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.
Not sure if this one quite works but it's an honest; I wrote it after finding myself momentarily looking down on the host of an open mic night called 'Hidden Literature' for asking . I realised on reflection this looking down on was a cowardly way of protecting myself from the judgement of others. I acting out of fear when I wanted to act out of love.
