Reading "Beth Shalom" at the Black Swan, York

The Ladies of Dona Sofia

This poem is in the latest "The Seventh Quarry" and I can heartily recommend the magazine to all.

THE LADIES OF DONA SOFIA

One by one the ladies of Dona Sofia
hatch from shuttered sleep, look up,
smell the spent storm, red with sunrise
and African dust, moving its rucksack
of cloud, towards the Sierra Bermeja.

Out they come, tentative, like pupae
unspun prematurely from chrysalides,
each touched gently by the sun moving
across the apartment block face.
Sessile dolls suddenly wrenched free

their limbs rejoicing, they clean balconies.
This is a synchronous choreography;
a bulerias where all hear the rhythm,
know the steps, feel the beat; all hold
the seed of sorrow close to their heart.

Each one cloths a window’s damp smear,
as if waving desperate goodbye
to a lover, until a pin sharp reflection
emerges, like a magic painting,
in which each, in sequence, see blue sky,

apartment blocks, ladies cleaning windows.
Tonight these imagos will metamorphose
their drab for Mass; they will imagine
sins to commit, finger beads for Nostra Senora
de la Rosaria, scrub clean their souls.

Trisagion (Thrice Holy)

1

Tiresias the seer comes towards me,
stands in sun-faded red flowered dress
transparent bag stuffed
with gleanings of street and shore.
He holds out a present of driftwood
bleached and salty, entwined like albino snakes.
Tells me what the birds have said today
in couplets I cannot understand:
reclaiming this temple mound from saint and sinner
he dances off.

2.
In the Cafe Caryatids an old man rests,
blue painted chair tilted in the doorway.
He sat there yesterday, will be there tomorrow.
Teeth and pullover holed and brown, he stares
mute at the road, a drone of tourists passing.
Bacchants and satyrs, they follow the unbrella thyrsos
snake through cafe chairs and shop front T-shirts,
short-stepping in rhythym after a guide; yellow tights,
black ankle boots, she is a queen,
finding honey in the columns and slabs
littering the temple site of Apollo; the residue,
a carved henge, faces westwards, leads nowhere
now, admits to nothing; a lizard's eye
unblinking red, through which
shutters click and cameras flash; the moment
when light folds into darkness remaining elusive.

3.
The kouros at Apollonas reclines obtuse against the hillside,
breathes out asphodels in wave froth to the edge of the cliff.
Tourists climb and slither in search of the shot
to validate memory's convivial hyperbole.
Unrealised Dionysus, a marble moraine,
a black smudge against the darker quarry wall,
suffers them; but dreams of standing free of this rock umbilical-
the headland a plinth, floating between sea and bluer sky,
his arms raised in welcome to sail and oar.

When the gods went villagers dropped hammers,
stopped chipping against the hard grain,
returned to their goats and groves - their piss-poor soil.
Those terraces, tribal scars cut into the mountain sides,
in turn, abandoned for easier fleeces each Summer boat
disgorged; a new mythology of excess is today's orthodoxy.
Dionysus, be content to lie weeping ferns into the pockmark pools

Feeding The Cat

Two of my poems have been included in the Cinnamon Press anthology Feeding The Cat which has just been published. They are The East Yorkshire Crematorium - which is mentioned in an earlier post - and a long poem in three parts caled Trisagion. In Greek that means Thrice Holy and is part of an Orthodox liturgy. The poem was written on the island of Naxos in the Cyclades and works with the idea of the ancient sites carrying a residue of the old religion which has been overlayed by Orthodox Christianity and now has a religion of sun seekers and tourists on top of that. Probably doesn't work but Naxos is a great place to sit and write ! I'll post Trisagion when I can find it on my PC !

Been away for some time and writing quite a bit so little news to report except that my poem The Ladies of Dona Sofia - written on a trip to Andalucia last December - is being published by The Seventh Quarry base din Swansea. I'm very pleased with this as it is a very good publication and I'll put the poem on this blog when it has appeared.

Vanitas

This is the poem just published in The Interpreter's House (45). I mention its origin below.

You would think it started with a photograph, black and white
probably, certainly dog-eared by now; but it didn’t. So I am able
to tell this as I wish; there was just a sharp sense of a wheel turned,
a ratchet cogged, a being reeled in, a floundering in shallows.

It was me and Phil Lee – mid 60s- on Friar’s Point where I stand now, watching a metallic sea scraping a thin white scar along the beach.
I think The Small Faces were Number One but it could have been
The Kinks. It would have been Summer, it would have been sunny;

perhaps a lazy Sunday afternoon or maybe just lazing on a sunny afternoon depending on which was Top of the Pops. An old man stopped – I say “old”
but he was probably much younger than I am now (everyone looked old
then being dressed since birth like smaller versions of their parents).

He was old enough though – looked like a talking skull. We would have been cutting edge – probably late Mod; just before hippy got me, electrical engineering got Phil. He said, “I was born here lads but haven’t been
back for years. I loved this place, it’s all that kept me going sometimes,

this view. Look at the wild flowers – on the wane now but they’ll be back
come Spring. It’s good to be here; nowhere else holds a candle to it”.
I think we said “fab” but that sounds as if it was already retro then so maybe we didn’t. Perhaps we shuffled, embarrassed, searched for a reason

to walk but held by the Grammar School boy politeness to elders,
we stayed, pinioned, tethered to the story, which did involve a lot
of bad luck, though I am short on detail as I didn’t really listen
and don’t want to make it up now. Anyway, the old man stopped,

looked at his watch, wandered off somewhere as we did – and ,
I guess, that, at most, we would have said “weird” or something like that,
(not “awesome” which is much too contemporary for my taste). Whatever, it would have been something which meant, you are not of the same universe,

what knowledge can you bring us; our life is immament, process and eternal;
we will carry forever this Sunday, the endless possibility of being fifteen
(or sixteen), the truth of back-combed hair, the inevitability of checked hipsters, the ability to sing obscure soul music, turning the heads of the

black boys on the fairground rides. (I think the old man would have liked Frank Sinatra, or maybe Matt Monroe if he thought himself cool – it is difficult to tell on such short acquaintance). Now I’m standing on the exact spot where it all happened forty plus years ago; dragging on this

memory like it was the last cigarette in the world - hoping for epiphany to cross the blood brain barrier; looking for someone to tell that I’m leaving for the last time . My Spanish cigarettes warn of “una muerte lenta y dolorosa”. Standing alone on Friar’s point, I can’t imagine any other kind.

Good news on the poetry front.

Heard today that I just missed the shortlist for the Cinnamon Press first collection competition. Very pleased to have got so far in the process and will have work published in the Cinnamon Press anthology Feeding The Cat which comes out in September 2011. One poem is The East Yorkshire Crematorium which won the Envoi Prize last year and the other will be Trisagion which is a triptych based on a backpacking month in Greece two years ago. The poems are largely about the island of Naxos where I stayed in Naxos City for a week.