Sudden return

The Edge rock ledge

29th September 2018 manuscript version

Real Days and a duiker

Been suffering crashings of confidence when I came upon this poem of Norman's from three years ago and was visited by a duiker. The saving graces of poetry, of nature - realities for me to live by.

A Table Love poem from years back - our "actual breath" in so many ways. 

He or she stared at me a good while on the other side of my window. Only yesterday I'd instructed the gardener NOT to repair the hole in the fence, I suspected the duiker was using it as a thoroughfare; she'd passed my studio while I was working there earlier in the week.

A friend

The yolk-yellow moon
balloons up slowly
through the lattice
of the old pagoda;

some twitterer's excited -
smacks forth chirps
as if he had a pair of lips -
right here in the budding clusters of Wisteria
you were so happy was recovering.

I miss your nearness much
these days - my memories have left
your illness, rewind
to days of early years -
you strong, your voice still full,
your macho kindnesses
startling my love into wonder
and depths between us
we'd not known.

How to speak fulfilment?
How does the full moon move itself
out of its honey bed
to whiteness
- almost blinding
the discretions of night?

Sadness has no legs. It sits
and listens to the sighings
of wind in oaks and deodars.

Wind cannot blow the moon away,
nor sadness, loyally returning.
A friend it is,
accompaning my yearning.

No why ever

Blue cranes -
snow-threaded mountains -
kites hunting, and
a sky - haired and studded with cloud -

blurred, but finding
water's shapelinesses combing through
my human thoughts
to hold

the crystal of a landscape never broken,
and no why? ever spoken.

Swallowtail butterfly

After 10 days in Somerset West, looking after my disabled mother (while my father was away on a conference in Prague) and at the same time unfortunately contracting a virulent gastric flu, I am homeward bound again.

Along the N9 this afternoon 

I found this butterfly in the back of my car under some papers before starting my journey.  

First reader feedback

I had the privilege the other day of receiving my first reader feedback for the first half of Greater Matter. So many questions now to tackle! Is my natural bent for occasional 'archaic' usage and, indeed, behaviour - which I tend towards in moments of intimacy and/ or crisis, and which is therefore never publicly seen ... unless glimpsed now and then, through these poems - something to be true to or something to censor, that is to say, alter, in the service of what readers expect of or can relate to in a 'contemporary' woman - such as I, in my heart of hearts, am not?

The feeling of soul straddling eternity, but body bound to one here and now ... and yet even that, not. Mind in this body is capable of so much movement between places and times. Is it that my poems simply don't adequately yet convey this?

Is 'unnatural' (Germanic/ Old English) syntax such as I spoke in my most extreme moments to God as well as to Norman in crisis something to share with readers, or will it simply cause them bewilderment?

What IS quality writing? WHOSE standards do I apply?

How can this record of my journey best help the greatest number of people in need of such help?

And I thought I could complete this manuscript by March this year! :-D

Safe, Honeymoon Suite, Outeniqua Moon

I've been, yet again, spoiled by my friends, Christine and Peter Watt of Outeniqua Moon Percheron Stud Farm in Ruiterbos at the foot of the Robinson Pass. These pictures show a little of their sanctuary. The poem appeared this morning, following a visit to Shadowfax and Greystoke, the farm's two stallions.

Safe
Honeymoon Suite, Outeniqua Moon

Folds of light
stand to attention -
hold the festoon-blinds in place
so dawn can splice
their sleepy silk;

frogs' clickings sprinkle us;
everything is fat with rain -
the very air's drenched in dreams

tongued by the soft lips
of the stallions I spoke to;

their nostrils took in my glove,
their mouths told us
the future has remained -

it has survived into this morning's private gold -
safe from betrayal.

Shadowfax and Greystoke, the two Percheron studs at Outeniqua Moon

Shadowfax and Greystoke

The farmhouse

Shadowfax

Greystoke

Sunset last night