Thursday 31 January 2019

CLIMACOPHOBIA

Photo credit & thanks to:  eberhard grossgasteiger from Pexels

(Climacophobia: a fear of climbing stairs)

Playing statues at the apex of the pinnacle
Of the top of the 'big' slide,
At watering eye-level
With the trunks of poplars.
Except I'm not playing.
Behind me, below me, bump and shove,
Other kids wait-not-waiting their turn,
Impatient to glide back down the shining
Ribbon of glissando,
The squealing slither
Coasting casual on belly or bum.

But there is this trembling 
Stopper in the bottleneck.

I stoop frozen. Jelly leggy. Sweaty.

On some school trip, half way up
Cathedral, windmill, tower, steeple,
Sickening spirals
Jostlers barging,
Climbing contrariwise
Over pocked medieval puddles
In slippery stone.

Or those awful public spaces
Gaping mockery of open plan
Steps with no vertical risers,
Daylight jeering between each tread,
While I steel myself
To bumble down on buttocks,
Blushing cheeks ablaze.

Don't go up one rickety rung
If you daren't come down again.
Life lessons learnt.

Down was always the killer,
The handrail from hell,
The hanging back,
The stepping off
Into cataclysmic abyss,
Vertigo's tunnel
Spinning and pitching.
She who hesitates is lost
In fathomless undercrofts,
Cellars and cryptic crypts.

Bless you, O bless you, terra firma!
I live to kiss the ground.







Monday 28 January 2019

BIG GARDEN BIRDWATCH 2019


Cilla the Grey Wagtail with suet pellet prize for turning up for the Big Garden Birdwatch 2019 in Wickersley, South Yorkshire, UK


The RSPB ( the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) organises a “Big Garden Birdwatch” on the last weekend of January every year. You count the maximum number of each species that visits your chosen patch within the space of an hour of your choice. It’s a way of inspiring young and old to grab their binoculars and point their spotting scopes at their wonderful avian neighbours. It’s also a rough indication of which species are thriving or struggling on these islands.

I made my second attempt at completing the survey this morning. It usually takes me a couple of tries, so the full hour of birding is sometimes cobbled together from ten minutes here and half an hour there, as strength and health permit. This year I’ve been fortunate to be well enough over the weekend to do the whole sitting in one go. Or rather in two goes - one yesterday afternoon and then a repeat this morning, which is pretty good going, by my low standards. As today’s session was the first feed of the day, the birds were more eager than last time, which was just after dinner.

One of the resident Magpies turned up to represent the corvids, as the Crows simply couldn’t be bothered. Neither could the other Magpies. The flock of local Wood Pigeons made a late entrance, minus my secret favourite, Drooper the Woody with the Wonky Wing or his mate Rolly, a female with a damaged leg which gives her an unmistakable rolling gait. The other pigeons who decided to participate spent most of their time attempting to mate, thrusting their wings petulantly at one another or flying off to sit in surrounding trees, meaning I needed to adjudicate whether or not they actually counted as being on my patch at all.

Drooper the Woody with the Wonky Wing

Yesterday, none of the tit family arrived during the allotted hour. Today, a trio of Blue Tits, a pair of Great Tits and a solitary Coal Tit got their attendance marks, unlike the little clan of Long-Tailed Tits I’d heard twittering away every day last week. No doubt the ‘Lollipops’ had been checking their diaries so as to co-ordinate their efforts not to get caught on the census. All the better for staying under the radar uncounted, getting up to any merry mischief they might choose, without human knowledge. The same goes for the resident Wren, who is heard but not seen most of the time, and was certainly not going to make it easy for me during the BGBW.

Great Tit (Parus major)
Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus)
The House Sparrows were here in force. Fifteen of them shuttling between hedgerow and feeders, chirping the odds, swapping places, noisily networking. Numbers of males and females seemed roughly equal. I know we’re so very lucky to have a such a thriving colony of House Sparrows in residence. In many parts of the UK they are becoming a rarity.

Standing out from the crowd is the one I’ve named Lucy, from the fact she’s a leucistic bird. Leucism is a condition where a bird is born with a partial lack of pigment in its feathers. There may be patches of white where other colours are ‘normal’ for the breed. Consequently, Lucy looks, from a distance, like some sort of pale finch or bunting. Closer examination reveals her to be a female House Sparrow with beautiful snowy sections on her wings. She flutters in like a ray of light, integrated with her tribe but always distinctive in our eyes. Lovely to have some joyful diversity at the bird table.
Lucy the leucistic House Sparrow
Of the pair of resident Robins, only one graced us with its presence, plumped out and very pleased with itself to be representing its redbreast posse. Maybe it thinks it is the most photogenic and coveted tick on the list, as it has recently been voted Britain’s favourite bird and always popular for its iconic place at the heart of the winter season. Two pairs of Dunnocks were omnipresent, as usual, not attracting attention to themselves, unassuming and modest little wind-up toys, ticking along under the hedge or on the lawn, dancing jerkily under their own momentum.

The unexpected highlight for me, of this or indeed any recent BGBW, came just five minutes before the end of the appointed hour. Onto the patio bounced the Grey Wagtail, nicknamed ‘Cilla’ after its Latin name (Motacilla cinerea). She first appeared a couple of days ago for the very first time. Before that I had never seen a Grey Wagtail in the garden. I certainly wasn’t expecting her to put in an appearance for the hallowed hour. But she didn’t let me down. I even got a photo of her with a suet pellet in her beak (see above). Had to add her manually onto the BGBW results page online, as she wasn’t included among the species most likely to be seen.

A reminder, just when we might really be needing one, that you never know what is around the corner. You sometimes approach a project with cynicism, only to be delighted by unlooked for miracles, finding your glass not just half full, but overflowing. The birds in my garden remind me of that every single day.

[Full result: 1 Robin, 15 House Sparrows, 7 Blackbirds, 6 Wood Pigeons, 4 Dunnocks, 1 Magpie, 3 Blue Tits, 2 Great Tits, 1 Coal Tit and 1 Grey Wagtail.]
Robin (Erithacus rubecula) Britain's favourite national sweetheart



Sunday 27 January 2019

BIAS BINDING

Photo credit and thanks to  Hitarth Jadhav from Pexels


Eye meets rolling eye
Two sides of screen
With space between.
Seeing your sorrow
I yearn to remind you:
Trolls can’t write your life
Cowards your story
Keyboard guerrillas
Can’t spin your tale
Bluster can't trail your blaze.
Block silky fibbers
Who flatter ‘my dear’
Who throw you really? and ‘quite’
A ‘maybe’ to minimize
Your dance through inner light.
Love yourself better than you do,
Hold yourself more kindly
Than you dare to deserve,
Your shining not muddied
By shade they thrash to throw.
Let their bitterest bile
Surge around you
Stand strong in the flow
May your ease be as chiffon
Wade as you weep
Stepping stones hidden
Now found by your feet
Let their bias not bind you
Sing your truth
Though your throat feels crumpled
By bullying blanks.
Rescue your radiance,
Child of forever
You are stardust
You are synchronous
Supernova
You come without commentary
Golden glossed.

Saturday 26 January 2019

SIGNATURE REFRESH

Photo credit: Pixabay via Pexels

This form from the council came today,
‘Signature refresh’ the header says,
For the postal vote, they must make sure
I write my name in the same old ways.

So I sign their box, but it makes me think
Of the way my signature has slipped
From the crisp italic I learned in school,
To scribbly illegible spider script.

Like when you sign for delivery folks,
On that box with its screen and bleeping sound,
The stylus won’t work, so your finger must serve
To claim your parcel they’ve carted round.

You point and wiggle and try to oblige,
You make that joke you always make,
It bears no resemblance to your name,
Very easy to laugh at, and easier to fake.

If the tiny stylus is still attached,
By its little lanyard an inch too short,
I always by accident press something wrong
So must sign ten times for the stuff I’ve bought.

We don’t get the practice we used to get,
Fewer sign a cheque when they bank online
So I sigh and I sign, I sign and I sigh,
(And I didn’t add kisses, so it's gone just fine!)

Friday 25 January 2019

NEXT TO THE SKIN

Photo credit with thanks: Kaboompics .com from Pexels

I still can’t bear
To wear wool
Next to my skin.
Thanks for that,
Family holiday
Fifty years gone.
A draughty caravan.
The east coast cliffs.
My new white woolly
Jumper with the roll neck
That nearly pulled off
My ears, dragging it
Over my head.
My occipital bone
Would emerge with a pop.
The hand-me-down sweater
Had shrunk in the wash
Squidging my puppy fat
In its greasy cable-pattern
Straitjacket.
Whooping cough
Mixed with pitch-and-putt,
Primrose Puffer,
Smell of rockpool.
My chest disembodied
With hot racking peffs.
Tinned vegetable soup,
Comfort food
That brought no comfort.
I suppose the vomiting
Was already written
In the stars and salty
Tide-charts.
Anyway, it happened.
Suddenly.
The arm of my woolly
Wasn’t quite so white, now.
Fever made the memory,
The touch of wool, distort
Into a nightmare loop,
Stiff itchy filaments
Squeezing my soreness
Rubbing me raw
With every rasp
Tickling, tingling,
Pinching.
 Two years later
At a party,
Under the table
I ate too many
Of those controversial
Chocolate dunkables
Sponge and hidden
Orange jelliness.
Cake or biscuit?
I had to be sure!
Greed not pertussis
My nemesis this time,
Again I was sick.
It only put me off
For a half a day.
If that.
(But still I won’t wear wool.)


Thursday 24 January 2019

WAGTAIL GREY

'Cilla' the Grey Wagtail (Motacilla cinerea) (Author's photo)

I don't know who
Was more excited.

Me? Grabbing the camera
On the wrong settings,
Flustering a few shots
Steaming the glass
Between us
With breath half-held in hush
For fear of you fleeing
Without trace.

Or you, wagtail?
Cinder ashen
Bumper rump a-bob
Lemon patched
Like nicotine
On pale knuckles
Nervy restless
Astonished
Astraddle
Puddle
Where the ice blade
Cruel edge
Of January
In this moment melted
To mirror
Your twitch and startle.
The same chill cut-throat
Drove you
Pittering to my patio
From waterway
And ringing river
Into the now
Of my scattering seed
My staggering standstill.


Wednesday 23 January 2019

SALTED CARAMEL

Photo credit -  Angele J from Pexels

I remember
The day I first heard
Salted Caramel
Was a thing.
That first eyes-closed
Sampling
The fudgy glory of it
The tang that twitched
Those salt-exalting buds
Making the flat golden
Saucy flow more edgy
Rewriting the mythic
Taste map of the tongue.

Not so the sea.
She is unimpressed
By her crystalline children
Strutting their way into
Coffee shops and eateries
Robed in sugar toffee puddles.
She is the sea
After all.
Perfect in every wave
Ebbing or breaking.
Secretly, though,
She must be proud
To be part of it,
Swelling her saline heart
At mothering such joy.

Tuesday 22 January 2019

ORDINARY MORNING MOON

Here's one I took (much) earlier of the eclipsed blood supermoon back in 28th September 2015

I catch her early
Between wake and wash
(Me, not her!)
Slipping down sassy
(Her, not me!)
Swanning through sycamore twigs
In her lap-dance
Way way west.
I’m such a lightweight,
Not up to the occasion,
I stand watching
At the foot of the bed,
Shivering in woolly shawl
Over my PJs
Mittens missing fingers
Thermal hat half over one eye
While silver she stoops to stun.

Last night,
In the cross hairs of half the planet,
She hid from me, smirking,
Strategically gathering
Colonnades of cumulus
To cover her scarlet blush
Her lupine loveliness
Her winter plumage
Plump as the robin’s
Her breast as red
Eclipsing carmine
Cochineal completely
At the nub of the night

But now she is already
Moving on into wane
Nibbling her rind away
Crater by crater
Knowing I must wait
Years to witness the same.
If on such ordinary mornings
I ever fail to be
Bowled over by wonder
At her wistful waning,
I don’t deserve
Her headline-grabbing
Up-all-night
Shadow play
Her super, her full, her blood.

Monday 21 January 2019

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Picture credit: Elephant by joeclub_ake at Pixabay
Trunk out the window
Skull skimming the ceiling
My soles skid on people-patterned parquet
I squeeze myself into
Your denial
Your unwilling
Hope against hope
You’ll notice me
Acknowledge me
Before I am crushed
By the narrowness
Of your room

Dropping your voice
You talk across me
As if I am invisible
I know you prefer me shrunken.
I weep at my bulk
My inconvenient presence
The way I wear
This pachyderm skin
I know I embarrass you.
I see it in your
Averted eyes
Hushed voices
Awkward silences

Someone feels my leg.
I am called a tree.
One grabs my ear
And I become a fan.
Fondler of my flank
I am not a wall
In your world of human hating
My tusk your spear
My trunk a snake
My tail you tug as rope
Please stop!
Focus your eyes
Hard as obsidian
And see me!
Know me.
Let me be here.
Admit it.
Admit me.
Embrace me
As I am.

Then scramble up on my back
And I’ll carry you home.

Sunday 20 January 2019

WHAT TIME IS IT, MRS WOLF (MOON)? - OR THE AMATEUR ASTRONOMER’S LAMENT

Wolf Moon rising - before the total eclipse in the wee small hours (Author's photo)


She’s risen! We’re feeling alright.
Best chance in ten years for a sight.
So get out the bins,
The thermos and lens,
And gaze at the sky, dead-of-night.

She’s Wolf! She’s Super! She’s Full!
Eclipsing like blood she’ll soon dull;
You think in your head,
“She’ll look great when she’s red!”
But that isn’t Wolf, it’s just Bull!

Cos when your alarm rings out loud,
And you’re poised, gazing moonward, so proud,
Comes that moment you dread,
And you’re straight back to bed -
There’s nothing to see but thick cloud!

Saturday 19 January 2019

SWINGTIME 1963


Buttery sun slants through the nets
Bootees kick into light
Dad’s dependable shunter’s palms
Guide to-and-fro at my back
Terpsichore clock hours bouncing blissful
From Bill Haley’s vinyl track
On the scarlet-lidded Dansette


Toddler pendulum, Dad rocks me
From kitchen cool to living room warmth
Up, lifting, back, forward, toes pointed,
Flying gaspy giggles, you trying to sing,
Floor tilts with subsidence
From mine-shafts burrowing
Blind moles under our valley
Dropped pencils roll from the south
Towards our cramped back yard
Its draughty outhouse, crunchy coalhole
Steam train rings on rails
Shudders the triangular under-the-stairs
Vibrates my heart-space with its presence

I don’t recall the Kennedy shock
When all the world stood still
Knowing where they were,
What they were doing.
I was ready already 
For the Moon landing.
How quickly it came, like the end
To my sixties swinging
Earthbound then soaring through stardust
Orbiting before the plummet

Two years later, back on the ground,
I run my fingers over those hooks
Either side the jamb painted magnolia
Echoes of where I swung without cares
Where hospital bed now fills the room
With its pulleys and chrome
When the dark blood clot moved into ours
While I was sleeping
And ate my daddy alive.

Friday 18 January 2019

I'LL BE RIGHT



That knot in your stomach. You know it. You feel it, too, don't you?

You feed it with worry and fretting about the future. Its favourite diet is 'might happens' and 'what ifs'. It ties itself tighter. It dyes itself deeper into darkness, knitting itself into a jacket with bristly threads.  You try to unpick it with distractions. You try to cast off its stitches but the needles of denial keep clicking.

Suddenly your mind is spinning. You feel shipwrecked on a distant horizon. Life feels remote and you picture yourself all alone, isolated, nervous, jumpy. Your hear an echo of your own helpless voice crying out, sobbing like you did as a child when you once felt abandoned and anxious decades ago.

You come to the end of your rope. You creep, broken, into silence. You let your babbling mind relax. You shush it firmly as it warns and scaremongers. You're Mary Poppins closing the beak of her parrot-headed umbrella.  When it starts to get the message, your mental chatter quietens its chuntering for a space. Just a space, so the silence can break through. Then the frantic little knot, the node of grief and anxiety, smiles at itself being gently acknowledged, and as your soul reminds itself of being one with all creation, you suddenly find the knot itself has unravelled and lost its kinks and snarls. Under all the surface shimmer of dire imaginings, you get a peek at the solid ground underneath.

Then there is a wideness, humming with light. You know for certain the truth that you are not floating in abandonment at all, but tenderly held, perfectly still, in love and security of another kind – the peace that's beyond words, or images or concepts. It waits for you so humbly, while you clumsily juggle with your mind’s plunge into the past, as it tries to recall better times while stopping off to rerun all the worst moments etched unhelpfully, obsessively, in memory; while your thoughts pick nervously at the imagined emptiness of the future, with that sense of undefined, vague and untouchable dread.

I hear from my heart: “I can't help with what you dread in the future. I can only be here with you in this moment. Here we can deal with everything that is, together as one.”

So I choose to be here. Not to ‘stay’ here, because change and impermanence is a given. We dread change too, don't we, when we make it into a choice, or link it to the uncertainty of the future? No. I choose to be here. Only here and now is rock solid liquid reality. Here I am beloved, with a love that is everywhere and everything, that is refreshed to perfection every moment, before that perfection can fall away even for an instant. Only sometimes, when the knot makes itself felt inside, I lose sight of this still centre and I escape into the captivity of mind-buzzing absence.

I've spent so many years of my life caught up in my mind's fantasies. The world of misery was always waiting when I came back to earth.  Like so many others, I've walked through a featureless wilderness of illness during these past few decades. After an initial ‘my life is over!’ moment, when I became so ill,  knees chopped from under me, unable to function from the illnesses that stalked me and ate me alive, I've reached a clearing. 

Clearings give us a new perspective on the surrounding forest with its thickets of thorns and hidden pits. Now I am finding my heart somehow drawn deeper and stiller than ever before. Nearer to silence's lucid clarity than I was, even in those active, fervent years when I was free to serve, travel, and minister wherever I was called to be. 

Nothing can quench that love at the very kernel of life itself. It never goes out and far from abandoning us to grief and cynicism for ever, it waits inside us till we can stop running and shouting and weeping for long enough to realise it has always completely been with us, and within us.

True joy comes welling up. Never pushy, never strident. It's always waiting in the background while the mind is doing its dread and loathing thing, fighting to get away from the truth of eternity that never diminishes or fades away for a moment.

This morning’s headlines in the UK include medicine shortages even before full Brexit at the end of the month after next. I could worry. I could whine. Perhaps I will, again! I've had enough practice! I could stress and resist and identify as poor little me, the hard done-by. But whenever I can summon up the insight not to, I refuse to. I'm unfriending that knot inside. I’ll let my imagination go on a hike, with its worst case scenarios and its personal 'Project Fear'. I’ll be softly in my spirit in the silence, in the midst of it. 

I'll be right here. 

I'll be right. 

Thursday 17 January 2019

R.I.P. Mary Oliver, poet of nature, wisdom, wonder


Such a sad day.

Sad for the natural world on this fragile planet, to which the poet Mary Oliver, who has died today aged 83, lent a uniquely sensitive voice and vibrancy through her words. Sad for poetry itself.

Mary was of the great American nature writers in the tradition of  Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. She loved Rumi, Hafez, Shelley and Keats. I think we are privileged to glimpse the inner life of her heart, rooted in nature, in cadences of pure communication, while she was equally unafraid to call out the unconscious ravaging of the planet by the human species.

Mary herself has been such an inspiration to me and so many others worldwide. She believed poetry 'mustn't be fancy' but put her beautiful heart's simplicity and clarity into every soulful phrase. She somehow carried into her words the deepest silence and stillness of her spirituality, true wisdom and joyous celebration, reverence, wonder and delight. Where Mary the witness ends and where the being of each subject begins, will always be a delicious mystery to her readers everywhere.

She leaves the Earth richer for her having lived here.  The spirit of nature had a beautiful champion in her. Through her poetry, she can never be forgotten.

An article here in the New York Times today, points out that 'perfect' was one of Mary's favourite adjectives.

Bless you, Mary, as you yourself were such a blessing.

May you rest now in perfect peace and rise in glory.