the news recently is that New Zealand novelist Lloyd Jones won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for his novel "Mr Pip". The Christchurch City Libraries blog celebrated the win in slightly inflated terms, declaring the book had been named the world's best book. The last I heard, the Commonwealth excluded a few of the larger countries of the world, including the United States, and a very large portion of the non-English speaking world as well. Still, it's a noted achievement, which leaves me thinking it's time I read the book (though no doubt the library now has a large queue to borrow it, and my book buying funds are a bit limited).

It had me thinking about a passage in a short story I read, called "The Life Coach". **

Erica wonders what book Anna is reading and Becky promises to ask. She rings back later that week:Snow Falling on Cedars.
"You're kidding? Anything else?"
"The Shipping News?"
"Oh dear."
"Well I liked it, especially the movie. And there's..."
"Let me guess. Captain Corellis's Mandolin."
"White Teeth actually. She couldn't really get into Captain Corelli."
"Becky, that's a book club reading list from eight years ago. She's a fraud."

Well, I haven't read White Teeth myself yet, and I presume it's still worth reading if it was worth reading when it first came out. I'd like to think that good books last more than a year or two. A couple of the others mentioned are on my book shelves and I'd be happy to re-read them. Do we just have to read the newest, latest thing?

Speaking of book clubs, I've noticed a disturbing trend when I've been browsing in book shops. some books now come complete with "book club reading notes" at the back. Looking at the notes, they seem to offer discussion questions at least as bad as the worst any of my school teachers came up with. If I were to join a book club, I'd want it to be like my poetry group. No set questions, just honest discussion of the personal impact of the book. I can't imagine joining in a club where we discussed set questions from the back of the book, as if we were thirteen years old again.


**The quote above is from a book called "The Six Pack", which was the result of a competition for New Zealand book month last year. The winners, judged anonymously, in categories of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, get a substantial cash prize and the book of six winners is sold for $6.00 which is fantastic value given that no other paperback can be bought in New Zealand for under $20.00 these days.
Five of the winners are chosen by judges, and the sixth is chosen by public vote. This year's entries can be found here.

Photo Thursday on Friday

Over at Create a Connection the Photo Thursday topic is water. Specifically, Nino asked for summer water images but it's winter here. Actually, it doesn't feel like winter as we have just had the warmest May on record.

I'm a bit late with this - that's the penalty for being asleep when the other half of the world is awake. I suspect the topic was posted while I slept on Thursday night, and then I've been at work all day.

Here are a couple of photos I took of the estuary, very near the open ocean, when I was returning from orienteering a couple of weekends ago. I had a little trouble with the second one as the sun was just off to my left, shining on the camera lens, but I thought the low afternoon sun was quite atmospheric.

Poetry Thursday: Rivers

This is more or less the first poem I wrote, that is, the first poem I was satisfied with from the first poetry workshop I attended as an adult - I'm not counting poems from my childhood and teenage years. (There was a long gap after that while I played at being a scientist and then a stay at home mother).

We had three prompts which I combined in one poem: "drought", "river" and "ice". Since the Poetry Thursday prompt for this week was "rivers", I thought I would share this one.

Drought

Here where the winter rain
froze in the cracks
and pushed until the rocks
came tumbling down

Here where the spring swollen river
with the strength of young love
swept me off my feet
and I fell into the cold, sharp shock

Here now the river has grown old
lies shrunken in a stony bed
the grasses withered on the banks
and the rocks feverish in the hot sun.

****************************

More river poetry here

Life Lines

Over at Poetry Thursday, Jim Brock has invited us to share lines of poetry that are particularly meaningful for us. In Jim's words:

lines, by a poet that stayed with you, that you could not let go for the life of you, and then in a paragraph (or two), describe a moment when these words arose in your life in which they brought you understanding, insight, solace, reconciliation, or comfort.

To me, reading this, I felt we were being asked to share not just favourite lines, but lines that whether literally or figuratively, saved our lives. And at first, I couldn't think of anything. I didn't feel that poetry had affected me that much. I've had a comfortable life, after all. I'm a fairly level sort of person. I can balance a cheque book, come up with a rational explanation for most things, and a practical approach to most problems. I was bullied somewhat in primary school, (being a bit nerdy), but I remember my family and my childhood as happy. I think of myself, I realised, as one of those egg-shaped childrens toys with the weighted base, that wobbles when pushed but never falls over.

I have always had enough to eat, a roof over my head, access to medical care when I needed it, books and education. I've been married to the same man for (gulp - is it really that long?) thirty five years. Our children still like us, as far as I can tell.

And then, if I do have difficult emotions to deal with, I don't turn to poetry for solace. When I was younger my approach to crisis was to sleep a lot. More recently, I find the most effective way of getting through is vigourous uphill walks.

Thinking about this, I realised that it's my lack of needing to be saved that poetry has saved me from. My ordinary, steady life. Poetry has taught me to look for the beauty and wonder in things. And the strength, and the power, and to listen to my emotions even when they talk in whispers, and go underground after an hour or so in the spotlight. Poetry reminds me to be human.

As for the lines that stick with me, I can't say why exactly. But here they are:

I married the way moths marry
I married hard

by Olena Kalytiak Davis, from a poem called "In Defense of Marriage"

(I found this poem on the wonderful Poetry Daily website, a few years back, but unfortunately as they only archive the poems for a year, it's not online any more. I believe it can be found in her book titled "And Her Soul out of Nothing".)

For more life lines click here

Time for a Photo...

We are having a wonderful mild autumn here. Since the early settlers introduced trees from various parts of the globe, some are bare already while others have barely started turning colour.

I took a stroll this afternoon and took these photos:

Some extra seating has appeared at the local bus stop!



A closer look. Perhaps someone thought they would wait in comfort.



This tree/shrub on the nearby corner always seems to glow at this time of year.



I feel privileged to live so close to this beautiful river:

Simple - Or is It?

We all want simple solutions. It's easier if there are nice neat rules. For instance, I've had global warming on my mind a lot lately. What can we do to help the environment?

When my children were at school they had a speaker on environmental issues who told the children that they should bring their lunch to school in a lunchbox rather than a plastic bag. The thinking of course, was that the kids who used plastic bags were using bags that their mothers had bought, and that were thrown out after one use. My children took their lunch in plastic bags. So the other kids hassled them about it - the simple rule was "use a lunchbox". Actually, I never bought a plastic bag. They used the bags that the bread came in, and folded them up afterwards, into their pockets, to reuse the next day.

Then there's car pooling. It's better to have two people in the car than one, right? Well, on the days I drop my son at university on my way to work, we use more petrol than the days when I drive alone. I have to go a kilometre or so out of my way, and if I didn't give him a lift, he'd catch the bus.

Low energy light bulbs are better for the environment, right? Except that there is the worrying reports that they contain mercury, so what happens when they end up in the landfill?

And then there's food miles - locally grown food has to be better, surely? I don't know. If I want tomatoes at this time of year, should I buy New Zealand tomatoes or those flown in from Queensland? I suspect the Australian tomatoes are grown indoors and the New Zealand ones in glasshouses. Do they use fuel to heat the glasshouses or do they rely on passive solar heating? Unfortunately that information isn't widely available. (If you're in Britain, do you buy local tomatoes or those shipped in from Spain?)

We have kerbside recycling here, and of course I put my paper and plastic out for collection, but I can't help wondering about the amount of fuel used in the trucks that collect it from households, and then the shipping of the paper or plastic to wherever the factories are that reuse it.

I'm not advocating doing nothing. Sometimes things are simple. And sometimes it's more complicated. There are things we can do to simplify our lives - manage on less (less goods and less mindless activity), but there is no substitute for information and critical thought. Thinking is something that we shouldn't try and simplify.

More musings on "simple" at Sunday Scribblings.

Poetry Thursday: Writing About the Past

Since my poetry group are beginning to talk seriously about our next book, I decided to go through my files and print out all the poems that I might potentially include, with a view to editing them and arranging them in an appropriate order. It's interesting to see what topics and themes tend to recur in my writing. I'm thinking that one way of organzing most of my poems would be chronological - not the order in which I wrote them, but the order of the subject matter.

There are poems that stem from my interest in genealogy, and which are either about my ancestors, or about imaginary ancestors. There are others that arise from incidents in my childhood, or from my own children, either when they were very small, or when they were older. Then there are more immediate poems, often about places I have been orienteering, or the hills close to home that I explore on foot. And some are harder to classify, being a mix of recent observations, the beauty of certain words, all sorts of trivia floating around in my head, and a dose of imagination.

Early on in my poetry writing career, I submitted several poems to a certain literary magazine. The rejection letter that came back told me, among other things, that beginning poets often write poems based on nostalgia, but "I prefer the here and now". This set me wondering about the here and now. What is it? If I walk in the hills, and think about what I've seen, and then write about it that evening or the next day, it's not "here and now" any more. It may be the recent past, but it's past. If I sit in a coffee shop, and write about what is in front of me, by the time the words are on paper it is past - even if it's only five seconds. So, everything is about the past. And at the same time, everything is about the here and now - what is here and now in my brain. Any poem is the world filtered through the mind of the writer, and the mind contains it all in the here and now, though it has been gathered up in the past.

Even the words we use were learnt in the past. One of the poems that was rejected was apparently "nostalgic" because it bore the title "What my Science Teacher Told Me". Well, it included a bit of scientific information I had learnt in high school, but it was actually about my thoughts on relationships as I was experiencing them at that time. Our brains like to mix everything up!

This poem, for instance - is it about the past or not? My greatgrandfather is clearly in the past, but the poem is about the experience of looking for the spot where he was buried, which was very recent when I wrote it.

Looking for Samuel

Samuel Arthur Wiltshire 1861 – 1905

I count down rows, across plots
to the number in the cemetery book,
a missing tooth in a jaw full
of crooked gravestones.
What did I think I would find?
I tried to tie an anchor around your neck.
Forgive me. There is nothing to keep you here
No concrete slab to roof you over, keep the rain
from you. No yew tree sending down its roots
to prise your femur from your pelvis,
nor flesh-nourished rosemary
carrying its aroma across town
on the nor-wester. May your bones rest.
Your hollow sockets gaze at nothing
but earth and sky. The rain has long since
dissolved your flesh, trickled rich and brown
through aquifers to creeks and streams.
Old sailor, you mingle with rivers
and return on the ebbing tide
to the sea,
to the sea



Samuel's unmarked burial plot in the Addington cemetery, Christchurch.

Posted for Poetry Thursday

More Orienteering Adventures

This is the map of the orienteering course I did on Sunday. The event was much closer to the city than the last one, on this headland which separates Lyttelton harbour from Christchurch city:



Looks like gentle friendly territory to run on, doesn't it? Well, partly - in fact the course planner was very kind to us - but then there were controls like this one:



You may need to click on it to see the details. At the foot of the large rock is a runner and an orange and white control marker. The marker has a punch attached, to clip a card to show that you have been there. Each of the numbered circles on the map represents one of these control markers which has to be found and clipped, in order. You can see another runner approaching the marker from the top of the rocky cliff. From where I took this photo, the control is easy to spot. It's not so easy coming from the direction that the runners were coming from. Did I say runners? Some of the younger club members are like mountain goats, but I was certainly not running for very much of the course. I think I did manage a slow jog in one or two places.

Despite the fact that I am way fitter than last year, my time still put me near the tail end of the field. But I had a good time, and still had enough energy left to go and help collect controls at the end of the day.

On the way there I spotted all sorts of views that I thought would be ideal to photograph on the way back. But by the time I was heading home, the low afternoon sun was glaring fairly much straight into my camera lens. This shot is taken from further back along the headland, looking out over the fringes of Christchurch city. The seaside suburb of Sumner is just below, and beyond it is the estuary of the Avon and Heathcote rivers, with the long spit of South Brighton separating the estuary from the sea.

Poetry Thursday: A Small Smile

This week's prompt at Poetry Thursday was "humour". It was suggested that we might, for instance, take a joke and turn it into a poem. While I don't think any of my poetry is laugh-out-loud funny, I do have a few poems that are in a lighter vein and might perhaps induce a small smile or at least a twitching of the corners of the lips. Here is one, that results from the insect problem we have in a home that is rather full of stored paper of various sorts:

Everyone’s a Critic These Days

Silverfish are eating my words
I look in drawers for notes I made
and find ragged paper.
Holes appear in the middle of my poems

ilver ish r ating m wor s
ragged pap

Silverfish hide in damp corners,
emerge up the plughole,
scurry behind the bookcase.
At night there is one crawling across the pillow.

silverfish hide scorn
night scrawl

Silverfish are eating my words
and shitting them out in small gritty piles
behind the furniture
and in corners of drawers

Words are turning themselves
into insects and crawling off the page
They mock me in slow anagrammatic dance
Silverfish are eating my words

liverish sword
vile feat
evil tears

*******************************

And as a bonus, here is a small poem that resulted from the random prompt generator at the Poetry Thursday site. The words it gave me were "flock", followed by "abacus". I'm not sure if this counts as a humorous poem, but it does depend on a pun:

You can count on
a flock of birds
perched on the telegraph wires
like beads on an abacus.

******************************

For more humorous poetry, visit Poetry Thursday

Shopping

After being "in my head" for all of April, with NaPoWriMo, I felt the urge to make something. I'm sending off job applications and with fingers crossed that something turns up, I'm feeling the need to update my work wardrobe. Especially since I've lost 14 kgs in the past eight months (about thirty pounds), and most of my clothes are rather loose. And it's so long since I sewed my own clothes that I'm not too sure what pattern size to use any more.

However, I do have some multisize patterns in my possession, and I have some fabric stored away which wasn't very expensive, so I'm going to make some shirts to test out the patterns, and then I can look for more "business-like" fabric when I get the fit right.

So I headed off into town this morning to buy buttons, and poetry. The poetry book I was after is "Blame Vermeer" by Vincent O'Sullivan. I'm heading off to bed to read it, shortly.

In the City Mall there was a girl with a basket of something. It looked as if she might be soliciting donations, or something like that, so I was carefully looking away. Others were hurrying past, too. And then I realised what was in the basket. Chocolate! Samples of Fair Trade chocolate, to be exact, and very nice tasting chocolate it was, too.

I wasn't impressed with the poetry selection in most bookstores. About half a shelf tucked away in some obscure spot without its own shelf title, mostly. For example, New Zealand poetry tucked in at the end of New Zealand fiction. And then, a good half of the poetry was those collections, often sentimental and awful, of "ten poems to change your life" or "poems to read at weddings and funerals". But I did eventually find the book I was after.

And I had a nice time walking around town on a sunny autumn day, poking around in interesting shops like Cherry Blossom and Blue Earth. Shops where I'm not likely to buy anything (Japanese fabric covered journals for $40, anyone? Beautiful, but I'd be scared to write in them) - but it's fun to look, once in a while. And to smell the beautiful Blue Earth soaps and massage balms.

And even though it's autumn, and the leaves are falling from the trees, the flowers in the pots on this balcony didn't seem to know that.

My Photo

I've put this photo up so I can add it to my profile as per instructions on blogger. The only problem is that when I follow the instructions and then try and save the profile, I get an error message. Grrr. Maybe I'll try again later.

Update: I should have read all the instructions. There are two URLs with a photo on blogger, the first is the large version and the second is the small version. Using the second one worked, the first must have been above the size limit.

The photo is in honour of my new haircut. And the autumn maples in our yard, which are losing their leaves fast. (Although the one in the background here is still greener than most).

I've been tweaking my blog a bit lately. I also added the poem that gives the blog its title to my profile. And I updated some of my links. What I really want to do is to come up with a fancy graphic for the header, but I'm a bit nervous about trying in case I mess the whole blog up.

Random Acts of Poetry

It's Thursday again! And now that NaPoWriMo has finished, and my second part time job has also finished, I have some free time to get things done. Which means that I am getting nothing done. I guess I can forgive myself for a week of zoning out.

However, among my e-mail was Eric Maisel's "Creativity Newletter". In it he suggests an interesting exercise: "take your medicine". In other words, treat your writing as if it's medicine - not that it's something nasty, but schedule it four times a day - fifteen minutes at 8 am, noon, 4 pm and 8 pm. Once I would have said "I can't write four times a day". NaPoWriMo has taught me that it's easier than you think to sit down and write. And fifteen minutes is not that much. It's possible to write for fifteen minutes in my lunch break, on days when I'm at work - and if I'm working, or driving, at 4 o'clock, well, I can do it when I get home, and again in the evening before bed.

Not that I have written four times a day, but I'm beginning to recognize that it's possible. I've been writing in the morning, mostly my CV and job applications. I've been writing at lunchtime, and this is when the Poetry Thursday randomizer is just what I need. I can't work on editing my poems, because I like to read them aloud when I do that. And I can't work on my family history, because I need all my research material at hand. But I can noodle around and brainstorm for ideas, and that's what I've been doing.

On Sunday I was orienteering, and this is the poem that resulted, using one of Poetry Thursday's random prompts "copper". I wanted to put a Common Copper Butterfly into the poem, but I had to admit that there weren't any. I managed to sneak the word in, anyway.

Running in the Alps

There is nothing spectacular here
except the mountains, which surround
this level basin where we run
in all directions through the pines.
The ground is carpeted with small
unnamed plants – mosses, lichens,
shrubs so low they form a thin cushion
that supports our steps. In the clearings
the fine seedheads of grasses a foot high
gleam copper and gold in the autumn sun.
We make tracks through them, believing
they will spring up again at the next rain.
But I avoid treading on the white flowers
scattered like stars in constellations
among the flat scrub. Tiny flies and midges
dance in the cool still air, and there is no sound
except footsteps and distant cicadas.
My brother once employed a man
who left out little unimportant words
like “not”, when writing his reports.
Let me never assume I know
which are tiny unimportant things.

Ten Zen Seconds

As promised on Thursday, here is my interview with Eric Maisel as part of his Ten Zen Seconds blogtour. I've been a fan of Eric's work on creativity for quite a few years and was happy to be part of this innovative book marketing project. Some of the questions and answers that follow are the standard ones provided by Eric, and some of them are ones I asked, that you will only find on this stop on the blog tour and nowhere else. I felt for those who come on this day only, I needed to present some of the standard part of the interview first, so if you have read that before on other stops on the blog tour, scroll down.

For more information on Eric Maisel's books and services
please visit ericmaisel.com

For information on Ten Zen Seconds, including the schedule for the blog tour, which will introduce you to a lot of fascinating blogs,
please visit tenzenseconds.com

Catherine: What is Ten Zen Seconds all about?

Eric: It’s actually a very simple but powerful technique for reducing your stress, getting yourself centered, and reminding yourself about how you want to live your life. It can even serve as a complete cognitive, emotional, and existential self-help program built on the single idea of "dropping a useful thought into a deep breath".

You use a deep breath, five seconds on the inhale and five seconds on the exhale, as a container for important thoughts that aim you in the right direction in life—I describe twelve of these thoughts in the book—and you begin to employ this breathing-and-thinking technique that I call incanting as the primary way to keep yourself on track.

Catherine: Where did this idea come from?

Eric: It comes from two primary sources, cognitive and positive psychology from the West and breath awareness and mindfulness techniques from the East. I’d been working with creative and performing artists for more than twenty years as a therapist and creativity coach and wanted to find a quick, simple technique that would help them deal with the challenges they regularly face—resistance to creating, performance anxiety, negative self-talk about a lack of talent or a lack of connections, stress over a boring day job or competing in the art marketplace, and so on.

Because I have a background in both Western and Eastern ideas, it began to dawn on me that deep breathing, which is one of the best ways to reduce stress and alter thinking, could be used as a cognitive tool if I found just the right phrases to accompany the deep breathing. This started me on a hunt for the most effective phrases that I could find and eventually I landed on twelve of them that I called incantations, each of which serves a different and important purpose.


Catherine: Which phrases did you settle on?

Eric: The following twelve. I think that folks will intuitively get the point of each one (though some of the incantations, like "I expect nothing", tend to need a little explaining). Naturally each incantation is explained in detail in the book and there are lots of personal reports, so readers get a good sense of how different people interpret and make use of the incantations. Here are the twelve (the parentheses show how the phrase gets "divided up" between the inhale and the exhale:

1. (I am completely) (stopping)
2. (I expect) (nothing)
3. (I am) (doing my work)
4. (I trust) (my resources)
5. (I feel) (supported)
6. (I embrace) (this moment)
7. (I am free) (of the past)
8. (I make) (my meaning)
9. (I am open) (to joy)
10. (I am equal) (to this challenge)
11. (I am) (taking action)
12. (I return) (with strength)

A small note: the third incantation functions differently from the other eleven, in that you name something specific each time you use it, for example "I am writing my novel" or "I am paying the bills". This helps you bring mindful awareness to each of your activities throughout the day

Catherine: Those who are familiar with your previous work will know that you write in areas connected with creativity, and coaching creative people. Would you say that this book focuses less directly on creativity - that it is a technique that is useful in all areas of life?

Eric: Yes, exactly. It is a mindfulness, centering and meaning-making tool that anyone can use in a whole variety of situations - getting calm before a meeting or a medical appointment, getting centered so as to have a deep conversation with your mate or child, and so on.

The technique came out of my work with creative and performing artists and its uses for creative people are many - to help make the transition from day job to creative work more fluid, to reduce anxiety before a performance or marketplace interaction, and so on, - but it is meant to serve as a whole-life technique that provides "fast centering" and "instant stress reduction" for everyone in every situation.

Catherine: Some of us are not making a living in traditionally creative areas. We may have lives made up of many parts - we go to our day job, come home to cook meals and do the laundry, we may be involved in various voluntary organisations, find a family member needs help in a crisis, we may have health problems, or have no health problems and want to keep it that way by exercising and taking care of ourselves, and yet we still want to maintain creative pursuits as well. All these things are part of making our lives meaningful - we don't want to give any of them up, but it means we are constantly in transition from one thing to another. How can Ten Zen Seconds help with the stopping and starting that is part of such a fragmented life?

Eric: First, the creating ought to come first each day - that’s a big secret and a big deal. When we get to our novel at five a.m. and write for an hour, then we have made some meaning on that day and face the meaninglessness of some of our daily pursuits with much more equanimity. If, on the other hand, we spend a meaningless day and THEN try to get to our writing, we are usually both worn out mentally and drained existentially, since we have been with "too little" meaning all day long.

If the idea of getting right to your creative work first thing makes sense to you and you want to give it a try (that is, getting up an hour earlier, forgiving yourself for not getting up an hour earlier and trying again the next day, and so on), then using incantation 3, "I am doing my work" ("I am writing my novel", "I am working on Chapter 2", "I am turning to my poem", etc.), used as soon as you awaken and before you turn your mind to the day and its responsibilities, is a key to "creating first thing each day".

Catherine: One of your incantations is "I embrace this moment". As a poet, it has been suggested that I take a notebook everywhere and note things down as I see them. This seems to me to be an example of embracing the moment - being aware of what surrounds me at any time. And yet, there is also the temptation to multitask, which can lead to unawareness. Composing poetry while walking, or driving, or in spare moments at work, can take attention away from what is in front of me. It can also lead to difficulty in sitting down at a blank page and really focusing on the writing for more than a few minutes at a time. Could you comment on these issues, and suggest ways in which Ten Zen Seconds can help overcome the negative aspects of the tendency to multitasking which is common these days?

Eric: Always having your notebook with you, concretely and as metaphor, is a crucial part of the creative process. It’s the proof that you’re taking your own ideas seriously and the only way to capture some of your best ideas, which are entirely likely to come when you are aren’t sitting at your desk.

Taking attention away from what’s in front of you, unless that thing in front of you is of vital importance (say that you are in the middle of performing a surgical operation), is exactly the right thing to do and VERY different from answering an email with your left hand while taking a phone order with your right hand.

Stopping everything to be creative is not multi-tasking, it is the very essence of meaning-making. The incantations that especially support this process of "stopping everything" in the service of your own good ideas are "I am completely stopping", "I am writing this down" (a variation of incantation 3), and "I am open to joy" - open to the joy of living your life as the creative person you intend yourself to be.

A Month of Poems

It was an interesting month. As I squeezed in time to write the daily poem, I contemplated the necessity of being away from the world, and the necessity of being in the world.

I started the day with the prompt in my head, wondering what I would write. Often, I wrote and posted in the morning before work. Sometimes, I set off with the day's prompt in my mind, still wondering what shape my poem would take. And coincidences abounded. On the day that the prompt was "spiral" I was startled by a flock of white gulls spiralling and wheeling in the park. On the day that the prompt was "glass" I went to hear a quilter speak, in a modern building whose facade is a river of glass.

Of course, these are not really coincidences. It's just that starting with a word in my head focussed my attention, so that I was more likely to notice incidences in the world. (And if I didn't, well, there is an even bigger world - the world of memory, of all that I have seen and read. The scope of my poetry expanded enormously due to the influence of the prompts).



Last Saturday I had lunch in a restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with a bunch of other writers and artists. We were celebrating the 60th issue of Takahe magazine. I looked out into the branches of a huge macrocarpa tree, and out another window over a beach and sand dunes stretching away into the distance north and south, a pier heading out west towards South America, a hardy bunch of surfers braving the cold autumn waves, a dog running in circles on the sand. The prompt for the day was "circles".



In the morning, I had been to the Arts Centre where Jeanette de Nicolis Meyer was having an open studio. She had been the artist in residence for the past month. There's that period of a month, again. I was mindful of those I had heard of, who had given up work to write a novel, and then spent long periods not writing. I asked her what it was like to have a month of nothing to do but work. She loved it, she said. She would stop work at 11.30 at night, not wanting to stop because of all the ideas buzzing in her head. But yes, she had four days at the beginning when nothing seemed to work, when she didn't have the right supplies, when all sorts of things seemed to combine to frustrate her. The key was to regard it not as a time to produce finished work, but as a time to explore ideas. And the results on the wall certainly suggested she had many ideas to explore.

Much of her work was based on bubble chamber images of the tracks of subatomic particles - full of lines and circles. Ernest Rutherford had once worked in the same building, and she had visited "Rutherford's Den". Those circles almost made it into my poem for the day, but in the end the dog running in circles on the sand won out.

I think I experienced the month in the same way - a chance to try out all sorts of ideas. Some of the poems I will let quietly sink into oblivion. Others I will print out, read aloud, and read aloud again, so that my ear can tell me where the clunky bits are, and my heart and mind can tell me whether I said what I wanted to say. Then, hopefully, I will revise them till I am satisfied, and send them out into the world for possible publication.

And I hope I will put into practice what I have learned - first to take myself apart from the world and write. And then to take myself into the world with new eyes, and notice things. And then to repeat the cycle. Oh, and I learnt that most of the time it has taken me to write one poem in the past has actually been all the drama of not writing the poem - of planning to write the poem. How much simpler to just get on with it!

I haven't written a poem since the end of the month, but it didn't seem like Poetry Thursday without one. So I'm including an older poem - not necessarily one that I consider among my finest, but it fits the season. Our dwarf maple by the pond is startlingly coloured, almost fluorescent, at this time of hear, and I found myself wondering what someone would make of it who had never seen autumn before.

But first, I'd like to invite you to come back on Saturday when I will be hosting Eric Maisel on his blogtour. This is an interesting way to promote a book without all the time, expense, and ozone depletion associated with the travel of a traditional book tour. Eric's book is "Ten Zen Seconds", an interesting book on a simple technique for calming anxieties and increasing focus. It will be useful not just to creative people (his usual target audience) but to anyone. I asked Eric several questions, but the whole tour is seven weeks, so it would be well worth visiting some of the other blogs to see what other hosts have asked him. Find the site for the book, along with the schedule for the blogtour, here. I'll be putting my post up on Saturday evening, New Zealand time, so that it will be early Saturday morning in the US, thus fitting in with both my calendar and Eric's.

And finally, today's poem:

The Amnesiac Discovers Autumn

It isn’t death that surprises him.
Though larger losses
- a parent, a loved pet,
even the dead bird on the garden path
- have slipped beyond
the myopic horizon of his memory
impermanence has its daily reminders.
Shrivelled flowers in the vase,
the spreading brown spot on an apple,
an upturned fly on the window sill.

No, it’s not the way the leaves
turn brown and slip to the ground
that startles him,
it’s the late afternoon
when the maple leaves
turn tangerine and magenta
and melt into the sky,
becoming pure light.

Last One!

Yes, 29 posts but 30 poems. And that's me done for NaPoWriMo. By the time I got this prompt "scatter", I was heading off to work for the day, and now that I'm home it's probably May 1st in the US. I hereby redefine the boundaries of April to encompass May 1st.

I was watching "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" the other night on TV. My family is neither noisy nor Greek, but there was one thing that resonated with me - all the cousins named Nicky. I found while researching my Scottish forbears, that the Scots had a very traditional naming pattern which resulted in large numbers of cousins with the same name, named for their grandparents. This poem is about the Jeans, although I could equally have written one about seven cousins all named David. I was thinking of the way in which the families who had no future in overcrowded Scotland scattered around the world.

There are four cousins
all named Jean. This is to remind them
of their Scottish grandmother
whom they have never seen,
and of the tenuous web which links them
to each other.
One Jean sews shirts
in Norwalk, Connecticut.
One Jean sings songs
in Newcastle on Tyne
One Jean is married to a doctor
in Boone, Iowa.
Dunedin Jean was born at sea.
She still feels its pull
as she walks on the beach at St Clair
reading a letter from the doctor's wife
who tells of the death of her baby
(also Jean).
Dunedin Jean
gazes out at the blue Pacific
and thinks of the cornfields of Iowa,
wave on wave of green.

NaPoWriMo #28

For aeons they vibrated slowly
as neighbours, in the slow flow
from the pole to the sea.
Then with a thunderous crash
(does the iceberg's split
make a noise
if there is no one to hear it?)
they are rent apart.
One molecule still frozen fast
in the edge of the ice shelf.
One floating northwards,
soon to melt and join the ocean currents.
Later, it's one time neighbour
will also join the ocean.
Currents will keep them
far apart. The icebergs
are making their slow trek
northwards.

For the prompt "split" at Poetry Thursday.

Only one more to go! Yes, it's the last day in April. I started two days late. Despite the heading of this post, I have written 29 poems in 28 days (one post included two poems on the same prompt). I was tempted to try and post my thirtieth poem today, but I am enjoying the prompts, so it looks as if I will have to wait until it's Monday in America, and post my last poem on May 1st. I don't think that's breaking the rules too much (besides, who makes the rules anyway?)

NaPoWriMo #26 and 27

I was having a lazy day yesterday, and didn't write anything. Acutally, I was planning to try and write a villanelle using a line from my poem from the previous day - "waking from a dream of flight". It seemed like a good idea, until I realised that I didn't really have anything more to say than I'd said in the short poem, and anything I added would be just padding.

I feel that writing metrical rhymed poetry is akin to being able to draw accurately for visual artists. If you choose to write unrhymed, loosely metred verse, or to paint abstract paintings, it should be because you choose to. It's good to know that you have the technical skills in the background if you want them. So from time to time, I try to write rhymed metrical verse - not usually to my satisfaction, but I enjoy the challenge.

So, the first poem today is for the prompt "circle", and the second is another attempt at a villanelle, using an incident from my eldest daughter's childhood. I'm not really satisfied with the last stanza. And it doesn't quite read smoothly in places. Still, it's a lot closer to what I want to be writing than the one I posted on Thursday. I skipped the previous prompt, "improper". On the whole though, I wouldn't have been able to write a poem a day without the help of the prompts which you can find at Poetry Thursday

Circles

Nothing is as round as happiness
It is the shape
of a ball, a balloon,
a bubble,
a hula hoop,
a dog chasing its tail
in circles on the sand

Nothing is as round as happiness
except sorrow
the shape
of a stone


Villanelle for Deborah

Deborah has seen a dead bird in the gutter
Its eyes are dull and it is gathering flies
She wants to take it home and put it in water

I have one eye on the time and the other on the weather
and therefore I am trying to hurry her by
when she stops to inspect the dead bird in the gutter

She still thinks a kiss can make a graze better
Daddy mended the moon and set it in the sky
and flowers last forever in water.

When you are three, it's the small things that matter:
blowing bubbles, watching them fly
and stopping to see a dead bird in the gutter

I'm not quite ready to tell my daughter
today's flowers are different from yesterday's
not everything can be cured with water

No manual prepared me for this: I mutter
some excuse to hurry away
She looks over her shoulder at the bird in the gutter
still wanting to save it by giving it water.

NaPoWriMo #25

Today's poem is one in my quest for using rhyme without seeming trivial or humourous. I didn't set out intending to rhyme, but it seemed to want to be that way.

Glimpse

Waking from a dream of flight
you feel the dream was real
that it's the daytime world
that's not quite right
you bend, pick up
a puzzle piece from off the floor
a glimpse of blue
if only you could put it all together,
you might soar.

written for the daily NaPoWriMo prompt "glimpse" at Poetry Thursday

Poetry Thursday, and NaPoWriMo #24

Today I decided to combine the daily prompt "blaze" with the weekly prompt which was to write a villanelle - OK, the daily prompt is for Wednesday but it is Thursday already in this neck of the woods.

When I try and rhyme, it tends to come out not too serious. And I am just about poemed out with NaPoWriMo, so I decided to stick my tongue firmly in my cheek and have some fun. Jessica suggested that villanelles tend to be about obsession. This one certainly is - and the narrator is definitely not me, I'm not that shallow (I hope!). I've been a bit free with the rules about repeating whole lines, and instead have varied them a bit while keeping the ending of the repeating lines the same.

A Villanelle

I don't ask much, just set my heart ablaze
send flowers, chocolates, tell me you'll be mine
for all of time, oh, shower me with praise

My heart beat faster when I caught your gaze
Your rugged looks, your nose so aquiline,
your sculptured muscles set my heart ablaze.

I've waited by the phone for days and days
I think, although I've lost my sense of time
I long to hear your voice, your showers of praise

I lie about the house in fevered haze
can't eat or sleep, can only write bad rhymes
Surely you know you've set my heart ablaze

She's wrong for you in oh so many ways
You have my number, leave her now, be mine
for what you said I'm sure was full of praise

I'm waiting for the phone to ring, the door to chime
I know you want me, tell me you'll be mine
for all of time, oh shower me with praise
Is it too much to set my heart ablaze?

********

For more villanelles and other poems, visit Poetry Thursday

NaPoWriMo #23

Today's prompt at Poetry Thursday is "sheen"

I find myself thinking of Byron:

and the sheen on their spears was like stars on the sea
when the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee

- a favourite poem when I was younger.

Not being Byron, I had to come up with something else. In the end I settled on the following, as it is Anzac Day in New Zealand:

He talked real fancy, our sergeant,
never told us to polish our boots
like the others -
"burnish them to a sheen, boys"
he said, "I want to see the sheen".
So we polished the boots and the buckles
and the buttons to a sheen, and drilled
with our wooden bayonets,
till we got off the ships
and they gave us real ones
and we burnished them to a sheen, too.
Then we marched through the dust
of the country roads, and the villagers cheered
then we marched through the rain and the mud
and we sat in the trenches, till the order came
to go over the top. Our boots were caked
and heavy with mud, the bullets were flying,
the men were falling all round,
and I caught one through the leg
and lay in the mud and the blood and the stench
waiting, hoping, to be rescued
before they finished me off
and the only sheen I seen anywhere
was an oil slick on a puddle
and the wings of the flies.

NaPoWriMo #22

I suspect this one is fundamentally flawed because of my tenuous knowledge of Greek mythology - never mind, I want it out of the way so I can get onto the next one.

The prompt for the day is "pluck"

High School Reunion

Three of the Sirens
are propping up the bar
After high school they left the band,
gave up singing. Not such a pretty sight
drunk like that, one of them
staggering off to the bathroom.
Icarus is telling a rambling story -
how he didn't die, as everyone thought,
but was rescued by a passing fishing boat.
Spent three years in physical therapy,
but now you hardly notice the limp.
He told his old man to rack off,
no way was he going to be an engineer.
Now he drives a truck, has three days
growth of stubble. Medusa now
- still formidable, you have to be
to run a top company, but what's with the story
about the snakes? No one can quite recall
who it was she was supposed to have turned to stone.
Now she goes to the best hairstylist in town.
Arachne is a minor fashion designer,
but doesn't wear her own label
- too dumpy to fit into clothes
designed to flatter a size 8.
Jupiter looks sallow. His liver is failing -
too many steroids, and Apollo looks like
an ageing Elvis. There are success stories,
of course, but they are not always
the ones you would expect. Somebody
nobody remembers - sidekick to some hero
or other, and now here they are
all filled out, and looking stunning.
Only Oedipus is missing.
Someone should have made him come,
so he would have known,
no need to pluck his eyes out.
Time will do it for you -
Jocasta will grow old, fat, unattractive,
while other beauties draw his gaze.
Now,sightless and mad,
he sees his mother as eternally
beautiful, while blind to what the others
have become.

Get the prompt for the day at Poetry Thursday

NaPoWriMo #21

On the home straight now - I think I'm ready to be done with NaPoWriMo. Of course, if one of the coming prompts inspires me again, I'll get excited about it for another day. I can never tell which prompt that is going to be. (For a list of the daily prompts, see Poetry Thursday)

This is post number 21, but I wrote two poems for one of the prompts, so that's 22 poems all up - eight to go. (Yes, it's the 24th. But I am one behind, and we are a day ahead of the US here, so I think I have it right).

Misplaced

How could summer have slipped away
in all its burgeoning, blossoming splendour?
The garden a blaze of colour,
then some day while you are inside,
not looking, sweeping the floor
or intent on a computer monitor,
it’s gone. You didn’t notice
that petal by fading petal,
one darkening evening minute
at a time, it was leaving.
The skies are grey now, the wind cool,
the leaves falling. But some days
the sun shines brightly, as if to say,
“not lost, just misplaced”.
You in the north, do you have
our summer? Please take care of it
for us, send it back when you are done with it
in six months time.

Where Did it Go?

The next prompt for NaPoWriMo over at Poetry Thursday is "misplaced". There are a couple of things I seem to have misplaced. Firstly, I seem to ahve misplaced the weekend. Only a moment ago it was just starting and now it's Sunday night already.

Actually, I know where most of Sunday went. Which brings me to the second thing I misplaced. I seem to have misplaced my brain. Today I went orienteering. It didn't start too well when I took a wrong turn on the way to the event. I stopped to check my street map, which I couldn't find. That did lead to some good when I looked under the seat and instead of the map found a pair of sunglasses belonging to another orienteer, who I had given a lift to a previous event. At least I was able to return them. The reason I couldn't find the street map, I found later on, was because it was on the floor of the car beneath my gear bag. Why I didn't look there I'm not quite sure.

When I got to the event I purchased a map, chose a course, signed up for a start time and headed for the start. My time was called, I went to copy the controls from the master map and realised I had forgotten to collect a set of control descriptions. So I had to go back to get them, and choose another start time. That led to a half hour delay because there were a lot of competitors queuing up.

Eventually I got out on the course, and I didn't do very well. I won't describe all the mistakes I made. I wasn't very pleased though after a long struggle up a hill covered with very long grass between the fifth and the sixth control, to realise that if I had chosen a different route I could have had a very easy run most of the way over a neatly mowed field. Then there were the controls where I was confused, looking for controls with letters on them instead of numbers. Actually, the letters were on the map but the numbers were on the controls. So I found the right control but went right past it thinking it was the wrong one.

All in all, once I had actually started, after all the delays, it took me nearly two hours to finish a 3.5 km course. Given that it was physically difficult, with a lot of ups and downs and some very tangly vegetation, that's still a long time even for me. I almost decided not to finish, but I'm glad that I continued. A year ago I would have been exhausted after being out for that length of time, now at least I was not too stiff at the end, and even managed to run on the flat part between the last few controls.

Still, if anyone knows where my brain went, I'd like it back.

After the orienteering I dropped in at my daughter's for a while as she keeps "open house" on a Sunday afternoon. Then later on she came around for dinner. I posted my poem for the previous prompt, and that was about it. I haven't even done the dishes yet. (I guess they will still be there in the morning).

NaPoWriMo has been eating my spare time. There are a couple of things I wanted to post about. Firstly, Deb at Red Shoe Ramblings (see the side bar, my brain is too fried to do many linky things tonight) nominated me for a Thinking Blogger Award. Thanks, Deb! I meant to spend part of the weekend putting the button in the side bar, and choosing five more blogs to pass the honour on to (since that's the way it works). It will have to wait. Wednesday is a public holiday here, so maybe I'll manage it then.

The other thing I wanted to write about was the Ten Zen Seconds blog tour. I'm going to be a host in early May. Eric Maisel has come up with this very interesting idea to promote his book - he is visiting a different blog every day for about seven weeks, and answering questions about the book and the concept of Ten Zen Seconds. I'll write more about it later in the week, for now, you can visit his site and learn more here. (The first link is to the front page of the site, and the second link is to the dates for the blog tour). I've nearly finished the book and it seems like a very useful technique for centering yourself when doing creative work, or any work for that matter.

Now, I'm off to bed. Maybe my brain will pop back in my head while I sleep.

NaPoWriMo #20

What She Left Behind

Elizabeth Robertson 1674

Item: ane oak standing bed
but no man to share it with her,
grandsons, but no sons
Item: ane old plough
and the plough graithe,
a horse to pull it
a mare to ride.
Item: four kine
Item: eight bolls of corne,
one boll of bere,
three firlots of wheat
sufficient for the winter,
and to plant for the next.
Item: the utensils and domicils
of her household and body
Item: three fir kists,
to store the above.
Having gathered these goods,
she recommends her soul
to the Lord almightie
hoping and trusting to be saved,
and passes from life with a small sigh
having walked lightly on the earth
and lightly left it.

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For the prompt "ten items or less" at Poetry Thursday

Elizabeth Robertson was my ancestor.