Post holiday poems

It’s been a strange stretch of time, the aftermath of my trip. ‘Guilt n Gratitude’ rock up in my brain like a dark comedy duo - ‘Gratitude’ hogs the sunny corner by the window, cross legged in some ‘mindful’ yoga pose, whilst ‘Guilt’ edges in, awkward and shifty; “Hm…..not sure I should be here, really……” in his hoodie and grey trackie bottoms like a skulking teenager. I’m massively grateful I had the experience, yet simultaneously a bit depressed to be back to my ramshackle life……..so that makes me feel guilty.

I suppose it makes sense that sun, fun and beautiful things are rather moreish. How could I not want more warm sand, cocktails and sea turtles? But…..hey……..if I had them every day I just know I’d tire of them.

Said NO-ONE EVER!!!

Anyway, to curb the ‘normality blues’, I’ve been out and about taking walks in the countryside, making the most of the fine scenery around me. I’ve been finding solace in the wonderful scents around right now - fresh cut grass, damp earth and heady clouds of cow parsley.

When something lovely hasn’t been immediately obvious, I’ve been actively trying to track it down, the way one rummages through junk at a church jumble sale. Sometimes, you have to rifle through an awful lot of fleece onesies to find a silk scarf, right?

So, this is what I’ve been writing, poem wise this last few weeks. At the end of the post, I will go through the meanings and imagery I had in my mind at the time, but feel free to skip that part and attribute your own.

The photos are all mine. I felt the first image below summed things up well; the heave of dark skies, so often a bedfellow to beauty.

Often

I think about you often

Strong emotion does not soften

Each memory, a guillotine

A head has not forgotten

Feeling was a package

Fragile bottle of mixed message

Cast out to tempestuous ocean

Like a crystal ship to wreckage

So, yes, I think about you frequently

By no means is it constantly

But who apart from you, my dear

Can make me smile so easily?

How minds are the cruellest prison

When they’re full of optimism

Tethered to the bars

Dancing bear without a rhythm

You became my favourite habit

Til I found I could not stop it

Your spinning plate so colourful

How could I dare to drop it?

But smashed pieces shard the garden

What was tender grows to harden

I vow to think of you less often

And that’s just about as far…..

Bolton Abbey

I once saw solid lacework

Made by a gothic fairy queen

But she’d grown bored, so nature

Filled the gaps with blue and green

The patterns were so dainty

The arches so precise

Each piece deftly positioned

Like a block of blackened ice

There was symmetry and strategy

Space were children played

There were corners for the birds to roost

With ample light and shade

Maybe she’d not grown bored of lace

That gothic fairy queen

Perhaps her project was intended

Just exactly as I’d seen

Fairyland

A smear upon your windscreen

Annoying and distracting

Obscuring where you’re heading

A source of irritation

But there was a time it looked like me

The place that you were going

Did I glint like pirate treasure?

An unfolding destination

.

And, I get it……’cause I used to

Do the same when I was little

Always thinking I saw fairyland

Would turn out to be Oldham

How the cruel allure of golden

From afar, suspended glitter

Was revealed on close inspection

As the headlights of a gritter

.

How it salted mushy wishes

To a tainted snow that washes

All the twinkling disco dancers

To a fate of faulty cats eyes

Sobbing, as the road was throbbing

I would turn back to the window

Waiting for a new deception

Night, my favourite magician

When it happens once too often

You stop squinting at tall buildings

You stop merging them with starlight

You resign yourself to England

.

That was back when I was little

These days, eyes are forced wide open

Steering, ever nearing

Arcs of disappearing rainbows

So, I understand your focus

How it’s foolish to get hopes up

There are way too many fairylands

That turn out to be Oldham

Grime can grace a screen like diamonds

When sun paves her pearls in pattern

Offer dirt the right conditions

I think Fairyland still happens

Coast

Let’s meet upon the jaws of cliffs

To sew the mouth of sea

Our boots as needles, love a thread

We’ll stitch creatively

Could we repair each ragged tear

With gull call and pink thrift?

Cleanse in salt each wound we wear

As sand dunes catch their drift

Night would charge, a prussian oil

To save each aching limb

The art of us in chalk and soil

Vermillion hearts a swim

I’ve pinned a hope that hangs, old rope

Yet burns, deliciously

That refuge of untravelled roads

May prove our sanctuary

.

Outgrown

He’s taller than me….

We looked in the mirror

It felt disconcerting

My son…..a great tower

.

For a while, I denied it

“The floor isn’t  level!”

Tried my best to fight it

“My feet aren’t together!”

.

Strange, how a person

You grew from a seed

Will clean overtake you

Shoot up like a weed

.

Remembered my own youth

Outgrowing my mother

The smug satisfaction

Spring reaching for summer

.

But such is the cycle

The natural order

Now, withering parent

Once burgeoning daughter

.

If life is a big wheel

I’m on the way down

He’s closer to peaking

My mother……the ground

.

But growth cannot always

Be measured in inches

For what of the wisdom

Experience teaches?

.

Our lifetimes are meadows

We flourish and give

As one thing diminishes

Something new lives

.

Drooping whilst feeding

To flatten and fall

But today was the day

My proud poppy stood tall

So, the poems.

‘Often’ is about the battle of head and heart. How you can try to suppress your emotions, but it’s difficult to do. I had the image of painful memories as a guillotine. I remember reading something about severed heads staying ‘alive’ a few seconds after a beheading and liked the idea of the head (logic moving on) still feeling the pain of being ‘cut off’. The idea that a head and heart cannot really be separated.

I wrote ‘Bolton Abbey’ after visiting for the first time, recently. I’ve always liked the idea of things turning to stone, freezing moments as enduring tableaus. The stone work reminded me of the detail found in lace and I started imagining sky fairies making it and purposely spelling it to stone.

‘Fairyland’ is about illusion. I’ve mentioned before that as a child, whilst being in the car at night, I’d always see clusters of lights and wonder if I’d found fairyland. Then, you draw nearer and turns out it’s just another northern town - plain and ordinary. I was comparing that to love/relationships. How you can seem glowing and magical to someone, but then they grow closer, and you turn out to be just another shit town to them. The last part is about finding beauty in the mundane (everyday people) anyway because it’s all we actually have.

‘Coast’ is romanticising about two people wandering the coastal path together. I was imagining a shore line as a hem, each footstep making ‘stitches’ to bind two people both to each other and the earth. I thought about how nature could balm heartache and also, the idea of ‘coasting’, winging it. I played with the notion of love as art; colour, chalk cliffs striking parallels with the chalk artists sketch with, as well as ‘night’ as a ‘knight’.

The final poem is when I discovered the other day that my son is now taller than me! It’s a bitter sweet thing, isn’t it? Or was for me. So it was me gathering my thoughts around that. How it all turns and comes full circle, how we all have our moment in the sun, in bloom, but also acknowledging how there are different ways in which we ‘grow’.