It calls me.
It flies
My ocean.
A cry,
I hear it dark and deep,
And I
Am like a scaly fish protesting
A hook, or beak, piercing its pulsating heart.
So greedy for life
It swallowed fast.
I hardly taste the worm.
It calls me
And passes me
And dives down and loops up coming to rest
On a lamppost.
The light has gone out.
The word for it is:
Bird.
No! No!
I owe
It more
Than that
My clumsy words flail and fall like
New hatched chicks.
I try again
Surely I can climb higher,
Achieve a greater specificity,
Surely I can soar,
Defy gravity,
Touch reality with my softest feather quill
Or at least die trying?
Surely?
But I am not sure.
And there is so much more
I want to give.
I love. I love. I love a
Seagull sudden squawks and swoops in perfect arcing flight,
Falls into my sight,
Touches me without touching me,
Lifts itself up and flies again,
Lands on a nearby lamppost.
Why? Why does the grey-white bird call me as it does?
Is it because when I was small and grey,
Suffocating on privilege
I saw its brothers and sisters freely wheeling,
Heard them shrieking,
Ecstatic,
At the sea,
Heard me in them -
That hunger to be free?
Is it because my brother, the one with charm, danced and sang as Jonathan Livingstone seagull in the school play?
Is it because my sister danced dressed in white
The weekend middle-class ballet?
Is it because, is it why, I dream, have always dreamt, of flight?
Is there a part of me that remembers a future
When we all flew too?
This really happened.
It is a true story.
The morning after she politely invited us to
Select our love language from among five categories,
Putting me in mind of a multiple-choice exam at school,
Making me feel
Like an angry adolescent,
I left my house,
Wrapped up warm,
To face the cold,
Riding my bike,
Remembering the open mic night,
Turning out of my street right
Into a stream of monochrome traffic
And a gull plunges
Low in front of me,
Almost touches
My face,
Calls to me
Lands on a dead lamppost,
Fixes me with its eyes
Like a question,
‘What is your language of love?’
What went down the night before the morning after?
I’ll try to paint a truthful picture:
I was sat upstairs with newish friends.
I wanted them to love the night.
I wanted them to love me more,
To see my flight, my feathers, hear my cry,
See me clear against the sky,
So when I felt and thought I saw
Disapproval at her playful invitation
My heart quailed,
My sense of humour failed.
I felt fear.
Webbed feet touched down,
Wings covered my eyes and my ears and
My voice said
‘Oh dear that lands badly with me!’
Nods. My friends it seemed agreed.
It was a ‘me too movement’!
And I thanked God I was not alone,
Not out in the cold,
Not in the dark,
Flooded with relief so loud its din drowned out a lone voice that even now plucks my heart like a harp whose distant music I ignore,
Asking from below
‘Anyone up there? Anyone?
Will you tell me your language of love?’
My heart hears the call but my I does not answer,
Just looks on
Haughty
Hearing but not listening
To the silence that ensues.
‘No! No! I like her,
I think she’s good,
She’s trying something new,
It’s good to try new things,’
I mutter inaudibly to no one in particular
As if that somehow made it better
But inside I know that I have betrayed my heart again –
It’s happened so many times I’ve stopped counting.
I feel so very tired.
I am not sure my wings will work again,
Not sure I will ever fly again, even in my dreams.
I am not sure. I do not know. Hope.
I am getting old, my hair is getting thin,
Like Prufrock but this comparison
Flatters me:
I’m no TS Eliot,
Nothing especially special me -
I am, aren’t? merely Jacob Thomas Haydn Waite
Just another empty example of the genre
A robotic lover
The likes of which they’ve seen a million times before.
What’s the point in trying then?
Still fumbling in the dark
A squawking gull, a would-be lark
Always learning lessons too late
Waiting for a flood to build my ark.
Why love again? Why not play it safe, hide and hate?
Why not sit still in darkness looking down my nose
Counting gold I could have shared
Growing old alone because I haven’t dared
To fly
’It might go wrong!
I might fall and die
Like Icarus!
Why
Would anyone in their right mind take that risk?’
Why? Why? Because
I want to love;
I don’t care if there’s no logic to it,
Don’t care if this does not make sense,
That ‘right mind’ is a lie ,
This I is not mere repetition.
Each line launched here is another one-off iteration
A desperate-hopeful flight across the sea
No land in sight endlessly…
I might be lost - who isn’t? - but am I also wrong?
A gull’s question:
Will you see me fly,
Will you hear my song?
Now when I look back and see her
Undaunted,
Still trusting, still calling up to us
Cowards in the dark,
I realise that she is an Amazonian warrior, she is Boudicca, Cleopatra, she is Joan of Arc,
She is grace,
She is this and she is so much more,
That she sings with her own original voice
And with the voices -
A mighty roar now I pause to listen -
Of all the women, of all the people, who could not speak
Their literature of yearning hidden deep
Sunk beneath the waves for so, so long,
Almost but never quite drowning under so-called great and powerful men,
Balloon men puffed up with hot air, machine men, men in armour, Trump men,
Men afraid to expose their hearts to the pain of love.
Her song even sings the hidden frightened parts of them, the hidden parts of me,
The parts of us that long to fly free beyond mere words and cheap, cheap categories.
Sensing these rich harmonies, I find I can dream again
It is a dream beyond knowing
A dream I can feel in my bones,
A beacon of light that shines in my heart like a prayer answered
A whisper I strain to hear and so loud it is deafening,
The gull is not a single gull, it is the whole flock, it is the why,
It is all of us, room for everyone forever in this cloudless sky;
We don’t need a cryogenic cell to stop us dying, no nuclear bunkers to hide in,
No rulebook to help us know what we all know if we let ourselves to feel it
– what love is.
Is this what Blake meant when he said we would build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land?
Can we make heaven here in little old Hackney Wick?
Is heaven everywhere if we just dare to see it?
Steady on! Don’t get your boxers in a twist!
At the end of the day, we do not really know anything for sure…
And I can hear a silver peal of laughter, like chimes moving in the breeze at a minute to midnight
Because at the end of all of this, of all of that, at the end of it all,
Sensing but not infected by the fear that struck us dumb,
She laughs.
Maybe her heart
Does flutter with silent disappointment
Her love’s arrow falling softly upon a bed of dank green earth
Not reaching the target
But still worth
The effort,
Still planting seeds like leaves from a tree,
Maybe there is a moment of hesitation in which the universe holds its breath but
She keeps going, unsheathing more words and letting them fly –
Fearless and bold and strong,
And from the darkness rising up to meet hers another voice
Sings another perfect song –
Shaday jokes that she likes receiving gifts,
Others follow,
The room sighs
As if relieved of the invisible burden of all our sins, or something,
Grateful for redemption,
‘Yeah, yeah’ she smiles ‘you need a little bit of everything, don’t you?’
It was only a game,
Only a bit of fun
Nothing so very serious.
I feel a bit embarrassed.
From the lamppost, the gull fixes my eyes like a question.
‘What is your language of love?’
And later when I look up the meaning of the Shaday’s name on the internet,
I discover what’s been hiding in plain sight all along
Because Shaday is the Hebrew word for…God.
This
This: you, me and all of us, all of it,
Here, now
Everywhere and always.
This is my language of love.
Mar 16, 2025
Mar 16, 2025 at 6:43 PM UTC
The view at the top draws appreciative sounds from my friend and her partner.
I take a picture on my mobile phone.
Maybe I will post it on Facebook later
In a highly edited version of the day
To help me forget the complexity of real life:
‘Wonderful walk with Paula and Simon near Burnt Island, Fyffe’
I might say or, rather, type.
Up until this point, there have been some qualified highlights:
The weather is good,
Although not the ‘brilliant sunshine’ forecasts had led Paula to expect,
Snatches of bird song,
A yellow hammer, we think,
A buzzard which circled before diving to ‘rip some poor thing’s guts out’, as Simon put it.
I can also recall some darker notes,
The insidious encroachment into nature of the human mania for control:
Signs telling us to keep out,
Barbed wire fences,
A huge brick-shaped rusty blue container in an abandoned farmyard containing God knew what,
And then, in strange wasteland confusion,
A storm-felled tree,
No longer bearing apples or any other fruit,
Having apparently sealed its fate by attempting to grow around a stone which denied its now dry and tangled roots good ground in which to find sufficient purchase.
The scene prompts my friend who writes crime fiction to comment
‘It’s the kind of place I like to bury bodies.’
Earlier a grassy outcrop of rock
That perilously overhung a sharp drop
Had tempted me to stand right there
And stamp down hard,
‘You know’ I joked ‘just to see if it’s my time’
But, obviously, I hadn’t dared.
Later,
After the descent,
We will see a cat scratching itself in silent ecstasy on sun-heated tarmac
And shops whose names hint ancient prophesies of better things to come:
Chapter and Verse Antiques,
Peach Blossom,
Kingdom Amusements,
Zenith Beauty and Everlasting Health.
Come what may,
As we stand here,
Losses have been suffered:
A favourite hat forgotten on a seat on the train,
A bag bearing favourite glasses on the overhead rack.
We had realised just too late,
Watching slightly tortured,
As our carriage pulled away like a dream of what might have been.
In other euphemistic news we have learned that our journey home may be disrupted because a person has been ‘hit by a train’
Putting an end to the pain
Of trying,
Becoming a travel bulletin
Provoking irritation at the inconvenience and
Generously reminding us of the way out
That, one way or another, comes to all -
It is maybe always just a question of choosing to leap
Or waiting to be pushed.
We don’t know this yet but
In the end the trip back to Edinburgh
Will proceed without delays
And miraculously my rucksack,
Reported on lostproperty.org will find its way back to me
Like a handkerchief gallantly returned to an Arthurian damsel in distress
By an algorithmic knight and horse,
Paula’s hat will remain lost to her forever but perhaps, from another point of view, will be found.
But there will be no bringing back the person
Whose blood will by then have been carefully removed from tracks that carry us home
Almost as if they had never existed
Like another piece of Facebook click-bait distraction,
Crucial details wiped out.
But this does not prevent the truth from being exactly what it is -
Quite inexplicable,
An unerasable blemish in the fabric of eternity,
Like all of us,
They will always and forever have been alive
And yet will also always end up dead.
Which brings us back to where we started.
I am not sure we ever really left.
Time is all relative, we are told.
Even so, we are not young
But younger than the man who,
Wheezing, red-faced, slumps onto the bench provided and,
Referring to the climb to reach the summit
Which has been steep,
While simultaneously eyeing the reward of a Cadbury’s crème egg fetched eagerly from his pocket,
Asks us,
‘It was worth it, was it?’
Mar 16, 2025
Mar 16, 2025 at 6:25 PM UTC
In the cafe of Edinburgh’s gallery of modern art
I work hard to make a female infant smile
Repeatedly hiding behind my hands and suddenly revealing who I really am.
Pram belt unclipped, the podgy, pink-white face stares at me with astonished seriousness
As I drink and eat: salad, soup and fresh bread, coffee and pecan pie.
‘It was all they had available’, I might say (but don’t) to give a reason why.
Her mother tells me the hard stare comes from her
Says ‘Thank you for trying!’
And, of this inheritance, lovingly confesses
‘I’m not sure if it’s a good thing!’
The baby starts crying
As her body is strapped back in,
But it’s just a clever ruse and when we least expect it
This little everything delights us with a gummy, toothless grin!
And in that moment’s synecdochic peekaboo,
I see…
What? Is it God? No, not God, surely…
What, in God’s name, is it then?
How can it be that I never spied it before now?
Or if I did only caught a glimpse
Out of the corner of my little eye
As I marched forward in time, metronomic,
Blindly impelled towards
The places I was trying to get to
Without knowing:
Freedom, wisdom, love?
How can it be that as I chased down
Abstract nouns that melted like clouds when they seemed close,
I hardly noticed, hardly felt my own breath,
Hardly even felt my feet touching the earth?
They were, admittedly, well-insulated by ideology, socks and branded shoes.
When I see and feel things now, the light is blinding, its heat burns.
Could any of it have been any different? It’s taken so long to get here!
Did I have to be for so long deaf to the heart’s sweet, sweet love song?
Not completely deaf, of course, not always, don’t get me wrong…
There were snatches of a melody,
Always fleeting, carried on the breeze,
Unread messages,
Cassandras telling truths cursed never to be believed
Until almost too late.
Is this how it is everywhere always for all of us? How it just must be?
Or am I, are we, among the luckier ones in the sense that everything that went before this point
Puts us a little further down the track
Than is the case
For many others’ random points in time and space,
Not because of anything we’ve done to deserve it
But in the sense that centuries of intergenerational trauma have played out in the way they had to –
An infinite number of just so stories, not one word out of place,
And among them vast hordes of human beings, each one unique, each one an implicit universe, that try and try and try and never win a chubby smile,
Who for all their efforts receive just an impassive stare,
A blank look
As if they were not there?
And how much do we owe them for their hidden labours?
Are they, they are surely, the heroes of this song?
It all seems so clear, so, so clear suddenly to me,
Or is that ‘all’ true?
Can one ever see everything in its entirety?
No, not ‘all’
‘Nearly all’ then, or just ‘clearer’, maybe less than that.
Let’s stop trying to quantify truth -
This ‘all’ is a feeling of the heart,
Not a picture of the eye,
Not a sound of the mouth.
It is a beat skipped, a sudden delight.
Peekaboo!
Surprise, surprise!
Why now? Why?
It almost seems a cruel joke
Like the exhibition here of the art of Everlyn Nicodemus,
A Tanazanian woman, painter, writer, poet whom I did not know until today.
Before its ‘discovery’ by a London gallerist,
Her work sat patiently in storage for years
While she took everything she had to hand,
Everything she could afford,
Used it to create more Arte Povera
Binding things together with nothing but love:
Love for all those who went before her whom she had not known
Love for all those who are to come whom she will not know
Love for all those whom her hands and eyes had known, and whom her heart had also known.
When her husband, Kristian, died, she told an interviewer, ‘I was nearly giving up’
But her best friend, Jean, made her promise on his grave to carry on
And then Jean died too but still she kept the promise and carried on.
She kept going. She did not stop,
By night transforming junk into beauty without pecuniary reward,
By day working in a care-home to pay the bills.
Why? How? What was she on earth for?
She has no children but compares the labour of bringing forth art
To a mother’s unconditional love
Wonders if this not money is what saves us,
What heals us of our many wounds,
An energy that makes the infinite weight of a human life possible to bear.
What to do in the face of the implacable mystery,
The total lack of explanation
What to do in the face of the infant’s unrelenting stare
‘I am not sure if it’s a good thing’ the baby’s mother said.
At 70, the artist’s joy at belated recognition is offset with sadness -
Ironic, the ones she loved most ‘are not here to see it’.
I am not sure it’s a good thing either.
When did certainty become so important? Who knows?
God? The child? Everlyn Nicodemus?
Perhaps love is always a leap in the dark which we take
Fully knowing it will both complete and end us.
Mar 16, 2025
Mar 16, 2025 at 6:20 PM UTC
It might try me accidentally to forget
And just lullaby to sleep,
Soothed by soft-words-of-mother,
Not to cry because it’s too sad, and if
All the noise kept carefully out
By, for example, newly fitted double glazing,
And who made that anyway?
And where did they get stuff to make it?
And whose bodies are buried inside white plastic?
If all the noise, or even just some of it,
Were to wake me up, I might never stop crying.
Poor me. It is all about me, isn’t it?
It might try me accidentally to forget
And it might succeed a bit and yet
Not stop the nightmare that with shrill voice shouts
‘Who built the rotting wooden posts
That kept the sea at bay so long
That gave you your shelter so that your you
Could order fish and chips and play on the slot machines to your dumb numb heart’s content?’
Voice! Voice! Slipping through cracks, falling
Through holes in the logic of carefully constructed arguments
And dissolving rocks and rotting wooden posts
With laughter mocking the idea implicit in so many of our actions
That things are just here for our enjoyment,
Without context or history,
Anaesthetised flesh,
Dreaming without knowing the dream is a dream
As if I deserved everything
Just for being little old me
As if I were my own achievement
Because I had the money which they invented and then gave themselves
And then bought everything which belonged to everyone else
And then told everyone else that if they wanted what we had stolen they had to get some money too
And that, by the way, we had all the money
So wha-tcha-gonna do?
‘So do not forget!’ the voice says
‘As you walk arm in arm with your own skeleton
Down the empty beech
Listening to the waves crash against the shore,
Do not forget that
This cliché feels wrong because there’s more
To it.
The empty beech
Is not empty.
Do not forget to ask who built the rotting posts.
Not forget to ask who saved your ***** white skin.
The empty beech is not empty.
The beech is full of everything
That it is not
Of all the things and people who kindly
Are not here
Who have withdrawn from view
So that you could have this moment walking solitary on the sand
And the clothes you are wearing
And your bones
Do not forget that all of it is on loan
Do not forget that, if special, you are so
No more than
A single grain of sand between your toes
Or the person in the crowd you fail to see tonight in the light’s glare’
‘Oh…sorry…hello!’
‘The forgotten but not forgotten
The dead but not dead
The ones who built the rotting posts.
Do not forget you owe everything to all of them
To all of it.
And do not forget to start paying your debts
While there’s still time.
Maybe start with a poem.
Try to make it good.’
Jan 14, 2025
Jan 14, 2025 at 3:46 PM UTC
The tide is out now and also now and
I am leaving footprints in the sand
On Cromer beech;
Other walkers say, ‘Good morning!’
Then drop their heads and hurry past -
No further speech.
One gull hangs sublimely in the air -
Beautiful! -
But by another measure
Getting nowhere fast;
Some peers, more industrious,
Congregate at the shore edge -
Strutting, nodding, self-important,
Clumsy and pedantic,
Both feet on the ground,
As if they had forgotten how to fly and dressed this up as progress;
An enterprising one or two perch amid the waves
On rotting wooden posts
And then me, old fool, pausing
Here now, now there which was here before -
See how words divide, make time and space! -
To take a picture or jot down poetic lines,
Heroic efforts - you think? - to pin it down, to
Arrest this infinitely wild and turbulent scene,
Impose some kind of order on it all?
You know, I’m not so sure that’s how it is,
Not sure these words I leave behind
Are not waves too
Forming rocks and pebbles and grinding all to dust
No final message in a bottle to be deciphered
Only this restless movement
This carrying on
And now always and again the sea arrives in undulations
Collapse-creating white foam hiss
Far from forgetting her many loves
Absorbing all traces into the whole
She sweeps the beech clean with tender, lingering kisses,
Whispering only ‘Yes!’ And ‘Yes!’ again
‘Yes Yes Yes!’
Jan 14, 2025
Jan 14, 2025 at 3:32 PM UTC