Shocking that I have never discovered this poet. What a beautiful simplicity to link two people and two hills that enclose a valley between them.
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spin – part 2
Outrage is legitimate but has reached ‘silencing’ proportions! What is left?
This expression is a cry from shared impotence and needs sharing.
touchdrawing by deborah koff-chapin
When I posted ‘spin – part 1 ,’ I had a long series in mind. In the days (weeks now) since, I have instead experienced a painful staunching of the throat. So filled with outrage at the sticky threads of injustice and untruth in the current political sphere (I cannot bring myself to say ‘discourse,’ though I long for it), my words have literally stuck in my throat. My hands are of no use. Everywhere I turn, I feel cliche. “Nice guys finish last.” “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” “What you don’t know, you make up.”
And I’m left holding so much inside that I cannot possibly express it all. Not in a lifetime. More to the point, I want so very desperately to DO something about all the silencing. For me, that’s what it comes down to.
One man’s spin is another’s silencing.
Images flood through…
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SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: OLAM, SHANA, NEFESH
Three samples are enough to want the whole! So ancient, Greek and Talmudic. Thanks to Sivan Butler-Rotholz
From OLAM SHANA NEFESH
By Jane Medved:
SIRENS
They think it is the young girls singing
you see, we pull them to us as smoothly
as oiled rope uncurls into golden braids.
It only takes a few minutes before everything
they see is woman. The pale skin of the sails
spreading like thighs, the thick knots
that tie the anchor turning to strands
of dampened hair held by a lover
before she shakes it free. The salt tastes
as sweet as sweat and soon the ship’s thrust
into the sea becomes unbearable.
This would be enough for galley slaves,
soldiers who tattoo fortunes on their scars,
the simple, parched sailors. But they are not
the ones we want. When we see the heroes
whose fierce deeds fall like hammers, we lay
aside our nocturne of desire. We sing instead
as a mother holds a dying child until
the horizon is…
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Synchronicity and going off the map.
This is both a personal and more universal revelation! Good for a winter’s Monday morning.
Synchronicity and going off the map.
Life as a journey is a bit of a cliché, really. I said once, “If life is a journey, then any short-cut is a death trap,” and I stand by it. My own journey has been an odd one. A long time ago, I looked at the metaphysical map and I saw that at the margins, around the edges, away from the established paths and well-known routes, there were areas marked “Here be dragons,” and I thought, I’d like see dragons. Ever since then, I’ve made forays into those areas of the maps that the map-makers couldn’t fill in properly because too few people had been out and explored them and come back with useful information. Most came back babbling about strange things they didn’t quite have the language for, and travellers’ tales that defy belief and rational understanding.
About ten years…
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A Seasonal Tale
My kind of seasonal story. And to wish all good friends a very happy Christmas.
“Time to earn your place at the dance this year,” Mother said, shooing Pepper out of the door into the bitter frost of a late Hampstead afternoon. “While you’re about it, tell that fir tree that it’s wanted inside. And don’t forget to shake the ice out of its branches – the last thing I need is puddles in the living room.”
Pepper sighed and stomped up the garden path, thankful at least for her thick leggings and Doc Marten boots. The air smelt of stagnant defrosted droplets and woody conifers. Would this be the year she managed to entice Mr Keats to the dance? Hmmph. Unlikely. However much Mother hoped so.
“You’re wanted inside,” she said to the fir tree on her way past. There was a gentle rumble of earth beneath the snow white blanket as the tree uprooted itself and shuffled towards the back door. Pepper turned…
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The Man Who Lost Everything by Erica Verillo
A wonderful story- a gift from Erica Verillo
Zayde died last Saturday. This afternoon we gathered to attend a service over a plain pine coffin and to remember him over cold cuts on rye. I remembered my grandfather chiefly as a madman.
“He died happy,” said my mother. “That’s all that matters.”
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Plea(se)
spring, spread your colour let red, white and blue flowers cover this black world *
Source: Plea(se)
Two Posts Removed
After careful consideration I have removed the posts that some of you kindly commented upon. Not because I regret posting them, nor retract what they expressed. I was grateful for considered responses. My reasons are more to do with a feeling that anything that stokes antipathy, or gives any cause for others to do so, involves a kind of ugliness at this point in time.
I felt the need to respond in some way, and that was done. Having expressed my impatience with empty rhetoric in the absence of resolve, (and I stand by all of that) the need for it to remain as permanent ’emotional graffiti’ is questionable.
I sincerely hope my followers will understand. I was asking for discerning ‘intolerance’ and not revenge but this distinction is seemingly not easily understood.
… what writers can glean from cinematographers …
Very insightful points from a one time cinematographer turned writer. Especially likes the image of the train whistle to convey all that train, plus station, plus a journey would do for vision- relatively superficial. The one thing that both book or film lack is the deepest evocation and the most ephemeral- smell.
Like writers, filmmakers manipulate time. They take a story apart and re-assemble it.
Robert Bresson, inquisitor and humanist, stimulated filmmakers and enriched the experience of
viewers. With a tiny leap of the imagination his ‘Notes on the Cinematographer,’ publ. by Quartet Books in 1986, transl. from the French by Jonathan Griffin, also offer inspiration to writers of stories. Here are a few brief notes I collated during my vocational film degree in the early 90s:
An image is transformed by contact with other images as is a colour by contact with other colours. A blue is not the same blue besides a green, a yellow, a red. No art is without transformation.
For the writer – this would apply to action and reaction, resonance or dissonance, anything that develops the dynamic interactions of a narrative.
To create is not to deform or invent persons or things. It is to tie…
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Review of Windward by Kevin McGrath
Source: Review of Windward by Kevin McGrath Immediate thoughts on a new book, smudged impressions so you might be persuaded to read it.
PHI lippa. Letters of Love 