With Many Thanks

We would like to thank all of the Golden Thread poets for reading at St. John's during the last 3 Edinburgh Festivals and all of you who came along to listen. Also St John's Church and the Cornerstone Bookshop for providing such superb venues and to those who generously sponsored the readings - without your help, they would not have been possible. 

This site too, would not have existed without your contributions. Many thanks for all the wonderful and inspiring poems and images.

This will be the last posting on the blog, but it will of course, still be available to view, reference, and link to. 

Two Quintas from Spain

Silent -

the land lies under sunlight -

spread yellow earth, red earth,

swept in tender circles round the olive trees

as if the sun’s broom was at work

Silent -

*

 

his blue eyes look out into distance -

olive trees in rows as regular as needlework

sweeping down the slopes -

dark green stitching

against dust-coloured earth.

his blue eyes...

Morelle Smith(words and images)

Anne Murray, Jila Peacock and Hafez

Gracenotes

INHERITANCE

I have inherited my mother's scarves

Autumn angora, winter wool

crisp cotton for spring;

silk for sad days like funerals, whatever the season.

She felt uncomfortable if there was no scarf.

At Rodin sculptures in the Burrell, she'd pause

and loudly tut not even a scarf around her neck.

When in town on separate jaunts,

I'd find her at the midday mass,

spot her immediately, her scarf

drawn up over her head, veil-like.

She'd nod as I joined her for the final hymn,

frown for a moment at my bare head

then smile in approval at my covered neck.

I take my time choosing my scarf, stroking

silver-flecked blues, warm reds, cool greens

noting that there are no beige.

It may be a difficult day ahead

but no matter. I'm not afraid

to stick my neck out

wearing any one of her scarves.

Anne Murray

Anne Murray reads at the Cornerstone - photo by Morelle Smith

Jila Peacock translates Hafez and shows her illustrations of his words

 

Rise up wine giver and offer the cup

for love at first so simple is now beset with trouble

even as sighs rising from the tangle of perfumed curls

suffuse our hearts with rapture.

Here am I revelling in the midst of life

when every moment the camel bells cry out

‘Pack your goods and chattels!’

Redden the prayer rug with wine

if the Magian elder tells you

For seekers know the map and methods of the Way.

In night’s black terror amid the fearful waves and whirlpools

How may those wayfarers of the shore fathom my despair?

My whole life’s yield is ending in shame through my conceit.

How long can the mystery we all seek remain hidden?

If this is the presence you seek Hafez, be bold

Abandon the world, let it go:

Then face your heart’s desire.

Translated by Jila Peacock

Jila Peacock shows her illustrations at the Cornerstone- photo by Mike Knowles

 

From the Cornerstone Readings

A Blackness

As clear as night

wings like ink

drawn in non-flight;

more positive than anything

is that Rook on the rooftop opposite.

Its wide-nosed beak

scans feathers

for insects or dirt,

coat clean and brilliantine,

upstaging the Jackdaw

hidden in slate—

charcoal

indistinct

like a so-called Eskimo

wrapped in sealskin

or centuries of a misconceived othering.

*

Rook really took the biscuit, though;

all the colours swam into him,

absorbed their differences

to nothing,

a negative-positive

to outshine the Sun,

a blackness that turns day

and night

back to light.

Nalini Paul

 

Nalini Paul

***

Chrys Salt's tribute to Adrian Mitchell -

With Adrian at the Peace Festival

if you saw him running it was because he’d spotted truth in the crowd and was chasing it if you saw him smiling it was at a good deed waving from a balcony if you saw him jumping it was in a playground with all the other daft kids on the block raising anarchy if you heard him singing it was girls and boys come out to play if you saw him laughing he was laughing he was really laughing if you saw him waving it was to say HELLO come in and join the feast of the human race if you saw him writing it was a love letter to the world on the day of its crucifixion if you saw him dancing it was to a Beatles tune about giving peace a chance and waiting for that moment to arrive

Chrys Salt

***

BUS PASS

I waited anxiously at the bus stop.

Two old ladies behind me

and a younger woman with a child

behind them formed the queue.

And when the bus arrived I panicked.

I encouraged the elderly ladies on first

then I motioned to the young woman,

discretely falling in behind her.

I wanted no association with these

old women – for we were leagues apart –

the mother and child much preferred

with my bus pass sweating in my palm.

I dreaded the bus driver’s eyes

as I dreaded the pad for the pass.

I felt sure he would question my age

as I felt sure I would fumble the pass.

All things pass, of course. It happened

without a word or the faintest of fumbles,

my pointless exasperation grounded in the vanity

of an uneasy, newly retired, senior citizen.

James Aitken

***

Geneva, August 2010 (from Gold Tracks, Fallen Fruit)

the wild sail of the water fountain

flaps a sheet of light across the Lac Léman -

from the cathedral bell-tower

it looks like a thread of torn lace

round the city’s wrist

Geneva rooftops (photo Morelle Smith)

 Scotland, East Coast, August 2012

passing through a narrow tunnel

that winds between the banks of sand –

no warning - the flat sea has spilled over the horizon -

it’s as if the dunes first protected you

then pushed you out

dunes, sea (photo by Morelle Smith)

Morelle Smith

After the Readings 2012

While last year's readings were memorable for taking place under grey skies and sometimes teeming rain, the weather this year could hardly have been better. In the new venue, the Cornerstone Bookshop, we read in an old stone building, full of books of course, and with light coming in through an arched window, as you can see below.

Fr Meslier at his desk

I sharpened a new quill today

shaving the pliant bone

fallen from the wing of a sky-

wanderer, its feathers shaded

mist-grey to rain-grey,

gave thanks so lovely a thing

had come into my keeping,

its balance between finger and thumb

the poise of flight.

In that moment I was out

of myself, the sky above me

drawing me on and up

blue on blue on blue

without end.

A C Clarke

A C Clarke reading at the Cornerstone Bookshop (photo by Morelle Smith)

THE MAGIC APPLE TREE
‘Comfort me with apples’



Cherry blossom pink and apple blossom
white or apple blossom’s deeper pink
as in Samuel Palmer’s magic apple tree
created for immortal Avalon
or for a taste of wisdom from the muse
from Venus, Friday’s child, with strongbow cider
fermented for a feast at harvest home.
Now hidden on a misty Scottish coast
old apple trees survive and are restored
each one to give its quintessential taste
in gardens of Lindores, its ancient abbey:
a gift to every sense and to more life
for birds, flowers, insects, thriving where
the apple reigns, cherished, venerated.

Tessa Ransford

Tessa Ransford (photo by Mike Knowles)

Programme for Readings at the Cornerstone Bookshop August 2012

We are delighted to announce that the programme of readings for August 2012 is now complete. We have a great lineup for this year and we look forward to welcoming readers and audience to our new venue, the Cornerstone Bookshop, just below St John's Church, Edinburgh. (text below is the same as in the flyer, only in larger print)

THE GOLDEN THREAD OF POETRY August 2012

in the Cornerstone Bookshop (independent, inclusive, ecumenical, charitable)

St John’s Terrace, Princes Street Edinburgh, EH2 4BJ

0131 229 3776 edinburgh@cornerstonebooks.org.uk

www.cornerstonebooks.org.uk

All events from 5.30 – 6.30 pm : with songs from Toby Mottershead on the terrace afterwards

Tuesday 7^th August

A C Clarke : compassionate poems about anatomy and atheism

Lesley Harrison: poems of birds and landscapes, minimal, exact

Anne Murray: well-made poems, well-read, well-travelled, well-thought

Wednesday 8^th August

Rosie Alexander: personal discovery and local feeling, a young poet from Orkney

Morgan Downie: also an artist, his poems draw from life and landscape

James Robertson: poems in Scots on political, historical, mythical and environmental themes

Thursday 9^th August

Tom Hubbard: international poems in English and Scots, lyrical or satirical

Nalini Paul: deeply thoughtful poems inspired by nature and experience

Morelle Smith : an exploratory traveller, she addresses the inner and outer journey

Tuesday 14^th August

Chrys Salt: ‘seriously good, thoroughly individual’, reading from her new collection

Pauline Prior Pitt: alternately funny and poignant, the older woman, island life

Wednesday 15^th August

Patricia Ace: poems of family, relationships and nature

Dawn Wood: a scientific mind brings simple subjects, wonderful connections

Thursday 16^th August

Lesley Duncan: her poems range from history to the contemporary, with acute observations

Hugh Macmillan: well-made well-delivered Scots historical comment, erudition and wit

Tuesday 21^st August

Jila Peacock: translations of Hafiz and Rumi read in Persian and English

Tessa Ransford: her new book is ‘don’t mention this to anyone’

Wednesday 22^nd August

Alexander Hutchison: philosophical, witty, aware and finely-written poems

Jim Aitken: angry at injustice yet tender and humane, poems of possibility

Thursday 23^rd August

Tessa Ransford and Iyad Hayatleh: A rug of a thousand colours: poems and translations inspired by the five pillars of Islam, bilingual in Arabic and English.

Water, Another Jetty

The boat is like a scooped out wooden shell

a crab once lived in.

It follows an oblique path to the shore.

A thin rope ties it to the wooden jetty.

The sun shines, out of reach of clouds.

The beach is pebbles, grey and rounded,

warm to the touch.

The sun has the whole estuary to itself,

fingers water, turns stones inside out,

revealing their true colours

Words and images - Morelle Smith

Two Poems

FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN

I had not expected this at my age:

all the muscles tightening in my throat,

my eyes welling up and glazing over

and palpitations in my ageing heart.

But more than this. I could wander around

the house, the streets outside and suddenly

your image would appear and then your voice

and I would engage in conversation -

Internally, of course, though it felt real.

I could hear you clearly, see you clearly

with that mischievous look from piercing eyes

and I would hold you close in an embrace.

I had not expected this at my age

and thought of the gap in years between us.

These things don’t seem to matter nowadays

and with this trend I felt myself at ease.

But deep down I knew it would never last,

your eyes were bound to rest on someone else

but what had been was bound to stay between

this grandad and his two year old grandson.

Jim Aitken

 

THE WHITE STICK

Like a blind man with his white stick

faltering sometimes on pavements,

only familiarity

and persistence can lead him on.

For ourselves when the fog descends,

when we can’t seem to find our way,

the white stick of inspiration

can become a shaft of lightning

That transforms the darkness for us,

the white flash a wand in our hand

that gives us lasting expression;

the bright new dawn of our learning.

Jim Aitken

Two Watery Quintas - River, Sea and Rain

The broken jetty

and the clouds over the water -

swag bags of rain slung

over shoulders, slate grey clouds

that don’t look back.

 

The ripples on the water

have a slick look to them

the reflection of the high bridge -

where the trains still pass -

near-perfect

Poems and images - Morelle Smith

Concealed by Blossom

March 26^th 2012

The dark days are done as we turn towards light

white on black like swans on water and the jaunty pied wagtail appears in black and white

with the first daisies in flower in the long grass wet with haar while the kestrel hovers above

a single dandelion and a cloud of almond blossom conceals the singing robin

Tessa Ransford

photo by Kurien Koshy Yohannan

First Flowers in Woods and Gardens

Garden snowdrops - posted by Freda Stobo.

EMBROGLIO

This body a carapace

shell for molluscs of thought

a pack of gregarious senses

of inaudible resonances

happy loving hurt

As we join the circus of life

intelligent cells coalesce

encounter the earth minutely

while part of the planet completely

survival the quiet test

Plants, such givers of life

seeds, a prism of colours,

sharers and makers of water

of feelers, of roots, of rapture

and soundless orators

To wait is the hardest demand

on the human unsatisfied mind

on the human impatient heart

whose senses are truly refined

when dark, deaf, silent and blind

Tessa Ransford

Wild snowdrops posted by Morelle Smith

That Season Just Before Spring

This morning it's misty, the crows caw and a chaffinch was piping, the snow shrinks and a dull green, a thin, light-starved, emaciated mat, greenish brown, is revealed. The snow, frozen to clumps of grey ice, forms slippery hillocks, wet, half melted, treacherous as the speeding mind, desperate as a weapon, to be off.

I am not going to follow this fire or this blade, I am tempering, slowing, I will shoulder an axe, I will lean on a saw, into the patterns of wood, cut a floury path through the branches, smell the resin, listen to the crunch of my boots on the faltering ice. I will gather sticks, my armour against time and the drying of laundry and hopes, remembering smells of dried pine, and warm cotton, the first flowers ripe as coconuts, yellow as corn.

The birds throw themselves from one tree to another, piping and growling and tripping over the twigs and the garden table, the tree-trunks and the matting and drooping of last summer's flowers.

Sap is pushing its way through the trees and buds are already glowing with colour.

…

The light has stayed so long, and changed everything. The earth scent, the sun going down at a different point in the sky. So the light makes quite different patterns of shade – shadows appear in unexpected places. Sunlight too, carries a rush bag in its arms, and empties it all over the garden, among the fir twigs and larch bark the colour of rust, and thick, like lumps of papier maché.

Morelle Smith

Two Poems

Leaving (for JC)

my star magnolia in bud
presides in fisted beauty by the wall

bulbs in the garden spiking through the mud

as black birds call.

Reminders of that other March

my young son packed to leave

burdened with desert camouflage

the garden bursting into leaf

my star magnolia in bud

bulbs in the garden spiking through the mud

Lost (Iraq: March 2003)

There are no maps for poets in this country.
The compass finger, mindless on its post
will not direct us on this dangerous journey.
An unfamiliar landscape tells us we are lost.
Above the bramble and the rambling wood
the wheeling dragons search for bones
of luckless travellers who have misconstrued
the alien symbols on the milestones.
We have nowhere to go but where we are,
our options closed, the exit double locked.
We may not take direction from a star.
The stars are out and all the roads are blocked.
How can we dare this nightmare territory?
the shifting contours of the hills and coasts,
the gibberish signposts and the season's enmity.
What hand our touchstone in this land of ghosts?

Chrys Salt

Poem for a New Year

January 1st

from North Uist

in dawn light

scarce enough

to not distinguish colour

the moon is polishing the sea

Pauline Prior-Pitt