snowdrops

in freda's garden, finally, spring is on the way....

Where Do Rivers Begin?

Where Do Rivers Begin?

Where do rivers begin?
I’ve never been remotely interested in
wide-mouthed estuaries where fresh meets salt,
where rivers must halt,
knowing that soon enough, on some fated day,
I’ll be sailing that way, skailing
into the ocean of eternity.

For now, I want to foot it back
along the dreary rooted banks,
those tangled briary paths near towns,
bollarded road ends, industrial estates
blocked by burned out cars,
coal - stained strands and sewage pipes,
short-lived silver sands of pleasure beach,
plumbing the mud flats like an arthritic heron
until I see the river bridged and narrowed.

Then further back and in
below stone arches spanned by Telfer and Wade
to the black and foaming tumbling
where the tourists hang over to gawp
at the ranting and rumbling falls,
then further back yet . . .
a swift bend up a glen, up a burn,
be it in Leadhills or Himalayas,
where a startled sheep bolts in alarm
past the ruins of a farm heaped in a broken ruckle . . .

. . . finally to be able
to straddle its clear cable and trickle.
Then up, steeper still
to where cloud smoors hill
on a summit of bubbling capillaries.
It’s there in the boggy mess and black loam
that Nature condenses her tear on a stone
for a birth and a death.

I might stop the ocean here.

Argument

Argument

“Do not become too fond
of life, a favourite green
and long-stemmed glass for wine,
and finely etched, a friend.
Find in Refusal an end –
for all shall equally
be taken.”

Or find peace in attachment so
intense: to wine, to lover, friend, locale,
Life sparks in common miracle.
Swear by red-ochre, soot-black, yellow
work-words, dye-words, bee-words,
clay-words, fish fin dicing, slicing sea-
words, bird-wing winding, binding sky-
words, tree-root gripping, tripping Earth
so hard, that when, just once, they fly,
their happiness is magical; a birth
and buzz. They hum. They sing. They die.


Walter Perrie

from his new book: Lyrics & Tales in Twa Tongues
published by Fras

long poem magazine launch announcement

Launch of the Long Poem Magazine, issue 5: The event will take place at the CCA, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow at 7pm on Tuesday 22nd March. Hosted by the Scottish Writers' Centre, the reading is in honour of Edwin Morgan, the man and his work. It will feature: the Scottish actor Tam Dean Burn performing about 25 minutes of EM's poem version of Gilgamesh. Adnan al-Sayegh, an international award-winning Iraqi exile will read 'Pages from the Biography of an Exile' in Arabic, with his translator Stephen Watts reading the English language versions. James McGonigal, Sandy and Stephen will read their long poems.

St Brigit's Day - A Time of Renewal

St Brigit's day marks the first Quarter Day of the year, a time of the first stirrings and awakenings of new life. Perhaps each renewal is a time for looking back to what has formed us and for questioning who we are.

Identities

Are you the language that you speak

or the one your parents spoke,

the one you never learned?

Are you the land you live in now

or the one that lives inside their bones,

the one that they call home?

Are you the kind of fruit you eat,

that prospers in this soil?

Are you the stories that your parents feed you

before they disappear,

a film of moist silt in your memory?

Or are you more a conduit, a colour

and a shape, a lightning-flash

that you hand on to others?

Mixing chalk and water with imagination,

are you vivid with light,

and warm too – with light?

Names fade it seems,

tossed out with the rind of mandarins,

lemons and pomegranates -

while what you live of sun

and stars – remains.

Morelle Smith

poem for St Brigit's day

ANGELS OF HEALING
for St Brigit’s day and Candlemas
Tessa Ransford (2011)

I open myself to the angels of healing
the greater or lesser, the arch or hermetic
wherever they may appear
with therapies or with silences
yet unsurely believable:
Gabriel, Michael, Raphael
who companioned Tobias
or whichever may be supposed
my guardian, a little Indian goddess?
Or shall I call Bride, our own goddess
of fire and light, of children and hearth
of kindness and practicality?

Angels know the world changes
all the time anyway and nothing
they do can change the endless
changing.

Are these the angels of healing who
pick up the broken bodies of those
they love and of strangers; Red Cross
workers, midwives and nurses,
Médecins sans Frontières;
bomb disposal experts, and those
who comfort the children, who gather
the minds and rejected feelings of all
who have tried to save and heal but have
been bereaved of hope?

Bride as midwife we pray you will
bring to birth
the light of the turning year
and assist the gestation of animals
plants and minerals,
riding the surf with your flock
of red-billed oyster catchers.

We pray you will
bear the child of the year in your arms
and, despite the anger that rages on,
we pray you will feed it the milk of human kindness
gathered where you may
out-poured where you can,
as you quietly allowed the Celtic church -
its hermits and insular saints
and we who humbly and blindly follow -
to change your flame from goddess to saint
your name to Brigit and to
number ourselves in your company.

I open myself to the angels of healing
and welcome the longed-for mother,
sister or nurse, in all manifestations,
her smile, her capable hands.

The Cosmic Dance

Almost sunrise on the solstice, December 2010




Solstice eclipse snow contributed by Hazel Buchan Cameron
















This particular dance combined three acts in one - solstice, full Moon and eclipse.
Then there was a further act - another eclipse.

Joseph Proskauer says:>

It must be very rare indeed to have both an eclipse of the Moon near the start of Christmas, and an eclipse of the Sun near the close. It seems we are experiencing an unusual harmony of Earth, Moon, and Sun. "May human beings hear it."

Apparently, Joseph says, it is very rare that the moon-rhythms (phase and height of path) should coincide exactly on the solstice and it is even rarer that a total eclipse should also occur then as well (although eclipses do always occur on new and full Moons.) He says that, to the best of his knowledge, the last lunar eclipse on the solstice was 372 years ago.

The second eclipse, the partial solar eclipse - along with the new Moon - occurred around 8.50 am GMT on 4^th January 2011.

The powerful rhythms and alignments of the celestial bodies are reflected in our own lives, in our dreams and our waking experiences, and we will express them creatively in different ways. This particular filament of the Golden Thread did not manage to see either eclipse, as they were obscured by clouds, but just going out walking in the hills on those mornings was quite magical, especially on the solstice, when the ground was still covered in snow, and all the trees and plants had their individual coatings of frost.

The photographs are of sunrise on the solstice.

Photographs of Cairnholy © Joseph Proskauer

Two quintas:

22/12/10
Solstice full Moon
hides behind morning clouds -
at evening, edges behind buildings -
finally, on the dark deserted beach -
what took you so long? It says

4/1/11
the Sun on the horizon
behind boat-clouds
pulled by swift rowers -
shielding us perhaps
from the shadow on its face

Morelle Smith

sunrise and solar eclipse

Song for snow

Golden leaf on silver bough -– break

Branches under snow –- shake

A Siberian wind -- flakes

Drift deep below

Black cloud thunder mass -– glow

Of midday outline -– through

To the gleam and glimpse -– blue

Shadows on the hill

Dark and light together -- spill

With birds raucous as they -- fill

The glen and loch and -– will

Skein their way south

Winter now forms our world -– north

Spin the seasons – earth

Works her systems – death

with birth interdwelt

Glaciers may return or –melt

Ice or flood our future – dealt

All beneath Orion—held

As we marvel faithfully

Tessa Ransford (December 2010)

Note: The poem’s form is taken from Gaelic Pibroch music, and in this case the tradition for a ‘call to arms’. The last word in each line is emphasised and leads on in meaning to the next line. Three lines rhyme with the fourth last line of each verse leading onto the rhyme for the first line of the next. I have imitated this from a poem of Hamish Henderson’s called ‘Brosnachadh’.

Portentous

Cloaked in a curtain of cloud

the sun burns

through black fabric

glares like an old woman

in a shroud.

It hovers above us

as we sit in the moving bus,

trying to warm our cockles in winter

willing the sun to shed

her widow’s veil

and shine over our discontent.

Nalini Paul