15/01/2012

Story three

...from the sieve of her hands...

Sorry haven't been here for a while. Trying to go forwards...Hope you are all well and using up the last of the year well. During the week I got onto a tube in London feeling very tired and despondent, as you often do cramming onto a tube at rush hour, and without a book to read I stared up at the adverts and among them was this poem. It is called 'Prayer' and was almost in answer to one in that moment, and was so lovely I thought I'd put it here. I hope you think so too...

PRAYER - Carol anne Duffey

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre

It would be enough wouldn't it... to write something like that. Even just once...

Not sure why, but this poem seems appropriate today.

Sonnet to Orpheus

Oh you gentle ones, every once in a while step
into the breath that is indifferent to you,
let it be parted on your cheeks,
behind you it trembles, reunited.

Oh you blessed ones, oh you whole ones,
you who seem to be the beginning of the hearts.
Bow of arrows and target of arrows,
your smile beams eternally with tears.

Do not fear to suffer the heaviness,
give it back to earth's weight:
heavy are the mountains. Heavy are the oceans.
Even what you planted as children,
the trees, have long become too heavy;
you could not carry them.
But the breezes... but the spaces...

Today it was the smell of lilacs that got me. I turned a corner, on a road I'd never walked down before, quite close to home, and bang... There I was a child of seven or eight again, dragging her feet on the way to the big houses under the railway bridge, where on some Sunday mornings, a tiny lady who lived in one of them sold us rhubarb, and bunches of mint for potatoes. Delicious smells...but before we got to them, we walked with our huge bundles of rhubarb along a crescent-shaped road that was full of (what I now know to be) lilacs, and the smell cleared everything else from your mind. For a while, everything...One of the saving graces of childhood. To this day I love lilac - the colour, the smell, the look of them...and of course the way they make my mouth water for rhubarb crumble.

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