The Absence #Poetry #NaPoWriMo #NationalPoetryMonth
It’s finally April! For the entire month, I plan to focus on writing poetry.
As a motivation to stick to the goal of one poem per day, I am taking part of the annual Ekphrastic Challenge over on The Wombwell Rainbow – hosted by Paul Brooks.
This Challenge is a collaboration between three artists and nearly a dozen of writers including myself.
*****
April 1st
The Absence
The empty black chair
once used by someone of great value
claimed through a senseless,
bloody war
robbing her of the only
lifeline
that kept her tethered
to sanity
********
If you would like to read poetry by the other writers – click here.
Ekphrastic Challenge: Day 1, My poem, Abandoned
(Inspired by Gaynor Kane’s Abandoned)
Abandoned
Abandoned–
the building with its
cornices, pilasters, and medallions,
its stained-glass windows
now dirt-begrimed,
its corners where cobwebs drip,
and its dust-blanketed floor, a canvas
for the nut-brown rats to paint
as they skitter-skat across it
after the owl moon rises.
Each night
it seems to tilt a bit more,
sigh harder
as if bearing the weight of the ghosts
who haunt it,
the call of the eternal is a murmur,
soft rat squeaks, chirrs, and thrums,
susurrations carried by motes, adrift in light.
It’s poetry month, and once again, I am participating in Paul Brookes’ April Ekphrastic Challenge. Each day, I will post my poem(s) here. You can see the art and read the other responses by going to Paul’s site here.
The artists are Gaynor Kane, John Phandal Law, and Anjum Wasim Dar.
NaPoWriMo 2022 Day 1
Day 1. My annual National Poetry Month 2022 ekphrastic challenge is a collaboration between artists Gaynor Kane, John Phandal Law, Anjum Wasim Dar, and writers, Tim Fellows, Carrie Ann Golden, Math Jones, Merril D. Smith, Leslie James, Lesley Curwen, Peter A., Eloise Birnam-Wood, Jen Feroze, Vicky Allen, Angi Plant, Simon Williams, Dee Roycroft, Jamie Woods, Jona Roy, Beth Brooke, Caroline Johnstone, Lynne Jensen Lampe and myself. April 1st.
Day One
-Anjum Wasim Dar – Masks
-Gaynor Kane – Abandoned
-John Phandal Law
The Absence (GK 1 Abandoned)
The empty black chair
once used by someone of great value
claimed through a senseless,
bloody war
robbing her of the only
lifeline
that kept her tethered
to sanity
-Carrie Ann Golden
AWD1
Civilian corridors
And now you will endure trial by gift-giving he said,
hiding behind flowers. Follow the scent to your destination.
It may not be where you need to go.
-Lesley James
Empty (inspired by AWD1 and GK1, April 1st)
In the unconscious night
the world is in colours,
swirling, melting and folding.
There is joy and laughter,
people surround me
like a child’s blanket.
In the daylight my room is empty.
-Sir Tim Fellows CBE
Nothing Is Being Suppressed: British Poetry of the 1970s by Andrew Duncan (Shearsman Books)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am glad Andrew Duncan has written his books about 20th century poetry, but I wish he’d do some proper research, reference material, and not be so opinionated (or at least use critical material to back up his arguments). But at least he is paying attention to what went on in the world of poetry (or parts of it), this time in 1970s Britain, the decade when I first encountered and paid attention to small presses and alternative bookshops, though in my case it was a weird mix of Brian Patten, Adrian Mitchell, Ted Hughes, Ken Smith and Julian Beck alongside T.S. Eliot and the WW1 poets I was studying at the time in school. For me though, postpunk and improvised music was in the mix, as well as experimental theatre and radical politics – and I wish poetry was sometimes…
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Creativity and the Slow Life
At the beginning of the year I decided I wanted to have a different kind of life. It’s difficult to pin down exactly what it is I am aiming for, but it is something to do with living a slower life: professionally, psychologically, personally and most importantly, creatively. It means allowing myself to bed into projects, prioritising my creativity and finding a way to hold on to a creative form of myself. Sometimes I feel like I have accidentally created the perfect nest that allows me to write well, and to hold onto that without quite knowing how I did it is like holding onto a thread of spider silk that could break at any minute. But creativity isn’t a magic trick. To be able to write well is as much about creating a place around yourself to be able to think, as it…
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Happy #MothersDay #MothersDay2022 #MotheringSunday #Cybele Celebrate mothers of all kinds I will feature your published/unpublished poetry/short prose/artworks. Please include a short third person bio.
A photo of my late mam outside the Rovers Return.
Our Mam’s Potpourri
Our home were spiced up.
When she were well
Mam placed wooden pots
of her favourite fragrances
on the tiled hearth,
strung garlands
on the hallway walls.
She made our home a rich orchard.
Christmas roses wilted in radiated heat.
Poinsettias glowed on the hearth.
Allspice, cedar wood shavings,
cinnamon and cassia bark,
cloves, cypress wood pairings,
fennel seed, incense-cedar
wood shavings, jasmine flowers
and oil, jujube blooms,
juniper wood chips.
I thought it magic,
‘cause it didn’t rot,
lavender leaves,
lemon balm leaves,
lemon peel, marjoram
and mignonette and mint leaves,
mugwort, orange peel.
Sweet citrus infused all rooms.
Whilst out of her French windows snow
gusted barkskin limbs shivered.
Pelargonium leaves, pinyon pine
slices and cones, rose flowers,
hips, rosemary leaves.
Even on gusty winter day Mam died,
and sharp tangs were stench
and pots emptied,
garlands binned,
odours dissipated from rooms but not memory.
-Paul Brookes
-Neal Zetter
Four Daffodils
When: March 1982Hampstead Parish Church Cemetery
Only four Daffodils mark the place we laid you
I bring you
many things I could not bring before
I cannot list them
but suppose they come with growing old.
I can cry now
and do as I watch the flowers in the wind.
Regret’s as cheap as pollen and as fertile
so I bring you —more
The one’s I love to meet you.
One being fed, one feeding,
as I was fed by you.
A month for every flower.
If you can hear me
bless them
bless me
and know that only now I understand
the depth of love
that always finds
and always fills
and never stops or fears.
-Dave Garbutt
Celebrate #WorldTheatreDay I will feature your published/unpublished poetry/short prose/artworks about your experiences in theatres, plays you have seen, performances that stunned you, and so on. Please include a short third person bio.
The Shrew
It isn’t the one performance I’ve seen,
open air, gender-swapped, abridged,
that comes back to me
as I read it for the first time
in twenty-one years,
well as I remember that,
at Fountains Abbey, the day after
my final exam. Sly was Scottish,
they messed up the ending,
Bianca disappeared as the actress
was playing Petruchio as well.
Nor is it Burton and Taylor,
though I can just picture them now.
Katherina’s voice for me
will always be that of Margaret Leighton
on the Harper Collins recording
I had on two white cassettes
and wish now I had kept,
or got it on CD instead.
Go get thee gone,
thou false deluding slave
was the only line I thought I remembered,
as it’s printed on a postcard
I use as a bookmark
in my book of Brontë poems.
It turns out there are hardly
any lines I have forgotten.
-Peter J. Donnelly
The Reading
Keats House.
There is the poet; exposed on her mountain-top,
no longer sheltered in her lap-top castle
poking fun at a hapless world.
She gabbles the words – her cherished harvest,
fearful eyes alert to the enemy,
each well-fletched arrow zinging dead on target.
Emotion builds behind the hurried monotone
and will she leave us, stranded in the ether,
or take us upward way beyond ourselves?
Ricochets from her philosophical bomb-blasts
mock the tawdry trappings,
the lampshades and the repro chairs,
unexpected artistry and pathos brings relief
and as the final cadence bares some naked truth,
the challenge passes in a wave of clapping.
Was this catharsis, – a physical implosion
in the name of art and womanhood?
Creativity travels lightly, with backward
glance and worn shoes,
and a gold standard placed just out of reach;
as each parent swims the hellespont of guilt,
the poet balances on a tightrope
strung between art and perfection.
Strauss Moment
Like a seagull riding a thermal
Jessie Norman takes us
on upwards aboard a melifluous
wave of mystic sound to
a heaven-scape from
Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs.
Such sound is not of our world,
splitting levels of perception
weaving harmonies
in a mystical language and
under that intoxicating spell
resistance is futile.
Just as lullabyes reach
deep in the soul to loose
tangled frets to the wind, so
Jessie Norman’s easy hypnosis
caresses until everything stills,
eyes close and a
private smile flickers.
Cheers and Tears for the Clown
Tears still prick at Ralph McTell’s clown
“hanging up his smile on a hook by the door”.
“All the world loves a clown”, sings Cole Porter,
but not true, for children sense instinctively
the two emotions, grief and laughter
thinly disguised by the motley
and the garish paint.
When the circus clown car stopped by me in
the front row, the fear was intense as
those heavily daubed eyes met mine
and the whole weirdness of that Vauxhall-gardens,
seedy, commedia dell’arte,
sexless, wild extreme
pierced my nice little world. . .
. . and mockery – the crowd laughing helplessly,
wave upon wave of laughter with each drum roll – why?
As the clowns’ world disintegrates like their car,
we join in with the ridiculing of the
underpants and the sausages
and the centuries of derision at someone else’s sadness,
one step removed from our own.
Through the circus clown, we’ve cloned vulgarity
and learned another laughter;
another weapon in the arsenal of life.
The flop of the custard pie takes something away.
The clown wears our grief in his sad smile – he
can bear it, it’s his job,
while we must laugh,
– laugh outside of the frame, beyond the boundary,
laughs transcending the artifice
of the big top, and,
just as enigmatic Feste steps
outside the comic dream of Twelfth Night,
the circus clown hangs up his smile
and weeps.
-All by Jane Newberry
He: “Actors Are Liars”
It tell him I’ve written
a Christian play.
He says:
It’s not real, you know.
It’s dishonest.
God says don’t lie,
and that’s what actors do.
Try to be something they’re not.
All theatre is lies.
Satan’s work.
All actors are Satanists.
All playwrights their priests.
-Paul Brookes
Emptying my late dad’s house, I find a shoebox labelled “Dad’s Cards” . Among these I discover a letter to him composed when a play of mine called “Still Children” was being staged at Hull University’s Gulbenkian Theatre in 1984. My final year, or so I thought.
I was twenty one. I am shocked by the religiosity of the language.
-Paul Brookes from an unpublished memoir
Bios And Links
-Peter J Donnelly
lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary. He has degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies. He recently won second prize in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition.
-Jane Newberry
Jane is a children’s writer yearning to be a grown-up poet. Retirement three years ago brought more time for trying new literary genres. She enjoys a wide range of musical and arts activities and shares her husband’s passion for historic buildings and Celtic Cornwall.
Publications to date:
2008 – A SACKFUL OF SONGS (Cramer Music)
2012 – A SACKFUL OF CHRISTMAS (Cramer Music)
2018 – poem “Hemiola” in anthology “The Possibility of Living”- (Poetryspace)
poem shortlisted Bridport Poetry Prize
2019 – Poem in anthology “Dragons of the Prime” (The Emma Press)
2019 – Mi-shan shortlisted for Mslexia Novella Prize.
March 2020 – Big Green Crocodile (Otter-Barry Books).
October 2020 – poem in South Magazine
July 2021 – Big Green Crocodile shortlisted for CLIPPA award
September 2021 – two poems in Coronavirus Anthology – RedWolf Editions November 2021 – Paperback edition of Big Green Crocodile
Poem in Visual Verse: What the Hummingbird Sees
My poem, “What the Hummingbird Sees,” is in the latest issue of Visual Verse. You can read it here.
The poem is a response to the image by Susan Fenimore Cooper. You will most likely recognize and want to read other poets in this issue, Vol.9, Chapter 5
The Wombwell Rainbow 