The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases
And I lie down alone.

The rainy Pleiads wester,
And seek beyond the sea
The head that I shall dream of
That will not dream of me.

O nor'wester! sweep away sweep away just,
All my hidden pains of past,
Sobs and sighs shouldn't any more last.

Royal poinciana is smiling in red,
Why am I feeling like lying on sick bed?
Let me be stormy and dread.

Look! this nor'wester has no pretension,
He is pure burning in sun sensation,
Has no secret trap or illusion.

O nor'wester! please restore my real being,
Let me dance like wind whirling,
Let beauty dazzle like revolutionary uprising.

So long this mind is empty,
A dais there is adorned with fabulous beauty,
Please give me flowers revolutionary red mighty.

Come come brush of red deep,
O blue past! don't peep,
Come shiny dawn! I won't weep.

It was a summer afternoon in Wester Ross. Two moments: one near, on tide-swept sands, with glorious and gloriously blue amalgams of sky and water; the other far, on a distant shore, a vista of sweeping rain and a gang of clouds marauding the hills. Near abouts: a meeting of warm land and cool sea over a deserted beach. There were midges of course, but on that day a lithe breeze kept them at bay. As she was discovering the chaotic delights of the disused Fishing Station, I was Charles Darwin standing on a deserted shore looking across to Tierra del Fuego. Not a sign of a dwelling, a boat, or even a person on the coastal footpath. A vast panorama spread beyond the edges of my unturning vision. Out on the grey blue water, I became Captain Vancouver sailing up the Inner Channel exploring and mapping every indent, nook and cranny of the double coast. Suddenly, five indians in their log canoe appeared paddling around the point, navigating by the feel of depth and the thrum of the current inches under their bare feet and bottoms.
 
This place, the larger vicinity, the region driven through, on and onwards, into and out towards landscapes vaster than anything I’d previously known in this small island; it had already staked its claim on my consciousness. I was transfixed. On my own, decent progress during a walk was almost impossible. I would stop every few moments aware that something new and different was going on. To miss anything seemed an affront to the sublime. I would walk early in the morning whilst she lay peacefully in bed, her arms stretched out on the blue-striped cover, her hands and fingers gently curved, at rest. This morning time was alive with a colourscape of silences, different shades of low-level noise. There is no camera able to catch the play of real all-surrounding images with those extensions of fantasy the imagination blends and stirs. No microphone can be sensitive enough to the surround sound in air and landscape, the faint breath of the sea, and the incessant conversation and playback of her tender evening voice in my thoughts. Here the past was invading the present, speculating on the future, our future.
 
I ventured inside the hut at the Fishing Station. Curious to see what she was up to. She was arranging, like children do, her found objects. Along the few shelves fixed to the corrugated iron walls her quiet hands placed and replaced, shifted and turned; then, the click of the camera, again click, adjust the focus, click. Ropes lay at her feet snake-like, hemp and nylon, that urgent orange, that too smooth blue, mounds of old fishing gear mostly unidentifiable, not an idea where the floor might be found, so completely covered. If there had been a door it was no more; just a gap in the wall, seaward.
 
These objects she arranged: screws, bolts, nails, strange keys, boltless nuts and nutless bolts, small bottles, a can or two. Everything hand-size, tarnished, rusted, some oiled, stained oil-black. I felt an intruder witnessing her preparations for a secret game, a ceremony of recording and removal. A kindly ‘do not disturb’ sign hung about her face; a blankness, a dream-like visage of the initiated, as though she held some premonition of this material’s importance, a treasure found in a shack of a shed, a ‘find’ she would collectively decode. Already this visit took on the character of a preliminary investigation. She began wrapping and tying some of the more unusual items in cloth, making mummies that in a few days she would return to and unwrap to find their imprint and press marked on the cloth.
 
We lost time in this place. Only the incoming tide was a clue to how the afternoon had advanced. The beach, at whose far end the station had been built, held a gentle new moon’s curve. The water’s encroachment of the beach became mesmeric; it was difficult to leave the looking until its tide journey had been completed. But we did, and wandering through the dune meadows, between the diffident cattle, past the remote farm at the end of the track, gate after gate, then the proper road, the twice a day post box, two houses set well back from the road, a woman leading a boy on a horse, up a rise, a lay-by with a camper van, walking backwards to keep the view to the red sand beach in our sights as the afternoon light began to turn from gold into auburn, then with fingers threaded into fingers down to the wooden cottage. And there, later, after love’s welcome and its celebration, stillness.

******* a Boat

Not everyone’s idea of bliss
Emptying the toilet every week.
If you are the kind of person
Who likes creature comforts
It is definitely not for you . .

They say it’s where you go
When things go wrong,
The close friend dies,
The relationship comes apart
And living alone in a shoebox
in Hoxton at £800 a week
Just can’t be faced.

On your daily run beside the canal
You suddenly thought:
Why not? It’s peaceful here
By the water, away from the streets,
Cold in winter, damp in spring,
But summer and autumn will be a joy!

You have to downsize of course:
Most of those books will have to go,
Just one guitar and be sensible
About those shoes and clothes,
A good pair of boots and Rohan frock,
Lots of warm tights, a wok,
And you can leave the Internet at work,
Come home on your bicycle to a novel
and your cat, put the wok on the stove,
and hear the sound of your breath,
as the boat trembles under your feet.



Night Thoughts by Li Bo (16C)


So bright on our bed this moon,
just like frost its light is spread.
If I raise my head to see it shine,
when I turn away I'll think of home.


Reading Variously

How patterns and connections emerged during the progress a letter, a letter in this case begun with only the slightest plan, whose intention was partly to hold his daughter in his thoughts for an hour. It was a one-way conversation, and he would imagine her patiently listening to him. She was an attentive listener with a ferocious memory.

The book on his lap halted this reverie. It was a collection of essays by a woman writer known for a severe collection of novels, creative writing in which one realised how essential and rich the imagination can be in this form. In one essay she had been forthright in defence of the novel, that form that has to accept the ‘nuts and bolts of temporal reality’, that ‘from time to time a character has to walk through a door and close it behind him, the creatures of imagination have to eat and sleep, as all other creatures do.’  He had been whelmed over with such writing, and this book had travelled with him during the week so he could read and reread, opening on train journeys, in the minutes before a meal. It had been a gift he had so nearly lost. He remembered first opening the book and thinking this is all too difficult and intense just now, and then realising it was, in fact, just what was required by the ebb and flow of circumstance. He was troubled in so many things, but he knew he needed to remain hopeful. He had completed a composition during the week, the result of a fortnight’s intense thought, preparation and the teasing out of note to note, which is the stuff of writing for voices. He had been stretched by his own creativity, and now was being stretched by someone else’s, a woman of deep faith (in hope) and understanding of that small world so many of us live in, but perhaps so seldom are able to acknowledge its various riches.

This writer had also charmed him with words about music. ‘I tell my students,’ she had written, ‘language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do. To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall.’ And he thought about his summer school students to whom he had said ‘music is language, the saying and meaning of words, the lift and fall of their inflection, the flow and rhythm of phrase and sentence. You have to read books and to listen to books being read, and poetry of course, the dear sister of music’.

There was more of course. Much history and philosophy sitting alongside spiritual meditation and the homespun observation of an academic, who wrote novels and taught ‘writing novels’, of a mother of four sons, of someone in love with small town life in Iowa and the possibilities of living a good and true life.

And so, the sun rose and lit up the barks of the chestnut trees across the road, in the park beyond. And as the camellia in the garden continued to explode with pink flowers, and the daffodils swayed and nodded, he picked up this vital book and opened its pages to the chapter titled Wondrous Love. Here the author writes about the importance of ‘elderly and old American hymns’. ‘They can move me so deeply’, she writes, ‘that I have difficulty even speaking about them.’ Yes, he knew the way such things moved him. Just the night previously he’d listened to a piano piece by Charles Ives, The Alcotts, with its haunting hymn-like melody and distant echoes of Beethoven’s Fifth, and thought of holding her hand in that university concert hall where he had shared with her this extraordinary work, music that had taken him him to America as a teenager, even to Concord Massachusetts where it had been composed, that he would listen to over and over and wonder at, a music so distant from his roots in the English Choral tradition, but so close to the heart, a music bound to a simplicity of culture that existed once on a different shore, and to which he continued to feel a deep association and love.


Lochan

a poem after  Bai Juyi  (772 -846)



There should be a temple here,

a pavilion on the eastern shore.

Easy to imagine oneself in Jiating, 

but this is Wester Ross.

Instead of orioles fighting in the warm trees, 

crows pick over the summer mud.

Disordered flowers confuse the eye,

bright grass hides the fisherman’s footprints.

I love this lochan,

but cannot stay for long by its bank.

One tree grows out of a reflection, 

on its island home.


Portrait**

You sat for my camera
just the once
in a Mediterranean garden.
It was a haven of green
above a sunned-blue bay.

Unplanned it was.
We’d eaten lunch
watching butterflies
flicker-perch and hover.

You’d tied your hair with a scarf
to keep the midday heat from your head,
a sun that brought your freckles to the fore
on bare arms, on your golden cheek.

Then, for a little while
you left your public self elsewhere,
and my zoomed lens travelled close
as a lover’s kiss when waking.

And as you gazed at the daisied grass
a gentleness and grace descended
on your sun-shadowed face.
I took two pictures, only two.

These portraits I’ve kept
far apart  from other ‘snaps’,
as they seem close
to a painter’s art
as I will ever get.

The portrait-call goes out
and I hesitate, I’m reticent, afraid
to share them with the public gaze.
They say so much, you see,  

of what I know you now to be:
the woman I’m privileged
to touch, to hold dear and close
to this unmanageable heart.

He wandered along the decks by night,
Stood at the rails by day,
Kept to himself from what I saw
And didn’t have much to say,
He wore a yellow sou’wester when
The weather came in cold,
And a battered and worn old Navy cap
With the legend ‘Merchant Gold’.

He must have been once a ******
In a time quite long ago,
He still had his steady ******’s legs
On the ‘Michaelangelo’,
A crusty and time-worn cruise ship
That had seen much better days,
Pottering round the islands through
The softly lapping waves.

I doubt that it could withstand a storm
It was just a summer cruise,
For a raggedy band of tourists who
Had nothing much to lose,
The fares were cheap and the cabins bare
So I utilised the bar,
While the wife would wander off and say,
‘I’ll know just where you are!’

I got in some serious drinking
There was nothing else to do,
While Helen came back with every name
Of the stewards, and the crew,
For Helen’s a social butterfly
And she loves to gad about,
I’ve never been much of a talker
So I tend to shut her out.

One night I happened to wander out
She was over by the rail,
Listening to the sailor who
Was reading her some tale,
I turned back into the dining room
Until my wife was free,
Then asked her: ‘What was he reading?’
And she said, ‘Some poetry!’

‘A poem called ‘Sea Fever’ that had
Brought a tear to his eye,
It was all about a tall ship
And a star to steer her by,
If only you could have heard him, Ben
He had such a tale to tell,
I could have listened to him for hours,
His soul is like a well.’

‘His life was spent on the water and
He calls it God’s domain,
He said that having to leave it brought
His life’s most constant pain,
He pointed the constellations out
Named every little star,
He gave me a feeling of awe about
The ocean, where we are.’

I know I must have been jealous for
I never took the bait,
I didn’t talk to the sailor,
When I would, it was too late,
A storm blew up and the rising seas
Crashed over the decks and spars,
While he clung onto the outer rails
And gazed on up at the stars.

And then I must have been seeing things
For a man approached him there,
Holding onto a trident with
Coiled seaweed in his hair,
Touched him once with the trident and
The sailor turned his head,
Nodded once, with a gentle smile
Then draped on the rail, was dead.

They gathered the poor old sailor up
And bound him up in a sheet,
Waited until the sea calmed down
Called everyone to meet,
Then after a simple service they
Just slipped him into the sea,
A fitting end for a sailor who
Had left our company.

But Helen was broken hearted she
Was weeping all day long,
While I was irritated, and
I asked her, what was wrong?
She stopped and smiled, and she said, ‘Oh well,
He’s back in the sea he loved,
In a tall ship with a broad sail,
With the sky and the stars above!’

I think of him, and Neptune with
A trident, on his throne,
The sailor reading poetry
But this time, quite alone,
While coral reefs and gentle seas
Pay tribute to his life,
But I couldn’t share it now with him…
He shared it with my wife!


David Lewis Paget

(‘Sea Fever’ by John Masefield)

When you come
you’ll reach to take what
I’ve clutched tight

You’ve done it a lot
— especially lately

You did it to that unsuspecting lady
when she stepped off the bus
on Philpotts Road

To that sleeping girl
with the mousy hair in
the children’s ward

To her father three months later

To my own dad while he prayed
by the bed and slumped

To that old pope who shook
like a wet dog in a sou’wester

I read again last week how you visited
the homes of those who wouldn’t
splash blood on their doors

Now that’s something!

I know what you want and I’m onto you

When you come I’ll be ready — I hope
and I’ll hand it to you without protest

But I have a request, if I may, and I hope
you’ll ask on my behalf:

Please don’t visit her before you call on me

Still the spring moon smiles
In the summer sky,
Past love is like the lock of hair
By the touch of wind that does fly.

I cherish so many fancies etherial
So many wishes swimming,
Feeling so eagerness in mind
To cross the dam ramming.

Stormy clouds are in the north-west
A sign of heinous activity,
The poetic mind doesn't care
Keeps ongoing its duty.

O nor'wester! Take love away
I'll be rigid nun,
These two eyes remain sleepless
Like border guard holding gun.

I want sleep, a sound sleep
Be asleep breakup pain,
O nor'wester! Bring a new era
Bring me a happy rain.

At sunrise a little girl calls
Uncle and he comes to
her and past, down the pier
to reel in the blue *****.
Everyone is crossing
the river where it meets the bay
to exchange pleasantries and
to tear off the legs.
So by mid morning: north
up the winding road past
foggy construction zones.
Everyone is crossing
the lake in canoes while she
is catching salamanders,
throwing news in campfires
and tripping over her shoes.
She takes her paddle to the water
and then the sun right above:
time to move.
A couple hundred exits passed,
a couple hundred exits past
noon. A little northwest
this time, a little late
for lab. Everyone is cross-
ing campus like they mean it.
She climbs and counts
and it's actually one hundred sixty-
two steps up the clock tower--
you have to count again--and what
a view. Jumping isn't the way,
you can't go down when you're
on top. She follows the water
norther, wester, you have
to count again, have to see
something new before dark

cool January
soft sound of chattering teeth
night of painful rest

faint tunes of dew drops
hazy February morn
sun and transport wait

first song of cuckoo
melting snow of mountain tops
a cool transition

bees drone busily
spring festival unites all
colorful April

groan of nor'wester
May carries storm and heat spells
month of thirst and sweat

tunes of first rain drops
sun and cloud play hide and seek
June brings hope of crops

downpour all day long
raindrops play a symphony
July helps sowing

rivers run in spate
August plays cymbals of flood
water everywhere

month of September
spread cough and stomach disease
catkin flowers bloom

crop harvesting songs
October brings festivals
smiling faces roam

yellow barren fields
songs of fishermen
cool November air

month of snow and choir
hail storm plays the Dholak drum
December- year ends  

27th June, 2017.

Shorn sheep warm themselves in the sun
shade under the crooked trees

a bathtub tilted to a trough
the **** ditch a ribbon of red algae

peeled signs on the border
water and land

the rippling nibbling on the *****
grass beds along the crest-path

I walk along the wide water
no screeching tyres here

sometimes on Sou'wester days
the seagulls and the wind

laundry flapping at the back
white as the sails in the lurid light

the sea level silvered by the sky
the horizon bent between the banks

the water arches over the green valley
swaying and waving seaweed nymphs

charm beneath the waves
treasures seemingly for the taking

golden yellow stones in the Shire Sea

When nor'wester hits us in summer evening,
swirling dust draws a curtain,
trees try to fly, birds lose nest,
we shudder at the duet of dark cloud with whistling wind.

Oh my life, face this storm of events
and be calm after torrential rain.

27th July, 2017.

Dear friends, this poem was posted on the ''Facebook'' last month along with maps and photographs, and was much appreciated. Unfortunately, I am unable to post any maps or photos on this Site! I post on the 'Facebook' these days which provides greater visibility & interaction! Hope you like this composition, - Best wishes, - Raj, New Delhi. Feb. 2022.

DATING EVENTS OF ANCIENT HISTORY : BY RAJ NANDY

FURTHER WE GET BACK IN TIME, WE ENTER THE FOG AND MIST OF THE PAST,
WHEN KNOWLEDGE BECOMES INSECURE, AND SPECULATIONS AND GUESS WORK STARTS!
WHEN WE ENTER THE REALM OF LEGENDS AND MYTHS
TO ENTERTAIN OURSELVES WITH FANCIFUL FACTS,
WAITING FOR HISTORY TO TAKE SHAPE, BASED ON RESEARCHED WORK AND VERIFIED FACTS!
IN OUR NOBLE PURSUITS AND ENDEAVOUR OUR ARCHIEOLOGISTS, GEOLOGISTS, ANTHROPOLOGISTS, - ALL COMBINE TO HELP US;
AND THEY HAVE INDEED HELPED OUR MODERN HISTORIANS, TO UNRAVEL MANY HIDDEN MYSTERIES
OF THE PAST!

NOW WHEN IT COMES TO DATING EVENTS OF THE ‘ANCIENT HISTORY’, IT MUST BE REMEMBERED BY
ALL OF US,
THAT EXACT DATES OF EVENTS CANNOT BE MADE AVAILABLE TO US!!
SINCE DATES ARE BASED ON INTERPRETATIONS OF ARCHIEOLOGICAL FINDINGS  MADE BY OUR  
LEARNED SCHOLARS,
WHICH HAS KNOWN TO VARY BY A CENTURY, OR
EVEN BY MANY MORE YEARS!!
SO IT IS WITH FACTS OF ANCIENT HISTORY, WHERE
WE CAN NEVER BE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN,
WETHER HOMER WAS REALLY BLIND, OR THAT HIS EPICS WERE DICTATED BY HIM OR WRITTEN?
THE TROJAN WAR IS THOUGHT TO HAVE TAKEN PLACE BETWEEN 1200 AND 1150 BC,
BETWEEN THE MYCEANEAN GREEKS AND THE TROJANS,
IN THE NORTH-WESTER CORNER OF PRESENT-DAY TURKEY.
IT WAS A PERIOD WHICH SAW THE COLLAPSE OF THE MYCENEAN BRONZE AGE CIVILIZATION.
COMMENCING THE 400 YEARS OF “THE DARK AGES” IN GREECE, -ABOUT WHICH WE HARDLY HAVE ANY NOTION!
SO SCHOLARS HAD RELIED ON SEVERAL ARCHIEOLOGICAL DIGS, WHILE COMPOSING ANCIENT TROJAN HISTORY.
WHICH WE NOW GET TO READ, THOUGH SURROUNDED BY FEW MYTHS AND MYSTERIES!

NOW THE SEVEN LAYERS OF THIS TROJAN CITY WAS DUG UP  IN THE 19TH AND THE 20TH CENTURIES AT PLACE CALLED ‘HISARLIK  TELL’;              (Tell = is a mound)
WHICH WAS A MAN MADE MOUND BUILT ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER, WITH MANY HIDDEN MYSTERIES AS WELL!
SO THE CITY OF TROY DID EXIST, AND A TROJAN WAR MIGHT HAVE ALSO TAKEN PLACE.
BUT THE REAL CAUSE FOR THIS WAR REMAINS ELUSIVE,
AND OUR  SCHOLARS CAN ONLY GUESS!
WE GO BY GENERAL CONSENSUS AMONG SCHOLARS WHO SPOKE OF MARTIME RIVALRY BETWEEN THE MACENEANS AND THE TROJANS,
FOR CONTROLLING THE SHIPPING LANE TO THE BLACK SEA UP NORTH, BY SAILING ACROSS THE WATERS OF
THE AEGEAN.      (Map here cannot be shown on this site!)
NOW AS FOR “THE FACE THAT LAUCHED A THOUSAND SHIPS” WHICH WE FIND IN CHRISTORHER MARLOW’S ‘DR. FAUSTUS’ DURING LATER DAYS;
WELL, IN THOSE ARCHEOLOGICAL DIGS THERE ARE NO TRACES OF ANY ADULTEROUS LOVE, OR OF FAIR HELEN’S BEAUTIOUS FACE!

FRIENDS, LET US NOT FORGET THE BRITISH AUTHOR JK ROWLING,  WHO BECAME ONE OF THE RICHES FEMALE NOVELISTS OF OUR WORLD;
WITH HER ‘HARRY POTTER’ SERIES WHICH DESCRIBES A LEGENDARY, MAKE-BELIVE AND A FANTASY  WORLD!!
NOW AS A POET I DO LOVE THE MYTHS  AND LEGENDS OF THE PAST, IMAGINING THAT THEY ARE TRUE,
BUT WHEN IT COMES TO ‘DATING EVENTS’ OF ANCIENT HISTORY MY FRIENDS,
I REMAIN AS SKEPTICAL, OR EVEN AS GULLIBLE AS YOU!!
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
NOTES:  IN ANCIENT GREECE HISTORICAL DATING IS SAID TO HAVE COMMENCED WITH THEIR FIRST OLYMPIC GAMES HELD DURING 776 BC, WHICH FOLLOWED A CYCLE OF A FOUR YEAR PERIOD, WHICH HELPED IN THEIR SUBSEQUENT DATINGS.  ARTIST’S IMPRESSION OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES HAVE BEEN POSTED FOR YOU.   - By Raj Nandy, New Delhi, Jan. 2022.

Solitude solitude!
Embraces me of great magnitude.
Do I want someone to come
Giving me love thrilling awesome?

My gloomy noon wants to fly
Beyond the ozone layer of the sky.
Dead leaves are being swept away,
O love! Are you nor'wester of May?

Have I effaced all the memories?
The balcony full of orchid glories.
The east wind that lost its path,
Seeking happiness in sheer dearth.

O hurting past, get aside!
O heart of sea, let me hide!
New dawn is peeping on hill,
All my aching reducing to nil.

Rain,
thinking it signifies the end of the Summer,
I root out my galoshes, my raincoat
and sou' wester
one time a Beau Geste in the hot sand,
but now best to take a hold of your cool hand
and go splishing and sploshing
and maybe some splashing as well.

Autumn is upon me and
the fall rises before me,
I'm going home for my tea.

He has ruined all my happiness cruelly,
My everything is absorbed by one touch only.
All the time I pass in crying,
Sheer grief is being hidden by apparent smiling.

Can anyone return my happiness?
Come as rain to innundate summer dryness.
The wind will dance all over my body,
Come flood, sweep me away, make me muddy.

O Nor'wester! Come and destroy all antique practices,
Destroy the so called convention and make them pieces.
O devotion, chastity! ****, **** your fidelity,
O pain! Let me touch fire and burn soft beauty.

Today I am like a leopard, wild!
Let me hunt deer! So tender mild!
Hey boy! Be a soldier brave valiant,
Burn the city, burn hypocrisy small and giant.

If you are autumn sky,
I'm clouds scattering above,
Making me innumerable pieces for you my love.

If you are summer noon,
I'm Nor'wester, the violent storm,
Unifying love of rain, lightning and wind to shatter old norm.

If you are the song of rain,
I'm adorable burflower,
All the time love you bathing in romantic shower.

If you are golden sun rays,
I'm later autumn morning,
To make you love-sick by smile entertaining.

If you are winter night,
I'm cozy woolen blanket,
Entangling of cold and warm in a magic love-net.

If you are spring breeze,
I'm flowers blooming in Nature,
Fly my petals in mirth to display enchanting feauture.