Huckleberry Thing

Warning!

Deep Water

Green weed coats the pond.

Catkins tiptoe past the curtain leaves

here in the conservation area near the tennis courts.

“Should you see

anything particularly exciting

please tell us about it.,“

requests the London Borough of Camden, Nature Conservation Section.

“Well, I didn’t notice much

except,”

he turns,

“You,

delightful  thing.”

(he bent down to kiss her)

Ah! Water deep

(she kissed him back)

2011

–

Many readers really enjoy this poem, primarily because they believe it provides some insight about the poet (i.e. me). I suppose they make this leap because – at 1,47m  – I am quite small, like a little human huckleberry. As readers, we also like to overlay the narrator’s voice with that of the creator. I shall leave the fact to fiction ratio up to your imagination. At the end of the day, it is my hope that the poem works in capturing a moment in poetic form.

You can own this poem – and 19 others – when you purchase a copy of my first volume of selected work: SHINING IN BRIGHTNESS. Two explanatory essays accompany the poems. The beautifully formatted book is available through blurb.co.uk.

I am on Twitter as @BeadedQuill. I tweet about poetry, my ambles in London’s green spaces and at the moment, my online dating experiences. (I also tweet quite a bit about martial arts.)

TUMBLING AFTER

Over here on the hill

I try to drop the pail.

In the valley

you scythe the bending wheat.
 

When the grain is ground to flour,

you will carry it in a sack to my kitchen.

There on the table

kneaded under the heel of my hand

 

I’ll remember the autumn, Jack

when you brought in the hay.

Now, come and eat of the loaf while it’s warm.

–

In December last year I posted a longer version of this poem. I returned to the material and experimented with distillation. Which version do you prefer? Why?

And what do you think of the nursery rhyme reference?

–

“Tumbling After” is another poem earmarked for my forthcoming set, Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys. If you enjoyed this piece, you may enjoy my first volume of poetry: SHINING IN BRIGHTNESS.

Follow me on Twitter. I’m @Beaded Quill. I tweet regularly about writing and working with words. Occasionally, I mention a good loaf of bread.

PROFESSIONS

There are all these Tonys of the world:

Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Lebanese, Eastern European,

who own sewing-machine shops, grocery stores,

corner cafés and sometimes sell insurance.

Anthony, Antonin, Antonio and the more Teutonic, Anton.

But Anton was the opera singer

after he’d worked for a while

on the railway.

–

Another poem for possible inclusion in “Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys.”

If you enjoyed the above, have a look at my first published volume of work, SHINING IN BRIGHTNESS.

Follow me on Twitter. I’m @BeadedQuill

I told her

I told her

      Because modern boys ought to know the advice given

 

Hold out until Tuesday.

You know you can. No public

communication whatsoever.

If necessary write it out.

But do not send.

(Especially, do not press send.)

Sit on your hands, girl

because you are waiting for move 5

in love chess.

–

Another poem earmarked for my forthcoming mini-collection, Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys.

If you enjoyed my poem, I invite you to preview my first volume SHINING IN BRIGHTNESS.

Follow my observations of modern boys, love chess and modern communication on Twitter. I am @BeadedQuill

Nice Words #1

Roverhampton
Bodensee
plimsoles
mixologist
category
salient
stubble
snub
rubble
rabble and ruin

–

I love lists and every now and then I wander around with a list either in my head or on scraps of paper of “current nice words.” At the moment this list includes torsion and fealty. The above list dates from mid-December last year.

–

My first volume of poetry, Shining in Brightness, was released earlier this year. You can preview it here at blurb.co.uk

Follow my regular tweets about my weaknesses for words, muesli and things cultural. I’m @BeadedQuill

Winterreise

 

We ate at Träumerei.

Maybe I ordered a quiche

And he had melted cheese.

Forget this not, my heart:

We lunched at Träumerei.

There shining in brightness

on the table -  a glass

of water,

four peppermints and the bill.

2012

–

It is from this poem that my first volume derives its title. In this prosaic moment, in which two people finish a meal at a restaurant, there is also a numinous communion. The objects and the moment between the diners are frozen in time like a still life, or a memento mori. I find it most intriguing that at least eight years passed from the moment of the meal to the poem’s creation. Because I know you’re wondering, the other diner is my Dad. When I was in my late teens and early twenties he would treat me once a month, near his payday, for lunch in Cape Town’s city centre. In the weeks leading up to meal, he would bring home menus from prospective cafés. Pouring over the meal options and discussing the ambience was almost as important as the day itself.

The moment in this poem is based on a vague memory of a meal we had at an Austrian restaurant, Träumerei, which used to operate on St George’s Mall. (At one time it had a sibling restaurant in Franschhoek, a wine route town renowned for its cuisine.) In my memory it is a bright, sunny Cape Town day and we are sitting on the white painted balcony overlooking the mall, a bustling pedestrian thoroughfare. It’s that moment of repose between the end of the meal, the paying of the bill and continuing with the hustle of the afternoon.

My Dad worked as a humble council clerk for the city council. Seldom did he seem to have money for practicalities like shoe repairs, a new suit or the ‘phone bill. In fact, once he spent the household bill money on tickets for all five of us to see a visiting Russian Cossack dance troupe. My mother was not pleased when they cut off the water. But my Dad had a rich poetic spirit, and he found the pennies for lunchtime dates, Saturday coffees and the regular offerings of a single rose or carnation for my mother.

My Dad passed away on the 5^th May 2009 after a battle with colon cancer and it is to his memory I dedicate “Shining in Brightness.”

–

Shining in Brightness my first volume of poetry presents 20 poems selected from twelve years’ worth of writing and two accompanying, explanatory essays. You can preview and purchase it here (via blurb.co.uk)

I tweet regularly about my current food yens – muesli, coffee and London dining – and occasional attempts at improving my German. I’m on Twitter as @BeadedQuill

1,000 Scientific Facts

A Thousand Scientific Facts

about the sea

Watch the mist-spray drift

towards the dunes:

A mother is out with

her children.

The daughter plays with

the dog breaking foam

And the little boy sits beside on a rock.

There are bluebottles along the shore today;

many cuttlefish shells;

a dead penguin, his flippers

laid out on the sand.

–

A few thoughts which originated during time at Silver Sands, Betty’s Bay circa April 2012.

–

For more of my poetry, see my first volume of published work: SHINING IN BRIGHTNESS, SELECTED POEMS, 1999 – 2012.

Follow me on Twitter. I’m @BeadedQuill.

Rooftop Thoughts

The Gullies (Covent Garden, London)

I have a personal Thursday pleasure and it is to choose my PCF picture of the week over a strong black coffee. The ten I have chosen to date are a visual log of the last two months of my London journey. “The Gullies (Covent Garden, London)” is my picture from 19 July 2012.

The public send in comments via an online option called Art Detective and it is my duty to log these comment. As I do so, I click over to the image referenced in the message. Each week I enter a parallel world of a people’s art and social history. The Your Paintings archive has brought together the outer world of the UK’s paintings and the inner worlds of artists, institutions and lived lives, and put them in front of me on a screen.

I came across “The Gullies (Covent Garden, London)” by Peter Snow after logging an email about another of his works, “The Passing World” (1985).  Snow’s image caught my attention because the Public Catalogue Foundation’s offices are in Covent Garden, on Maiden Lane. The kitchenette windows look out onto similar rooftops and the back windows of rented office spaces. On a grey day, a wintery day, I can imagine that this is how these rooftops are shaded in similar dull shades, murky greens and weary browns.

My view from the computer is of arched windows across the road with three neat, potted round-headed topiaries on a sill. The colouring on this side is different, too: white, those green, topiary balls and bricks of a softer, warmer, baked biscuit hue. Heard though unseen, below bustles a street of restaurants and bars; in the morning string-armed delivery men unpack crates of alcohol, at lunch business commences. I think of as green and yellow/ gold as the colours of below. Firstly because the awnings of London’s oldest restaurant, Rules, are themed in these shades and the door to the PCF offices is green. Secondly, because the South African shop is down the street; the combination of ‘green and gold’ calls on an embedded memory of school-lesson patriotism.

“The Gullies” took me back to my high school art history classes in the early 1990s, in Cape Town. In those days Mr Cain still lit up the theory room wall with images from a slide projector. Those slides opened up the worlds for me. When I saw these Covent Garden gullies I remembered Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie – Woogie” (1942-43, oil on canvas, 50- 50 cm, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)). One of Mondrian’s last paintings, it captures his bird’s eye view, we were told, of the hustle-bustle and jazz-fuelled streets of 1940s New York. He was in a great city, but far from home. He looked down on his new urban landscape, as a voyeur of the urban maze.

Gan Gan was my London Granny, she was born in 1917 and raised in the city between the two World Wars. “My Fair Lady” was her favourite musical. In one of my last memories of her more lucid, we are sitting on the edge of my parents’ bed watching it. She was in her 80s; I about 12. This was 17 years before I came to London, when England was still as once upon a time as Eliza Doolittle, Dick Whittington, the bluebells and nostalgia in Gan Gan’s quarterly copies of This England magazine. England was a place of purple, blue, grey and rain. It was “The Cries of London” on decorative plates along her staircase wall. It smelled like Eau de Cologne 4711, tasted like milky tea with honey and Tennis Biscuits. (Coconutty Tennis Biscuits are not quintessentially English, but in Gan Gan’s kitchen at tea time they become so.) London’s song was “Knees up Mother Brown” and the pop of a large biscuit tin opening.

In July I was not so well, but remained hopeful and “The Gullies” maps out a grisly, possibly-paved-with-gold London for me. I love “The Gullies (Covent Garden, London)” for the free-running it gives my imaginary London and my recent real experience. There’s something very rich in it, and it sparks a leaping of parkour proportions in my creative brain. Not unlike the crazy time I have spent in this remarkable city.

2012

–

My first volume of poetry, SHINING IN BRIGHTNESS is available for preview and purchase at blurb.co.uk

Follow my London adventures, North-South musings and hunt for good biscuits on Twitter. I’m @BeadedQuill

In respect of copyright, I have not reproduced Peter Snow’s lovely images with this piece. If you click on the painting titles above, you will be taken to the Your Painting’s website where these images are archived. ”Your Paintings is a website which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real. It is made up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around the country.”

The Poet

You’ve read me elsewhere

Kapow!

I’m redundant now –

Yours,

the superhero of

pre-used words

–

This morning on the way to the tube I was given a copy of “Short List,” a glorified catalogue of a magazine (as most magazines are) and brother publication to my other favourite London freebie-mag, “The Stylist.” In those the tube-carriage canisters, we commuters have our heads down over copies of “The Metro,” books, iPads, Kindles or bent to the muffled soundtracks worming through earphones.

We’re all ingesting words.

The poem above derives from some scribbles about this profusion of words:

you’ll need to use me again tomorrow

because our words are all

pre-used

but if you set me down

in words and lines then published

me I’m already seen and

done cutting edge

A lot of thinking to go beyond hackneyed –

Push to keep us running new –

I’m finding it a real challenge to find new words and ways of expression. Perhaps it’s time to do more crosswords, or buy a thesaurus. Maybe the solution is to step away from words for a while. What do you think?

–

If you enjoyed the above poem, you may enjoy my first volume of poetry SHINING IN BRIGHTNESS. You can preview it here.

I tweet regularly about my London existence and other matters about words. I’m on Twitter as @BeadedQuill

Don’t Waste Paris on a Broken Heart

A blue sky over Notre Dame

Advice for *

 

Don’t waste Paris on a broken heart

next to the Cathedral Notre Dame

where yellow-petalled violas squint

their purple eyes at you

shadowing their beds

as you turned: his hands on her,

embracing on the Seine.

 

From April 2012

–

Who takes the bus to Paris from London? (You didn’t know one could take a bus to Paris from London?) Well, that’s what I did one weekend in March last year. Pooling the £25 or so for the bus fare, but determined not to skint on museum entries, I made use of the last few days of a valid Schengen visa. My primary reason was to visit a friend, who happens to live a twenty-minute walk from the Eiffel Tower.

It was a wonderful weekend of catching-up, art viewing and walking the pavements of a new city. This poem developed from a moment during which I stopped outside Notre Dame, near the children’s playground, to enjoy the sun. I caught sight of this scene on the other side of the river. In my pause, the violas in the flower-bed beside me were caught in my shadow.

–

If you enjoyed the above and would like to read more of my poetry, see my first published volume, SHINING IN BRIGHTNESS.

Follow me on Twitter. I’m @BeadedQuill