So here are this weeks poems. Have a look and as last time, don’t worry about understanding every word, it’s about how the words or images make you feel. Maybe there are certain words or phrases that you’ll be drawn to or perhaps it will remind you of something else. See the comments thread for responses:
Getting Older – Elaine Feinstein
The first surprise: I like it.
Whatever happens now, some things
that used to terrify have not:
I didn’t die young, for instance. Or lose
my only love. My three children
never had to run away from anyone.
Don’t tell me this gratitude is complacent.
We all approach the edge of the same blackness
which for me is silent.
Knowing as much sharpens
my delight in January freesia,
hot coffee, winter sunlight. So we say
as we lie close on some gentle occasion:
every day won from such
darkness is a celebration.
***
Like a Beacon – Grace Nichols
In London
every now and then
I get this craving
for my mother’s food
I leave art galleries
in search of plantains
saltfish/sweet potatoes
I need this link
I need this touch
of home
swinging my bag
like a beacon
against the cold
from Rebekah:
Hi Rachel.
I think its fab you have a blog about training.
As for this weeks poems.
Getting Older – I think perhaps this is *supposed* to make people feel better about getting older, obviously as getting older means we have lived a full life. It however reminds me of our mortaility, and thats something I have to admit I dont aknowledge very often.
The line about how we approach the same darkness and for her it is silent. Is quite a terrifying idea. It makes me feel the writer is completly with out faith. Yet she doesnt seem scared. I think this poem is seemingly innocent and about the small pleasures in life. But all I can feel from it is the feeling that there is nothing more. Brilliantly written though.
Like a Beacon – Is a lovely simple poem. I like how you seem to be choosing a more intricate one and a simplier one as well. I can definatley visualize the woman strolling through the freezing cold London. With everything going on around her. But all her feelings being for somewhere else.
I have a policy never to read anything back I have ever written so if I sound like an idiot please forgive me !
from Liz:
Hello
Reading Growing Older, it gives me a sense of cynism, fear of getting older and time passing but reluctantly acknowledging that nothing terrible has actually happened. A kind of muted excitement that we are still here and appreciating the simple stuff. But what stays with me is fear.Maybe cos there’s a lot of negative in there. It makes me think of survival.
Like a Beacon makes me feel the longing I used to feel when I lived in London. I used to shuffle through Galleries and sit for hours in cafes trying to figure it all out. I was so homesick, not really for my mothers food mind you!! But for anything that was familiar because London really wasn’t at the beginning anyway. ‘Swinging my bag’ makes me think of how I was as a young thing, striding forward, outwardly confident but inwardly lost and lonely. Again surviving! I was so afraid!!!!!
Thanks Rach. it’s so lovely to read something totally new again. Its a great distraction from the absolute chaos going on here right now. Which I’ve only just noticed.
from Keri:
Oooh I do enjoy these posts!
The first poem is really quite mixed. On one hand it seems to find a certain peace in growing older and facing the inevitable end, but it closes in such a way as to make you realise the writer is still running away from death. I guess it encompasses the range of fears and intrigue we all have when we think of our own end. For the most part I am not scared of death, at all, but more scared of the events leading up to that death. I like the way the poet makes us aware that our own mortality really should remind us of the commonplace beauty we take for granted in life, like the smell of freesia and the uplift of winter sunlight. Often it seems a shame that we live our lives surrounded by simple pleasures as these, but it takes impending gloom to make us sit up and take notice.
And I LOVE the second poem! I have never lived in London (or wanted to) but I do identify with homesickness. Even though we’ve been in the UK 19 years, I still spent my childhood growing up somewhere so vastly different and often crave the comforts from that home. In fact, tonight I read ‘Handa’s Surprise” to Addy and the African setting, although not my own, made me yearn for ‘home’. More often than not that is satisfied by eating food that we loved as kids, just to relive that memory. The poem and the act of eating ‘home’ food is summed up well in the line “I need this link”. At any point in my life, when i have felt lonely or homesick, food has reminded me again of just who I am. Leaving the art galleries seems a euphamism for leaving busy Western civilisation, to return to the small things that used to matter. When I read these lines, I think of a man actually, and imagine his Afro-Carribean childhood. And sympathise with him: how horrible it can feel to be drowned out in another culture, when all your heart wants to do is return to the place where the sun warms your back and watermelon juice dribbles off your chin.
*Sigh*
from Shona:
I LOVE the first one – just to be awkward!
The first line: “The first surprise: I like it.” – it’s just so straightforward; blunt even. Suggests other surprises – other good surprises. It sounds like the end of the race – nothing can get me now. Anyone who has worked night shifts will have experienced the feeling on the last (or 2nd last sometimes) of “They can’t hurt me now” – it actually doesn’t matter what happens now – even if it’s something really awful, I have won and ‘they’ have lost. Presumably because the most terrifying things (dying young, bad things happening to her children) have not happened.
Yes, it’s about mortality, but revelling in that mortality. Int he solidity of the here and now. It’s defiant – and yes, in that there has to be some fear, but still triumphantly defiant.
I have no faith. At the end is only the end. And I do not want it otherwise. Silent blackness could be restful, peaceful.
I wish I could convey how much I like that poem.
The second one is nice, reminds me of missing cold winter mornings when we lived in Oz for a year. But it doesn’t have the power and presence of the first one (to me clearly – not criticising what anyone else thought / felt as clearly we all feel what we feel – you know what I mean…)