Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas!

... and I call upon some old friends who always made me feel right! 

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas!

3 from Roger McGough

Roots
Like a poem around a tree
Like a freedom flag unfurled
A homeless refugee
I have travelled round the world

I remember slanted mountains with dusted white peaks
ivory snow and emerald green trees.
I remember the tickle going up my spine
when birds settled on my branches.
The soft footfall of a passing fox.

I remember the sweet smell of pine-scented smoke
wafting from chocolate log cabins.
I remember thinking that there will come a time soon
When I will no longer remember any of this:

A sickle moon
The scrunching sound of footsteps
A brutal saw chomping through my bark
and the snow slides off me like a silken robe.

The squabble of sea birds and an icy deck
the savagery of ropes and roller-coasting waves,
until eventually, the warm cuddle of sleep.

In a clearing in the concrete forest of a city
I rise to the noise of pigeons and car horns,
Of children laughing and crowds cheering.
With 500 white lights I am adorned. Am excited.
Crowned with a star. I am adored and delighted.

When the children leave and the music stops
And the lights and the words taken down
Unlike the tree I have put down roots
In London, my new home town

Lights, camera, action!
A switch is pulled
and I light up like an angel.


The way things are
No, the candle is not crying, it can not feel pain.
Even telescopes, like the rest of us, grow bored.
Bubblegum will not make the hair soft and shiny.
The duller the imagination, the faster the car,
I am your father and that is the way things are.

When the sky is looking the other way,
do not enter the forest. No, the wind
is not caused by the rushing of clouds.
An excuse is as good a reason as any.
A lighthouse, launched, will not go far,
I am your father and that is the way things are.

No, old people do not walk slowly
because they have plenty of time.
Gardening books when buried will not flower.
Though lightly worn, a crown may leave a scar,
I am your father and that is the way things are.

No, the red woolly hat has not been
put on the railing to keep it warm.
When one glove is missing, both are lost.
Today's craft fair is tomorrows boot sale.
The guitarist weeps gently, not the guitar
I am your father and that is the way things are.

Pebbles work best without batteries.
The deckchair will fail as a unit of currency.
Even though your shadow is shortening
it does not mean you are growing smaller.
Moonbeams sadly, will not survive in a jar,
I am your father and that is the way things are.

For centuries the bullet remained quietly confident
that the gun would be invented.
A drowning surrealist will not appreciate
the concrete lifebelt.
No guarantee my last goodbye is an au revoir,
I am your father and that is the way things are.

Do not become a prison officer unless you know
what you're letting someone else in for.
The thrill of being a shower curtain will soon pall.
No trusting hand awaits a falling star
I am your father, and I am sorry
but this is the way things are.


First day at School
A millionbillionwillion miles from home
Waiting for the bell to go. (To go where?)
Why are they all so big, other children?
So noisy? So much at home they
Must have been born in uniform
Lived all their lives in playgrounds
Spent the years inventing games
That don't let me in. Games
That are rough, that swallow you up.

And the railings.
All around, the railings.
Are they to keep out wolves and monsters?
Things that carry off and eat children?
Things you don't take sweets from?
Perhaps they're to stop us getting out
Running away from the lessins. Lessin.
What does a lessin look like?
Sounds small and slimy.
They keep them in the glassrooms.
Whole rooms made out of glass. Imagine.

I wish I could remember my name
Mummy said it would come in useful.
Like wellies. When there's puddles.
Yellowwellies. I wish she was here.
I think my name is sewn on somewhere
Perhaps the teacher will read it for me.
Tea-cher. The one who makes the tea.

-

Image source here

About Roger McGough

M&L

Here's the music...

And here are the lyrics...

I walk in stride with people
much taller than me
and partly it's the boots but
mostly it's my chi
and I'm becoming transfixed
with nature and my part in it
which I believe just signifies
I'm finally waking up

and there's this moth outside my kitchen door
she's bonkers for that bare bulb
flying round in circles
bashing in her exoskull
and out in the woods she navigates fine by the moon
but get her around a light bulb and she's doomed

she is trying to evolve
she's just trying to evolve

now let's get talking reefer madness
like some arrogant government can't
by any stretch of the imagination
outlaw a plant
yes, their supposed authority over nature
is a dream
c'mon people
we've got to come clean

cuz they are locking our sons
and our daughters in cages
they are taking by the thousands
our lives from under us
it's a crash course in religious fundamentals
now let's all go to war
get some bang for our buck

I am trying to evolve
I'm just trying to evolve

gunnin for high score in the land of dreams
morbid bluish-white consumers ogling luminous screens
on the trail of forgetting
cruising without a care
the jet set won't abide by that pesky jet lag
and our lives boil down to an hour or two
when someone pulls a camera out of a bag

and I am trying to evolve
I'm just trying to evolve

so I walk like I'm on a mission
cuz that's the way I groove
I got more and more to do
I got less and less to prove
it took me too long to realize
that I don't take good pictures
cuz I have the kind of beauty
that moves

and I am trying to evolve
and I am trying to evolve

-

Immortel

Il y a ni portes ni fenêtres pour aller où c’est toujours parfait. Celui qui est né là-bas, vit éternellement jusqu'à la fin du monde.

Penned Nov 17, 2011.

Image source here 

Serendipity

"To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing--a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there. To live this life far from emotions and thought, living it only in the thought of emotions and in the emotion of thoughts. To goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers. To possess, in the shade, that nobility of spirit that makes no demands on life. To be in the whirl of the worlds like dust of flowers, sailing through the afternoon air on an unknown wind and falling, in the torpor of dusk, wherever it falls, lost among larger things. To be this with a sure understanding, neither happy nor sad, grateful to the sun for its brilliance and to the stars for their remoteness. To be no more, have no more, want no more...."

The Big Apple

  

 Source here

God Speaks (Rainer Maria Rilke)

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

What this is not about. Or is it.

There are those who live by the map. And drive by it. Those who are humble. And uncertain. Some with the half-life of an elephant's memory. Some who choose to live there. For some, every milestone is a trigger. An echo their sound bird, their word carrier across chasms. Of space and time. To some, this life holds no enticement. To some, the only fear of loss, is death. Some wait for forests to move. Some toil in silhouettes to cave out barks of trees to make them. There are also those whose lives are as fickle to chance as the paths they take. Random. With no design. Then there are those who want nothing. They simply exist in flame or ash. Like air.

Penned June 22, 2011. 

Letter to a young poet (C.K. Williams)

Pulitzer Prize winning poet, C.K. Williams, gives his advice for a poet starting out.

I’ll begin by promising that there’ll be times in your life as a poet when the problems that are a part of trying to live that life will make the whole undertaking seem a terrible mistake, and you’ll find yourself thinking there must be something else to do that might better reward your labor.  And indeed some poets do release themselves from poetry; they become novelists, or teachers, or accountants, (happy accountants!) and this can happen to poets who are still surprisingly young.

I should also say though that I don’t think the decision to abandon poetry has to do with how much talent one believes one has or doesn’t have, or how much dedication, or confidence; it’s rather more a spiritual crisis, a loss of faith in the conviction that poetry has a value beyond the doing of it.  Surely the pleasures of that doing are undeniable; the making of something from nothing is a delight unlike anything else.

So the conviction that poetry has significance beyond its practice becomes absolutely essential, yet it isn’t at all self-evident.  Finally, at some point we have to ask what it is that draws us to poetry in the first place? It seems to me that the essential function of poetry is to unify.

Human beings experience ourselves as assemblages, almost collages, of the passional, the sensual, the intellectual and the spiritual. We are at once philosophers, aestheticians, social and political theorists; we are lovers and haters, children and parents, we lie, we tell the truth, we make myths and stories; there is violence in us, but there is also the unlikely charity which illuminates our spiritual history.  And what’s more, we are both participants and observers of all these portions of ourselves, these selves.   Poetry’s real greatness is that it is the most effective means we have of bringing together these apparently disparate parts of ourselves.  Because to be real poetry must be true, and  because it must deal unconditionally with the reality of a single person’s existence, by its definition it entails a bringing together of selves within the self.  Poetry makes us more whole than we thought we could be.

And for a poem to do this, in some strange way it doesn’t matter what it is about, what its subject is.  Poems can be self-consciously dedicated to the moral adventures of our lives; they can delve into that complex swarm of emotions and thoughts out of which our ethical sensibilities and obligations arise, and this will give them a certain admirable weight, like the poems of Dante, or Milton, or Baudelaire, but whether poems do this or not doesn’t determine their ultimate merit.  All poems exist in the tension between the immateriality of consciousness and language and the brute physical facts of reality, and so all poems, or all poems that are not empty drums banged to garner the applause of others, poets or critics, resolve this tension in ways that make them speak both to and out of the self.  A poem can seem to be about nothing at all – a clever conceit about lost love in a sonnet by Ronsard, a meditation on a moment of sensual delight in an ode of Keats – and yet, if a poem is authentic, if it is true, it will still evoke this essential unity in us, and will help us understand that we are not the poor fragmented things we can seem to be, and that our social organizations aren’t merely groupings of other fractured beings.  Because poetry demonstrates that the plural is merely a convention for the human spirit. The truth is that we are born and live and die one by one, and poetry, because it speaks at once to the poet and the reader, links the experience of one single soul to another and by doing so it exalts both.  That, finally, is what poetry is about, it is what allows us to be able to sit in a room by ourselves and do battle with language and form and with the pain of being able to do so little about human pain, and still feel we are doing what we know is the right thing.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet C.K. Williams has published numerous books of poetry, including Wait: Poems (2010); Collected Poems (2006); The Singing (2003), Repair (1999), The Vigil (1997); A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987); Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969). He has also published five works of translation.

Among his many awards and honours are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. He has served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Currently Williams teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris

C.K. Williams has travelled to the UK to give the Poetry Society’s Annual Lecture “On Being Old.” He will also read a selection of his poetry at the lectures which will take place on:

• Wednesday 25 May at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, Newcastle University
• Thursday 26 May at Senate House University College London
• Thursday 13 October at the Kenneth Allott Lecture  at Liverpool University

In C.K. Williams’ Letter To A Younger Poet, he emphasises the need to keep faith in poetry. If you had a time machine and could send a letter back to yourself when you first started writing poetry, what would you say? Do you have questions you would like to ask your future self?

Source is here