Presents

Dear Reader,

This is the last blog and poem I am producing in 2015.  I will return on Sunday 3rd of January 2016, and hope you will all re-join me then.  Thank you so much for any reading of my poems, and my musings, that you have done since July when I started writing my blog, not really knowing whether it would be a success or not.  But with the incredible advances of technology I can see where you, the readers, are coming from - and you are far and wide, in fact from all over the world, and I am very grateful to you.  As I told you in my introduction, poetry is not a popular art, but that some faithful, and some new readers, seem to access my blog gives me enormous pleasure and makes me think I should continue posting it next year.  So until Sunday 3rd January, when I return, I wish you all a very merry Christmas and happy New Year, whatever you are doing and whichever way you celebrate this festival.                                        


                                                                              *

I posted this poem in July this year but think it is my most appropriate Christmas message, so apologies if you remember it, and for those who didn't see it, here it is.


Presents

I don't want presents
tied and ribboned.
Encouragement doesn't wrap
well in green tissue,
praise in paisley boxes
or love in thick gold paper.
I don't want guilt
compressed into an envelope
with cheque.

A parcel of thoughtfulness,
a parcel of interest,
a parcel of embracing,
a parcel of safety, were
the presents I hoped for
under the festive tree.
The presents I hoped for
which were not to be.
                                                                        *


I like this quote from Thoreau  and thought you might too:

                                                      If a man does not keep pace
                                                      with his companions,
                                                      perhaps it is because he hears
                                                      a different drummer.
                                                      Let him step to the music he hears,
                                                      however measured or far away.

Very best wishes,  Patricia

Que reste-t-il de nos amours?

Dear Reader,

Someone said to me a few weeks ago that I was an eccentric.  Now whether this is good or bad I am not sure, but I do know that in my family there was a true eccentric, my maternal grandmother, and  I thought perhaps that you might like to know a little more of her.  She was born into an Irish labouring family from Kilkenny, where her father worked on the land and her mother was a cook. She had nine brothers and sisters, all of whom had the same problems with bronchitis and coughs caught from the damp cottages they lived in.   So she was sent to Edinburgh to stay with an aunt who kept a boarding house, and here she met her first husband, a man thirty years her senior, a rich brewer.  She was very pretty with bright red hair and had a lively way with words, and she loved men and money.   After marriage, at the age of eighteen, she lived in great luxury producing two children, a boy and a girl.  The son was sent to Eton College and the girl was kept all her life as a companion. 

When her first husband died she was told that "widowers of wealth" went down to the south of France to drown their sorrows, staying in the best hotels.  So that is where Granny went.  Here she found my grandfather, a widower with eight children and a large house in Yorkshire.  I think she probably seduced him and he took her back to Yorkshire, much to the consternation of all those children, and married her.  She didn't like Yorkshire, or the eight stepchildren, and they bought a house in London's fashionable Mayfair where my mother was born.  After my grandfather died she retired to the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly and lived there for eighteen years.  Eventually she was asked to leave the hotel because she told other guests that there were ghosts in the bedrooms, indeed that she had seen them herself.

She wore the most extraordinary clothes, always.  Her favourite coat was made of red velvet with a long train trailing along the floor behind her.  She wore this with a black hat and a transparent black spotted face veil under which were her round, tortoiseshell spectacle frames with blue glass lenses.  Going out with her in London, which I was frequently made to do, was embarrassing beyond belief.  She was, in very old age, extremely deaf so it was necessary to shout embarrassing answers to her excrutiating personal questions asked in the dining room of the Ritz Hotel.

Having said all this I was very fond of her.  Why?  Because she had the quick well known Irish wit, she was funny and she made me laugh.  Dear Reader, you will probably know by now that enjoying a joke, and generally having a merry time suits me very well, and I would like to say congratulations to Granny for having come a long way from the fields of Ireland with such spirit and tenacity.  No wonder she lived to the age of 98.

                                                                            *

Que reste-t-il de nos amours?

A kitchen somewhere in France,
a candle alight on a small round table
remains of supper not yet cleared,
two old women sitting silently,
listening to soft music.

"Que reste-t-il de nos amours?
Que reste-t-il de ces beaux jours?"

The two old women rise slowly,
start to dance,
gently holding each other close
crumpled hand in crumpled hand,
cheek brushing cheek,
no words spoken.

Is it of the once vibrant love
they had had together
that they are thinking,
or of other loves, or that life is short,
and each of us only has one turn at it,
that life is only made of moments
and that they have had their share?

"Que reste-t-il de tout cela?
Dites-le-moi".

The two old women dance on,
gently swaying,
to soft music no longer playing .....
                                                                      *

I wrote this poem after seeing the film "Iris" about Iris Murdoch's later life.


With very best wishes,    Patricia

Farm Portrait, 1880

Dear Reader,

Dormice, which live mainly in trees or shrubs, have been having a bad time crossing roads and railways of late.  This has had a very detrimental effect on the dormouse population being able to breed.  So various organizations such as "The People's Trust for Endangered Species" and "Wildlife Bridges" have thought of a way to help them.  They have built arboreal bridges, made out of ropes and poles, stretching across the roads and railways to allow the dormice to scuttle from one wooded area to another.   Where these bridges have been made, the results seem to have been very successful, and the dormice are now having a good time.

*

Farm Portrait, 1880

That's me in the painting, a potato-picking wife,

dressed in clogs, a woollen shawl, a woollen shirt.

I stand on stony ground with my riddle and my knife,

put potatoes in my apron, worn over muddy skirt.

And that's my husband, wearing an old cloth cap

over pale face and wistful eyes, digging with our son,

while coughing Sarah holds within her lap

the swaddled, crying babe, until our work is done.

Our house is cold, dark and full of mice,

the grind is hard, the winter weather harsh,

damp oozes from the walls, and we have lice,

the lonely peewit calls from the eerie marsh.

But, at dawn today, I heard a blackbird sing

and hope arose with thoughts of coming spring.

With very best wishes,   Patricia

The Perfect B and B

Dear Reader,

A Linnet

Since we have have all been distressed this week with terrible world news I thought I might share with you quotations from two authors from other, gentler, times. We have had the first frosty nights this week in the Cotswolds, for which I was very glad, not liking the warm unseasonable weather we had been having.

So on November 13th, l872, Thomas Hardy said in his Dorset journal:

 "The first frost of autumn.  Outdoor folk look reflective.  The scarlet runners are dishevelled: geraniums wounded in the leaf, open-air cucumber leaves have collapsed like green umbrellas with all the stays broken".

And Jane Austen said on November 17th, 1798 writing from Hampshire:

"What fine weather this is!  Not very becoming perhaps early in the morning, but very pleasant out of doors at noon, and very wholesome - at least everybody fancies so, and imagination is everything".

Ah, Jane Austen, we miss you.......

I must say I find the weather a very interesting subject, as most English people do, probably because it is ever unpredictable and baffles us all, much of the time.

                          *                                              

The Perfect B & B

Soft red brick, covered in roses,

the hall floor Cotswold stone,

the doors and furniture

applewood, mahogany, old pine,

chintz curtains in pretty bedrooms,

thick woollen carpets

and large white towels,

long and lovely views of distant hills,

sweet smells of lilies and lavender,

fresh asparagus for dinner,

duck and strawberries.

On the garden table,

its soft green feathers

ruffling gently in the wind,

lies a dead linnet.

                                                                       *

Very best wishes, Patricia

Small Moments of Warmth

Dear Reader,

                                                                 
                                                                   

                                                                      A Tilly Lamp

We have had in the last few weeks, months, and years, warnings about when and how we should dispose of our food, according to their "sell by" dates.  So I was very interested in the following two tales.  When a man helped his grandmother to move house in 1980, she prepared a delectable lunch from various tins,  and both the tin of Heinz vegetable soup and the tin of Libby's corned beef were  bought before the war.  Another man found in his great aunt's attic a presentation gift of a large slice of the royal wedding cake celebrating the marriage of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra of Denmark, on 10th March, 1863.  Despite having been baked 117 years earlier it was, apparently, delicious.  So I think if it looks right and smells right, eat whatever it is with a merry heart.

*

Small Moments of Warmth

I remember a little warmth,

Joey trotting the family through Norfolk lanes,

the small yellow trap swaying in the sunshine.

I remember picnics on Yarmouth beach

with enough blue sky "to make a sailor's trouser".

We ate cucumber sandwiches.  Penguin biscuits.

I remember dark evenings,

the small warm flame from a Tilly lamp

lighting the kitchen, and sometimes for supper

we had chicken, chocolate mousse.

I remember a warm holiday in France

squeezed into the back of a car,

singing old thirties love songs.

But will these small moments of warmth,

at the end, be enough to heat and split

the heavy stones that circle the human heart,

allow salt tears to trickle through the cracks?

                                                                              *

Very best wishes, Patricia

             

Thanks, Private Norfolk

Dear Reader

So many words have been written about wars and their consequences by others far better qualified than I am.   So I just thought I would write a word or two about my own father.  He fought in the First World War as a major serving with the Royal Army Service Corps.  He was three times mentioned in Dispatches, and I have a letter written in January 1916 congratulating my grandparents, from a Colonel Harrison and other Officers, on their son's distinguished conduct and gallantry.  So today I am thinking of you, Dad, and am thanking you for doing your bit, and am sending you my love.

                                                                        *

Thanks, Private Norfolk


You left singing, with your pals,
marching for good and glory.
You hadn't yet dug a trench,
killed an unknown soldier,
seen dead bodies, smelt their stench,
heard comrades' last sickening cries.

You gave your life with generous heart,
believed the lies
dispatched by loftier ranks.
And so to you, dear Private Norfolk,
I give my salute,
and my deepest thanks


for swapping your mauve rain-skies,
your white-breast beaches, and beckoning sea,
your level fields of ripening corn,
to fight in foreign fields, for us,
for me.


                                                                          *

Very best wishes,  Patricia

Crosby

Dear Reader,

Do you remember how during this summer we all read about the strange aggression being shown by seagulls swooping down on people enjoying their sandwiches on the beach, or just walking along eating, annoying nobody?  Then there was a peacock who threw himself at his own image  that he saw in a car's door, scratching the paintwork and causing considerable damage.  Apparently he thought his image was a rival for his lady friend.  Now there is a new danger from hitherto gentle animals, the wild ponies from the Quantock hills.  Apparently they have taken a liking to sweet sugary leftovers from people's picnics, and their behaviour has become violent and aggressive in order to satisfy their desire for sweet things.  They have even butted and bitten a walker, and broken one woman's leg.

I must say I feel quite nostalgic for the days when I happily picnicked on a beach, undisturbed by seagulls  who didn't want to share my sandwiches, watched peacocks peacefully strutting about in ancestral gardens, and walked in the Somerset hills where the ponies didn't give me so much as a glance.                    

                                                                        *

I wrote this piece of Poetry/Prose after I had seen photographs of Crosby Beach.  Crosby Beach has 100 cast iron, life size figures,  stretching out to sea,  sculpted by the artist Antony Gormley.  I think they are very beautiful, magnificent even.


CROSBY

I pick up white shells from the beach and put them into the pocket of my dress.

They stare out to sea.  Tall and dignified they stand, all weathers, undisturbed.  Gulls perch on them, sea salt encrusts their faces, the tide laps at their ankles, and in winter fog obliterates their forms.  I wonder, do these statues whisper in the wind to each other?   Talk of important things?  Do they run along the beach when the crowds have gone or have a swim at midnight?   Perhaps, after dark, they stare out to the horizon, star directed, seeking eternity.  And, are they ever lonely?

I walk back to the car park wondering again, about what is real and what is not.

                                                                          *
Very best wishes, Patricia