DerekCoe.com

So, not many readers of my venture into blog-space and I may call the whole thing off. Egocentricity meant I hoped there would be more interest in a little mix of poems and anecdotes, but it seems that (without having a social media “presence”)  I’m unlikely to grab the attention of a larger audience.  It’s been fun, and I’m really grateful to Phil  who’s set up and administered my account, and to Mel who encouraged me to start: it’s been worth it just tobecome friends with such lovely people. And other loyal friends have been very supportive: my thanks to them.

So, it’s nearly Christmas … and I never know how much I’ll give in to the sentimentality, or how angry I’ll get with the extravagance and waste, or how homicidal I’ll feel when I’m put on hold and force-fed Christmas muzak.  So, being the type of modern person who has to start every sentence with “so”, I’ll give you 2 poems.  One is frankly silly and rude; the other ismore concerned with the horrific poverty experienced by millions – the bleakmidwinter with no joy or jingle-bells within earshot.  The idea for the second piece arose manyyears ago when I visited Haiti on the anniversary of Papa Doc’s death, saw suchsqualor and brutality that I’ve never been able to forget, and which I’vefinally managed to pin down in a poem.  Ithink.

So, possibly the final blog, and warm wishes for yule-tide.

Derek

ALTERNATIVE CAROL

The Heavenly Hosts are rending the sky
with their anthems and praises like thunder,
while the Holy Ghost wakes from a very deep sleep
(a divinely post-coital slumber).

                       (Refrain –
                       here and after final stanza should be more than enough!) 

 It’s Christmas again,
Hear the bells ring
for all who are wholly
living in sin.

The Virgin Mary is saying her prayers
as she sits in the stable in the stable, desultory. 
Joseph is angry, tearing his hair –
he says she’s committed adultery.

 The cattle are lowing, the asses all bray, 
and the smell from the straw is appalling.
The shepherds yell out from the field down the way
“For Christ’s sake stop that kid bawling!

It’s hard enough trying to get some more sleep
with that heavenly host up there screaming.
Now the ewes are awake, the lambs start to play,
and the old ram’s begun his wet-dreaming.”

The Magi arrive, shivering with cold,
and looking tremendously intense,
with some gifts of myrrh, and some made of gold,
and a chap off the streets called Frank Incense.

They gaze at the stable, then up at the star,
and turn to the hovel incredulously.
Said one to the others, “We’ve travelled so far,
andfollowed that star very sedulously.

We must have gone wrong and strayed off the road.  
Let’s jump on the camels, get back in the tents …”
“Hear hear,” they replied, “forget myrrh and gold,
we’ll tossup for who humps Frank Incense.”

                        (Refrain, if you can bear it!)

WINTERBIRTH,  Port-au-Prince

No sunlight dapples the damp-patched walls
or flecks with colour                                                                                                the crazed crude-structured shack.               

No moonlight romance, no whitening wash                                                  smoothing over the cracks.                                                                                    There is no cover to hide                                                                                        the paper-back hovel, no shelter from squalls                                                  which over the rivers of stagnating streets                                                        scatter the sordid                                                                                                    detritus, the trash                                                                                                      of the city. Across the vacant lot floats                                                                the bar’s noise and lights which flash                                                                  in the darkness, the dead                                                                                        of the night. 
                                                                 

                         In the ebb of the year, emptiness greets                                    the birth of the child. The mother’s tears and her labour                              are over.  Only                                                                                                          a vague pain remains.

Only an ache in the distance is left                                                                                          of the passion, reminds
her of love.  Lonely
and empty.  Then, to the rustling of rats, the saviour
of her sanity adds a cry, a thin wail 
of anger, a scream
of despair at the cruelty
that created him, forced him into the world,
a cry of futility.

                                            Torn from the dream
of the womb, already he feels the pain of the nails,
the despair of the Garden, already his father forsakes
him, his mother remembers her madness.  Even now
she can see them, the animals bending in wonder,
the shepherds, the kings with their presents, who bow
to the child, the light in the sky, the angels who thunder                            their praises…                                                                                                                                                             …but the visions are fading.                                  With the dawn light                                                                                                she sees even clearer                                                                                                the world that her baby has entered.  She laughs.                                                                                                                                                                                  He has nothing to fear.                                                                                            Only night,                                                                                                                  and the rats in the straw, and the death that is waiting.

My father left me nothing of worldly value, but a wealth of principles.  Typically, I’ve rejected most, but treasure a few.

He was born in 1909, in the tiny hamlet of Daisy Hill, County Durham: a beautiful area, but with pits, slagheaps and smoke as evidence of the price to be paid for its only industry.  My paternal grandfather had been a coal-miner until gas in WW1 threw him back to Daisy Hill, unfit for work.

My father left school at 14, and inevitably began to work in the colliery – still with private owners who could dismiss with impunity any troublemakers, like my great-uncle Tom Holmes, who led a strike against unsafe working conditions.  His sacking led to my father’s dismissal: because, as a relative, he was tarred with the same brush.

Somehow, my father found another calling.  Somehow, in the depression of the late 20s and 30s, he found his way to Cliff College in Derbyshire, an evangelical training college, a sort of protestant seminary.  As well as theological qualifications, Dad learned to live by his principles, twice trekking round Britain, with a handcart and banner proclaiming “Mission for Christ”.

Somehow, he met and married my mother, the daughter of a Sacriston bricklayer.  Somehow, at the start of WW2, he became the lay pastor of a Mission in the East End of London, then of another in Plymouth, during the bombing of both cities.  Only much later, I learned that he was a pacifist, a conscientious objector, who had volunteered as a firewatcher: a compromise between his unbending ideology and his Christian outrage at the evils of Nazism.

I was born a year before the end of the war, in Lincolnshire, where (somehow) my father had become pastor of a small Methodist Chapel, and assistant chaplain at Horbling Prisoner of War  Camp.  Some of my earliest memories (and family snapshots) are of sitting on grey-uniformed shoulders, excitedly clapping to the beat of a big bass drum.  Father had got permission for the PoWs not only to worship at his chapel, but to parade there with their band.

One of the German prisoners, Manfred Knodt, had been training as a Lutheran priest when he was conscripted.  My father helped him with his theological studies, and his ordination in Lincoln Cathedral at the end of the war.  Manfred became Pfarrer of the Stadtkirche in Darmstadt (heavily bombed, and home to “Little Texas”, a huge American base, when I first visited in the early fifties); the twinning of Darmstadt and Coventry led to Manfred’s involvement in the creation of a European ecumenical community, united in the belief that all, whatever their faith or dogma, should work together towards peace.

To my shame, I was embarrassed to discover my father’s pacifism when I went to grammar school at the age of 10.  Many of my teachers had returned from the forces, damaged in a variety of ways.  Most of my story-books and comics were excitable reworkings of the gallant Allies fighting the evil Huns.  Open scorn and derision for the cowardly conchies who’d run away from their patriotic duty meant that I kept my father out of my school-life and friendships.

Much, much later, as a pacifist too, but also an atheist, I was torn between admiration for my father’s courage and opposition to his dogmatic adherence to other evangelical principles: teetotalism, sexual purity, the sanctity of even a disastrous marriage … as a student in the late fifties and early sixties, I just couldn’t co-habit with such a father!

What has led me to re-tell a narrative which must be familiar to many others of my generation, my zeitgeist?  The most important value to survive the war was not patriotism, but friendship.  In the late fifties, my father preached friendship and European unity at Manfred’s church.  In the late seventies, Manfred flew from Germany to preach at Dad’s funeral (home, at last, in County Durham).

And, in 2017, Manfred’s nephew Reinhart Bȕttner and I renewed our friendship, first formed in the early fifties.  Two old men, comparing hip replacements and back operations, two brothers damaged by the war and its aftermath, determined to be Europeans, to be united once more: against the new fascism, the new nationalism, the new “alternative facts”, the Trumpery which is overshadowing our lives.

Perhaps all we can do is shout and rail against secular as well as religious evils.  But he’s an artist, and I can write, so perhaps we can shout more eloquently, and wave our walking sticks in protest.

As a belated remembrance, near the 100^th anniversary of the end of World War 1 which so damaged his own father, here’s a small offering to Adam Holmes Coe (1909 – 1979)

FATHER’S FIRE

Each morning father had to lay the fire.
Riddling dead clinkers, separating those
from ash and half-burnt coals to be re-used.
Ashpan emptied, grate swept and cleaned, he chose
paper, sticks and bits of nutty slack
and made a little pyramid, precise,
well-ordered. Satisfied, he lit a match.
A small half-smile, then, kneeling down, touched flame
to paper. As if in prayer he waited.
And only when the fire spread upwards
through the kindling, layer by layer, he stood,
task over. He would make the tea and then
turn to the scripture for that day. He read
about the all-consuming fire of God,
the tongues of pentecostal flame, the gift
of holiness.

From mining coal, he said,
he had been called to spread the gospel, trek
the length and breadth of Britain, preaching
where and when he felt the flame consume him,
searching out more souls to save, prepared
to pay the price demanded by his God
as Satan led the worldly powers to war.

He was a conchie, volunteered instead
to keep his dockland mission in the day,
but watch for fires every night. He never spoke,
except to thank the Lord that he’d been saved.
“Soldier for Christ” he called himself, a brand
plucked from the burning …
… and every morning
of his burnt-out life prepared the fire
and separated ash from coal, and prayed
to his zealous searing God to give him
strength to carry the torch for one more day.

It looks as if I’m heading for another podium place – the third time in 48 years!

Way back in antiquity, my shipwreck in the Bahamas led to The Sinking of the “Almeta Queen”.  First poem, and first in the 1971 Bahamas Drama Competition (yes, a poem winning a drama comp: the performance must have been persuasive).

Creak forward to 1985/86, and an MPhil at Cambridge University: I had to relieve the brain-ache somehow.  As well as playing Subtle, the eponymous Alchemist of Ben Jonson’s comedy in the ADC’s May production, I won a limerick competition as part of Wolfson College’s Beaujolais Nouveau celebration (younger readers might find it difficult to understand the totally OTT frenzy of each new Beaujolais wine’s arrival).  I was amazed to find that my 3 fairly sozzled creations had won – 6 bottles of the bloody wine – until the Bursar told me I was the only entrant.

The dinner

The College’s Beaujolais Nouveau,
With typical Franglais menu – so
Gastronomique,
Quite, quite magnifique!
Bottoms up! Vive la France! Comme il faut!

“Le matin après” (or “le lendemain matin”, whichever is vraiment français):

The effect of the Beaujolais wine
Was to make Wolfson members supine.
Bacchic revels and feasts
Make men wish to be beasts –
But the droop is the fruit of the vine.

An individual downfall:

A young Wolfson member named Alec
Was inspired by the atmosphere Gallic
To dance far too much.
He now needs a crutch …
But I don’t think his stiffness is phallic.

 

And now, something completely different.

I’ve been told that I’m in the first 3 of Ver Poets’ Summer Competition for rhyming poetry – and I can’t even be there when the results are announced!  I’m in Sicily for a week, and can’t be at the prize-giving.  I’ll try hard to down a few glasses of Nero d’Avola on Friday evening, 21^st September, when my poetic soul will be at St Michael’s Church Hall in St Albans where the results (Gold? Silver? Bronze?) will be announced.

The poem originated on a slow train journey from London to Durham for my father’s funeral, and an even slower train back the same night.  I’d scribbled down a few lines, fallen asleep, and woke up with my head resting on a lovely young woman’s shoulder.  I mumbled an apology, but she said “It’s all right, pet, I’m very comfortable”, and we both went back to sleep.  Brief encounters … part of the oddity of travelling, where being encapsulated shifts you out of time as well as place.

               Funeral Train

Grey scurf-patched grass. Coal-coloured streams
seep through the tyres and tins and glinting glass.
Crippled walls of soot-red brick, bleak troubled dreams,
blind memories, old lantern-slides that pass

beyond perception, never quite revealing station names
that blur away on neatly-painted wooden boards.
Inside the rattling rhythm, dirty windows frame
and isolate the travellers. Communication cords

must not be used. We move on parallel lines
towards divergent destinations, never meet
in this encapsulated absolute where signs
like “Gentlemen please lift the seat”

discreetly segregate us. Simple trust
in progress tells us that the journey’s end
is where we want to go. We brush the dust
of leaving from our feet, anticipate some friend

to meet us. But then the flickering picture stops.
An unseen signal? Windows mirror fears.
Stillness. Dark, dingy fields. Silent raindrops
etch into certainty with tears.

I love cemeteries!  They’re usually peaceful (well, the inhabitants are quiet), often have an aura of love arising from memorials, and they can sometimes reveal little nuggets of history.  When I was a student, I worked as a gardener and occasional gravedigger in Lawnswood Cemetery, Leeds.  After being sent down from University (as the first of our extended family to get to higher education, it seemed like nemesis had really punished my pride) I worked there for 5 months before taking the easy way out and going back to uni.  Maybe I left just in time: some of the old gravediggers would talk to the dead, quite naturally.  It had started to feel natural that the dead should reply.

Marquein cemetery is quite unlike the majority of French graveyards.  It is in the churchyard, rather than separate; it has a wonderful open view of the chain of mountains from Corbières to Pyrénées; and it has an empty tomb for anyone in need.  A gesture of hospitality, going above and beyond the norm?

Returning from France to a cool St Albans, catching up with the comic opera of blocked drains and slightly wounded car has led to thoughts of other blockages. I wrote nothing for about 10 years – from headship to civil servant in career terms.  It may have been because I had no space left in my head for anything other than work, or because ultimately I lost heart with my work; or perhaps because I had nothing to say.  It took a breakdown, followed by voluntary redundancy, to act as a metaphorical laxative.

Our little house in Marquein, bought in 1990, was a bolthole from stress for both of us, and it’s where I eventually started to write again … by chance.  I happened upon (don’t you love that phrase!) a little paperback edition of the poems of Paul Valéry; a distant echo of A-level French in the very early 60s, and an echo of something closer:  Marquein cemetery.  I’d got to know that little resting-place quite well, as it’s been the most reliable site for mobile-phone reception – cyberspace meets spirit-world?  One of the residents there is Paul Valéry.  Curiosity aroused by co-incidence: the Paul Valéry, poet and polymath, in the illustrious ranks of the Académie Française, was born and was buried in Sète, had nothing to do with Marquein, but I went along with the happenstance and began to read and translate some of his poems.

Finding a structure and a metre in English to match the French was a sort of academic exercise, but I was sufficiently engaged to start writing my own “stuff” again.  A bit like unblocking the drain by getting a flow of water running through. I was also lubricated by a little red-wine sentimentality as well as by the sheer delight of co- incidence!  These two translations are a salute to Marquein’s own Paul Valéry, sleeping in his narrow cell, with no trophies raised to his memory… apologies to Thomas Gray!

La Fileuse  (The Spinner)

Sitting near the window, the spinner in blue
Dozes with the murmuring of the garden;
The old wheel’s humming has made her head bow.

Drunk with the azure light, wearied by braiding
Her tresses, hands tired, all sounds are now hushed.
Her little head droops; soon she is dreaming.

Air, spring-water fresh, sighs through a bush
Which sways, sprinkling its sweet petals slowly
On the sleepy-head’s garden. Another gust

Of the roving wind stirs a branch; it bends low
With a vain bow to her charms, then hands
A rose to the old wheel as if it were holy.

But the sleeper draws out one single strand;
Mysteriously, as if by the pale shade,
A thread is drawn through her sleeping hands.

The dream unreels, and lazily braids
(angelically, to the spindle’s slow whirs)
Her tresses which drift in perfect cascades …

Behind so many flowers the sky turns
Invisible. Spinner of leaves, light now
Around her – the green sky dies, the last tree burns –

Your sister, the rose, from whose bower
Smiles a saint, breathes scent on your forehead,
And you feel faint, fade, lose your power

In the blue of the casement, where you spin the thread

Au Bois Dormant  (In the Sleeping Wood)

In her rose-pink palace the princess sleeps
Beneath the moving shadow’s murmurings.
A word, like coral forming on her lips,
Remains unheard; lost birds peck her golden rings.

She cannot hear the rainfall, nor the tears
Which tell of treasures lost, an age forlorn,
Nor flutes whose fading notes throughout the years
Were heard beneath the forest’s hunting-horns.

May that faint echo soothe her in her sleep,
Sweet tendrils caress her as they creep
And gently stroke those heavy-lidded eyes.

Rose petals fall and brush her cheek. Such
Secret pleasures cannot be disguised;
Arousal flickers at the sunbeam’s touch.

 

About Marquein

we realised how lucky we’d been! Not until the water receded from the roads could we see the vast quantities of clay, like potters’ slip, which filled the drains and ditches and covered the lanes. The few hedges to have survived intensive ploughing (right up to the edges of fields) had been washed away, shallow-rooted trees torn up, and posts for power- and phone-lines had collapsed with the earth on which they stood. Gardouch, a neighbouring village, had seen the Canal du Midi merge with the little river Gardijol and inundate all the low-lying fields and houses; wet clay was everywhere.

And then came the sun again. Clay, scraped off the roads’ surface, hardens in the ditches and verges. The lanes are baked ridges of terracotta. Broken banks of earth wait for the next downfall. Tree roots are still exposed. Sunflower stalks are stripped of their leaves, and stick out at an angle to the ground, a few sparse flowers like jaunty hats on skeletons.

And will we still refuse to see this kind of storm as a preview of payback time?  Farming used to be called husbandry, in our old quaint sexist way, but land is now used for maximised profit rather than as part of our heritage to be tended and cherished.  A recent headline in the Guardian stated “Earth’s resources consumed in ever greater destructive volumes”,  and (even) The Sun had a banner headline on 26^th July proclaiming “the world’s on fire”, reporting evidence from climate-change scientists.  Is this sanctioned by Rupert Murdoch, a climate-change denier (like his self-effacing pal Donald Trump … and, apparently, a majority of the Republican party)?  If it represents a change of views (I’d been going to write “heart”, but that would be problematic for both Murdoch and Trump) it’s probably too little, and much too late.

END OF DAYS

 Everybody says, it’s just so hot,

or wet, or mild, or cold –

  whatever – just so unseasonal.

Nature is out of joint.  Unreasonable

to expect normality

at the end of days.

We’ve destroyed the earth,

belched poison in the air,

voided our waste into the seas,

and even cyber-space is filled

with bile, as if our appetite

(long sated) demands

self-harm

in every possible way.

Suicide by proxy

The world is dying.

We drink to our destruction,

speed towards oblivion,

spend more than what we’ve earned,

build what we can’t afford …

and at the end of yet another year

send each other cards

filled with nostalgia

for a past we can’t remember

(or never had)

and wishes for a future

we will never see.

We play on, blindly;

Trumped by greed.

 

It’s hard not to feel full of joy, when blue sky and unremitting sunshine warm hearts and joints (although that could mean the St Albans we left behind), and when the tranquility of a tiny French village takes over from the hustle and bustle of English life.

And yet … there are downsides. We will know the fate of the old boiler next week. And still no WiFi, unless we subscribe to a service bounced from one church tower a few kms away to Marquein’s clocher mur, and that would be a cost of several hundred euros a year. Internet and mobile connection is still unreliable; I find one particular tomb in the village cemetery is a handy, if bizarre, “sweet spot”! The bar in Salles-sur-l’Hers, 7km away, has a friendly and free WiFi connection and the temptation of just another demi.

Our little garden was a green wall of weeds, after an unusually wet spring continued into June, and trying to hack it all back enough to be able to sit on the terrace (in temperatures of 35+) is exhausting enough without the risks of insect bites. And the temptation of just another beer.

Our struggles with digital communication and with the small garden of a small second home are (as a friend of ours used to say) rich folks’ problems. The continuing threat of climate change is a universal problem, and the sharp end is obvious here. The abnormal rainfall has almost ruined this year’s wheat harvest and delayed – perhaps even ruined – the sunflower crop. It’s not only poets’ and tourists’ hearts which leap up at the totemic golden fields of summer. Sunflower seeds and oil are a staple for local farmers and for the local economy. And there are no golden fields yet.

An old friend of ours, visiting us in Marquein many summers ago, commented that whole fields of sunflowers seen at close quarters felt threatening … over head-high, heads often bigger than dinner plates, all turned in the same direction, whispering and rattling in the evening wind. And when they’re ready for harvesting, the stalks and leaves are hard and dry, the flower-heads black and shrivelled, as though fire had swept through the battalions of bronze troops.

A couple of years ago, they seemed an image of my own bi-polarity; I read William Blake’s poem, and this emerged almost fully-formed.

 

Ah, Sunflower! Weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done.

(Blake)

Sunflowers

Burning through France, autoroute starting to shimmer
with heat, I wait for the first
oasis of gold, sunburst
semaphore, signalling south, reminder
of light. Drawn by the sun
away from the deadening nightmares of time,
pressure, work … to that “sweet golden clime
where the traveller’s journey is done”,
I long for the sunflowers.
There! Over there!

Closer and closer, searching each face for response.
Each stares back blindly, in rank after rank of implacable bronze.
Each stands erect, on its armoured green trunk; each yellow stare
is a warning. Nothing in me can reflect.
Nothing in me can attract.
Nothing. They serve only the court of the sun.

Late August, earth seared of its gold, I run
north again, turning my face from survivors:
black skeletons, burnt grotesque faces,
fire-withered lines where the sun’s army stood.

Bleak winter waits. Returning fills me with dread

 

 

If “Sunflowers” is too bleak, do what I do, and look up Phoebe Hesketh’s poem, “Nothing grows old” at https://allpoetry.com: it’s a wonderful uplift, from the first line (“This is the hour the gods set to music”) to the last.

P.S. Prevented from posting this by first of all Bastille Day (14th July), then the World Cup Final (vivent les bleus!), both of which involved total shut down of all services, I had high hopes for Monday … but a violent storm on Sunday night and Monday morning cut off all power and phone lines (even the water supply failed: burst pipe), blocked roads, caused local floods, and totally destroyed several fields where the sunflowers were struggling to ripen after the late planting. Mudslides, fallen trees, minor leakage in our loft – all horrible. So today, Tuesday 17th, I’m hoping to get this blog posted, and preparing another which, quite logically in my view, blames Trump for everything!

Enjoy summer while you can.

Derek

We recently had to replace our central-heating boiler; too old, no longer serviceable. Next week we drive south to our little house in France, where the (even older) boiler is due for its annual health check. We fully expect the same outcome – if not now, very soon. Its future is diminishing.

As an old actor playing old characters, it’s good to feel serviceable still, although the recent production of On Golden Pond meant poor old Norman Thayer had to contend with my knees, my back, as well as his own declining memory and increasing palpitations.

A very old Yorkshire joke limps to mind. A very old Yorkshireman sat in a pub, sobbing. When the concerned barman asked him what was up, the old chap replied, “I’ve recently married a beautiful young woman, who loves me dearly and looks after my every need.” The barman said, “That’s nowt to fret about, surely!” “But”, said the old man through his tears, “I can’t remember where I live.”

Apologies to Company of Ten members and friends who were at my 70th birthday party (or the Wake for Jake – it almost coincided with my son’s sudden death, in one of those awful, almost Jacobean, collisions of comedy and tragedy). I had just played the part of Tom Eliot’s father-in-law in Michael Hasting’s play Tom and Viv.In reply to my question, “Any special talent?”, Eliot is given the wonderful line “I have a feeling for ditties which rhyme”.

With that in mind, I wrote and performed my only song. (Well, performed and song are gross exaggerations). It’s mainly a series of quotations from The Love-song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with a little help from Leonard Cohen thrown in for good measure; I think of it as Eliot’s reverse bucket-list: all the things he’ll never be able to do! Amazing though it may seem, the older you get, the shorter your future … The second poem is a twisted update on Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress.

Eliot’s Ditty that Rhymes

(Refrain, to be sung to any tune that’ll fit – keeping a little beat where indicated)

I grow old, I grow old.
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Do I dare to eat a peach?
Will I hear the mermaids singing // each to each?
I do not think they will sing for me,
or linger in those chambers // of the sea.

(x2)

Shall I part my hair behind?
Does it matter? Will // anyone mind?
I’m not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
My only role now is // mediocrity.

(x2)

Do I dare, do I dare,
To show my bald spot as // others stare?
An ageing Fool, they’ll sneer away,
who aches in all the places where he // used to play!

But that is not what I meant at all,
I’ll carry on regardless, going to // have a ball.

 

Take your time

Nothing works any more, I moan,
a waste of effort – leave me alone.
Take your time, she says. No hurry. My time?
The sand’s run out, my clock won’t chime
with yours. I want the eternal now,
can’t find the words to tell you how
the past has grown, the future shrunk.
Relax with me, she says, chill out, get drunk.
She smiles, looks at her watch. I hear
Time’s wingéd chariot drawing near.

 

Back from a week in SE Spain, the wonderful desert of Cabo de Gata-Nijar Natural Park. Our third visit. The first was on the anniversary of son Jake’s sudden death; the second was the occasion when my back took centre stage (ruptured disc and cracked vertebra – the journey back was a nightmare, straight to hospital and eventual surgery); this time my knee was vying for attention, but we managed some walking, strolling on the coast around Rodalquilar. I’ve fallen in love with Isleta del Moro, a beautiful fishing village just north of San Jose … is it too late to think of relocating here? Our base was El Jardin de los Suenos (The Garden of Dreams), a small hotel in an enchanting desert garden.

Some delightful experiences, with meals ranging from “Cow’s Cheek” in a cafe bar in Rodalquilar (love the rhyme more than the food: if only we’d known what it was before we ordered) to a Menu Gastronomique in Ora y Luz: fabulous food, a wine for each course, and an evening spent quite by chance in the delightful company of Sofia and Jose. Two orthopaedic specialists, stopping over en route from Malaga to a wedding in Lorca … something about the evening and the company made my knee better: could it have been the wine? The conversation had to include a reference to Lorca’s Blood Wedding (me, trying to show off), just as this blog has to include a poem for each of the three visits. Return to the Garden is a work in progress; I still have some tinkering to do.

Extinct Volcanoes
(Cabo de Gato, Almeria, Spain. May 2015)

Dry, desert heat. And crested larks rising,
singing, to swoop and perch as if in air.
Volcanoes’ molten rage, vented long ago,
contorted into crags and jagged peaks:
passion spent, now sculpted into tortured
eerie beauty. Only the larks moved, sang,
and led us through the clumps of colour, blood
on phallic stalks, gold bizarrely dripped
on sere, scorched ground.
And step by step, plodding
with the gravity of love and death and grief,
we moved into the curing arid space
of those extinct volcanoes, the healing
abandonment of self. Salt tears dried.
And on and on the larks took flight and sang.

The Garden of Dreams
(El Jardin de los Suenos. April 2017)

The old cat stretches, yawns, rolls over
into the bougainvillea’s shade, stares
towards my shuffle to the chair.
Her milky eyes close again. She sleeps.
Cushions hold me. Between the morphine
and the pain, I close my eyes and let
the darkness draw me in to where
the blind cat lies. Let me slide
into the night, sleep long into the day,
and fade into the drowsy garden’s warmth.

Return to the Garden
(June 2018)

We planted many dreams here: seems like
years ago, when those first stabs of grief
were stilled by relics of volcanic force.
Some have strange shapes now: twisted, skulking low,
bursting into lurid flower when seeming dead.
Some – the jacaranda’s ghostly blue,
the bougainvillea’s blowsy painted tissue –
appear like unexpected smiles. And some
burst from the ground, startle into song,
and taunt us with their freedom.

The old blind cat faded in November.
She died at home, perhaps consoled by dreams
of cicadas’ summer noise, of warmth and shade,
and of the tempting, rising song of crested larks.

40 years after the shipwreck came the following poem;
it’s a sort of elegy, a sort of celebration of survival,
and a sort of condensation of trauma.

Forty Years On

Life holds us casually
a thin thread stretching
credulity to snapping point.

The sudden blue sky after take-off
as the plane climbs, banks, and then
the fragile frame fills with smoke.
Belief in flight first fades
then burns and falls away. Fire
in the engine, wing scorching,
screaming down to earth
to land on foam
and slide to shrieks and sirens
and see the fantasy of flight
stripped to the bone.

And later, air having proved
unreliable, we trust ourselves
to water. Not capsuled now,
we stand, we walk on deck.
Wood underfoot, and under that
the sea, immense and dark.
Floating is easily understood.

Light fades, the harbour
recedes. Wind grows,
waves irrationally loom overhead
and oh we’re so small
a drop in the ocean
and the water
impossibly tall
as the hurricane howls
and hurls us into
the night.

And later, water having proved
unreliable, after the shipwreck
and after coming to terms
with survival, repairing the damage,
replacing all that was lost,
we live on an island.
A fragment of earth
hovering between water and air.

We burn in the salt and the sun.
We find only dust.
We cannot survive the mistrust
that misfortune has left us –
there is no longer
an element to live in
nor medium for us
to grow in.

Love, lacking confidence,
dies. Life, lacking meaning,
goes on in improbable ways
filling the space
between starting and ending.

Derek Coe
October 2010