My boat is so small and the sea is so wide

photo by Gordon Parks

Summer in the City 

may look glamorous but the reality is very different. We stay here in the village and go for our city fix later in the year. People come to stay from all over the world, they rent the holiday cottages and liven up the village - the world-wide-web makes it possible. Many of us living here have to cope without a decent mobile phone signal but we are blessed with the internet and that keeps us sane.
"Only connect ""...

Summer in the village

So much comes to us. 

We had a a close encounter in June,  The cold, wet spring made eider ducklings rarer and later in arriving. 

Lost and Found

What are you?

I get closer and scoop you up

A lucky strike – have you safely enclosed in one hand

Small eider duckling with elegant eye-stripes

Feathers like tiny hairs and a big personality

What was your mother thinking

Leaving you tumbling over our steps?

We find yet another use for a Lidl plastic trug

Lie you in a teatowel and hear you cheep-cheeping

Grab the ipad for a quick snapshot -

A composition in suffragette purple, green and white

With you, a tiny brown dot in the centre

One may take a duck to water but …

When we find a crèche for you to bond with -

The sight of a long, thin man,

topped by an orange hat

Holding a purple trug

and brandishing a duckling

Seems to spook your relatives on the water

Off they all fly each time we approach -

An inter-species misunderstanding

Finally he launches you

Into an unknown future

We scan the sea-

Eider duckling

Is that you?

©Sally Givertz         June 22nd 2015

This is what made me think of that quotation:  "My boat is so small and the sea is so wide."

When one sees an eider ducks on a wild day with the waves battering them it seems unlikely that the young will survive but they ride the waves fearlessly and seem somehow glued to the water. They disappear neatly to snatch a quick bite and pop up unperturbed.  Blissfully unaware of the magnitude of the sea they just get on with living. 

Feeling like a leaf

                                              photo by Rob Mckay

This blog post stalled because I was feeling like a leaf....

Yesterday I came across this poem by the wonderful Naomi Shihab Nye:

The Art Of Disappearing

Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say  We should get together
say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees.  The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

I love this poem and it had just the right words at the right moment for me; the last three lines in particular. If you are feeling fragile or overwhelmed it might help.  Decide what to do with your time.

(Note about copyright - I don't usually publish poems by living writers but this one is already up on the internet and I am sure that it will help sales of her poetry rather than reducing them.  If anyone thinks I should take it down or just give a short extract please let me know.)

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/naomi-shihab-nye

This is a link to information about this outstanding poet.  She is not Scottish but I am widening the parameters of the blog - we are all global citizens after all.

Update - now writing this in September 2016 - blog went into the Doldrums we I am steering out of it now. 

At the beach life is different

                                                               Out at Sea - Ritchie Collins (Scottish Artist)

At the beach life is different.  Time doesn’t move hour to hour but mood to moment.  We live by the currents, plan by the tides, and follow the sun.

 Sandy Gingras, Writer.

We are all fascinated by the sea - that place where the ground under our feet shifts into less solid sand and then to another element entirely.  We walk into the sea and suddenly we can float; we look at the sea and are moved and soothed, or swept away from our own concerns:

When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.

 Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet.

Poets can't resist the sea and Scottish poets have plenty to go on, or on about.

Contemporary poets need to sell their poems so I have chosen some earlier poems for this blog post,  If you want to read or listen to new poems the Scottish poetry archive is a wonderful resource:

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry

Norman MacCaig (1910-96) was one of the best Scottish poets and one of my all-time favourite poets. 

I was quite annoyed when I first came to Scotland and discovered MacCaig properly. Previously I'd only read his poem Stars and Planets in an anthology and no one had grabbed my arm and told me to read his poems. But on reflection I realised that I would not have enjoyed the poems half as much before I lived in Scotland.  I'd never seen an eider duck diving or the wine-dark seaweed at night; I'd never heard the squeaky rasp of the winch on the pier: 

Midnight, Lochinver

Norman MacCaig (1910-96)

Wine-coloured, Homer said, wine-dark…

The seaweed on the stony beach,

Flushed darker with that wine, was kilts

And beasts and carpets… A startled heron

Tucked in its cloud two yellow stilts.

And eiderducks were five, no, two –

No, six.  A lounging fishbox raised

Its broad nose to the moon.  With groans

And shouts the steep burn drowned itself;

And sighs were soft among the stones.

All quiet, all dark: excepting where

A cone of light stood on the pier

And in the circle of its scope

A hot winch huffed and puffed and gnashed

Its iron fangs and swallowed rope.

The nursing tide moved gently in.

Familiar archipelagos

Heard her advancing, heard her speak

Things clear, though hard to understand

Whether in Gaelic or in Greek.

                                                                       Summer Seas - Owen Henderson - Scottish artist

I have been marinading a sea poem for a while now and it finally reached the my consciousness this morning.  Most of the human mind is unconscious and the sea is far more than just the surface we can see. 

That Which Can Be Celebrated

Yes the levels are rising

Yes the coasts erode

(if a clod be washed away)

But it’s not all about us

The sea is bigger than that

It is splendidly indifferent

It offers trade and riches

Trafficking and despair

Here I live by the sea -

A challenging companion

I am in thrall

But fully aware of her

Moody ruthlessness

Like a spoilt beauty

She thinks she can

Get away with murder

The drowned are buried at sea

The victims of sea battles

Were slid over the side

Tipped off a board

Covered by a standard

Visible for a second

Before the big, deep, sleep.

For me it’s more personal

(It always is with humans)

I cast the last ashes here

Into a light breeze

Haloed by rainbows

It’s what he’s now become

Hold fast to that

Which can be celebrated

And move on.

       Sally Givertz©2015  

Kathleen Jamie  (b. Scotland 1962) is next.

The poem below is already up on the internet and I love it so am breaking my own rule and showing it here in full. I think that we can all - both men and women - identify with this universal burden of believing we are somehow responsible for keeping the earth turning.

                 

The Creel

Kathleen Jamie 

The world began with a woman,

shawl-happed, stooped under a creel,

whose slow step you recognize

from troubled dreams. You feel

obliged to help bear her burden

from hill or kelp-strewn shore,

but she passes by unseeing

thirled to her private chore.

It's not sea birds or peat she's carrying,

not fleece, nor the herring bright

but her fear that if ever she put it down

the world would go out like a light.

creel: wicker basket for carrying fish, peat, etc on the back

thirled: enslaved

I have added a tiny poem by RLS being fairly cheerful about life for a change:

FAIR Isle at Sea - thy lovely name

Soft in my ear like music came.

That sea I loved, and once or twice

I touched at isles of Paradise. 

Robert Louis Stevenson

As a footnote I'd say there are hundreds of other poems written by Scottish poets about the sea. 

Hearing them speak their own poetry is the best way to get to know a new poet or enjoy a familiar one.  Try the Poetry Archives.  You can search by subject or by poet. 

http://www.poetryarchive.org/explore

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets

Have a good summer. 

Divine Inspiration - A Travelog Part 2

Hereford 

When I think of Hereford I think of the poet Thomas Traherne    

A detail from the Tom Denny window in Hereford Cathedral inspired by the life and writings of Thomas Traherne. 

This could be a self-portrait.

Thomas Traherne - a remarkable seventeenth century poet, scholar, clergyman and religious writer believed that Hereford was a blessed city.  I am inclined to agree with him.

As I strayed quite far from poetry in the last blog post I am going to jump straight in and share this Traherne poem with you:

Consider the Extent of Love

Thomas Traherne

(1636 or 1637, Hereford, England -  1674) 

  

You are as prone to love as the sun is to shine;

it being the most delightful and natural employment

of the soul of man; without which you are dark and miserable.

Consider therefore the extent of love, its vigour and excellency.

For certainly he that delights not in love makes vain the universe,

and is of necessity to himself the greatest burden.

The whole world ministers to you as the theatre of your love.

It sustains you and all objects that you may continue to love them.

Without which it were better to have no being.

Life without objects is sensible emptiness,

and that is a greater misery than death or nothing.

Objects without love are the delusion of life;

the objects of love are its greatest treasures:

and without love it is impossible there should be treasures.

Hereford Cathedral is a treasure.

No one demands money with menaces as you go inside; no implication that it might fall down on your head if you don't cough up a fiver, It is a welcoming and busy place full of life and colour. It is a beautiful building that is being constantly renewed and revived for the twenty-first century. It feeds both body (good cafe and little sheltered garden) and soul and lifts the spirits. You don't have to be religious to value such a special place. For me it is an object of love and it was wonderful to visit it again and watch the Magna Carta exhibition going up.


  
If you'd like to know more about Thomas Traherne your very best guide is Denise Inge - another inspirational scholar and religious writer who died far too young.  I recommend Happiness and Holiness on Thomas Traherne published in 2008 by Canterbury Press.

I also visited Ledbury (home to an annual Poetry Festival) http://www.poetry-festival.co.uk/

And of course, birthplace of the 19th century poet John Masefield. I will spare you the ubiquitous Sea Fever and offer this instead: 

JOHN MASEFIELD

An Epilogue

I have seen flowers come in stony places,

And kind things done by men with ugly faces,

And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,

So I trust, too.

Much of his writing seems dated to me now and often gloomy, but this frivolous little poem cheers me.

                                                    1936 Gold Cup winner Golden Miller ridden by Evan Williams

Of course the Gold Cup he refers to is the famous Race Meeting at Cheltenham and this is a good way of taking us across the border to Gloucestershire and the village of Dymock.

The Dymock Poets  

The 'Dymock Poets' are generally held to have comprised Robert Frost, Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, and John Drinkwater, some of whom lived near the village in the period between 1911 and 1914. Eleanor Farjeon, who was involved with Edward Thomas, also visited. They published their own quarterly, entitled 'New Numbers', containing poems such as Brooke's "The Soldier".

Which ones to choose?

Edward Thomas is probably the most local poet and maybe we'll take one from Eleanor Farjeon so a woman poet gets an outing. Thomas famously volunteered to fight in the First World War in 1915 and was killed in 1917 - this led to the break-up of the group.#123 on

The Glory

by Edward Thomas

The glory of the beauty of the morning, -
The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove
That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;
White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay;
The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy
Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart: -
The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning
All I can ever do, all I can be,
Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue,
The happiness I fancy fit to dwell
In beauty's presence. Shall I now this day
Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,
Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start
And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops,
In hope to find whatever it is I seek,
Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things
That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?
Or must I be content with discontent
As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings?
And shall I ask at the day's end once more
What beauty is, and what I can have meant
By happiness? And shall I let all go,
Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know
That I was happy oft and oft before,
Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,
How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,
Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core. 

His strange, discontented personality shows through this poem and perhaps helps to explain his decision to enlist.

The poem below - very different from Eleanor Farjeon's well-known children's poems and her theme tune Morning Has Broken, may be a reaction to the death of Edward Thomas.

Peace

Eleanor Farjeon

I am as awful as my brother War,

I am the sudden silence after clamour.

I am the face that shows the seamy scar

When blood and frenzy has lost its glamour.

Men in my pause shall know the cost at last

That is not to be paid in triumphs or tears,

Men will begin to judge the thing that's past

As men will judge it in a hundred years.

Nations! whose ravenous engines must be fed

Endlessly with the father and the son,

My naked light upon your darkness, dread! -

By which ye shall behold what ye have done:

Whereon, more like a vulture than a dove,

Ye set my seal in hatred, not in love.

II.

Let no man call me good. I am not blest.

My single virtue is the end of crimes,

I only am the period of unrest,

The ceasing of horrors of the times;

My good is but the negative of ill,

Such ill as bends the spirit with despair,

Such ill as makes the nations' soul stand still

And freeze to stone beneath a Gorgon glare.

Be blunt, and say that peace is but a state

Wherein the active soul is free to move,

And nations only show as mean or great

According to the spirit then they prove. -

O which of ye whose battle-cry is Hate

Will first in peace dare shout the name of Love? 

The famous wild daffodils in Dymock Woods 

We saw the famous lent lilies - wild daffodils on our way to May Hill in Gloucestershire.

Red May Hill - Valerie Maclean 

May Hill is known for its crown of trees (supposed to number 99 but this is a poetic truth only) and this makes it very easy to identify. 

John Masefield describes May Hill in his poem "The Everlasting Mercy" eulogised "May Hill that Gloucester dwellers 'gainst every sunset see".   But I'll spare you that one as it is beyond bad.

Suffice it to say that a walk over May Hill on a spring morning is poetry in motion. 

A final word for Ross on Wye - where I lived for almost 30 years.

Ross is famous for its beauty and its connection with hedgehogs. This seems to relate back 1500 years when the Celts invaded Ross on Wye and called the area "Ergyng" which meant "Land of the Hedgehog"  My daughters' school badge was made special by the hedgehog peering over the top.

There is even an annual Hedgehog Festival and Ode to the Hedgehog poetry competition.  Can you think of any good rhymes for hedgehog ?

I leave you with a Scottish poem about a hedgehog as I bring myself back home.

Hedgehog, Hamnavoe

Jen Hadfield

Flinching in my hands

this soiled and studded but good heart, 

which stippling my cupped palms, breathes –

a kidney flinching on a hot griddle, 

or very small Hell's Angel, peeled from the verge 

of a sweet, slurred morning.

Drunk, I coddle it like a crystal ball, 

hellbent the realistic mysteries 

should amount to more than guesswork

                        and fleas. 

This began as an inspirational blog post so rather than leaving you with the idea of fleas I offer another aspect of the hedgehog.

You can knit your own - guaranteed no fleas!  

Next Post - Scottish sea poems.