Poetry Thursday

I wasn’t going to post anything today other than a poem, but it appears that’s not going to happen. I woke up an hour ago after dreaming about my love for the first time in a few months. My brain has been protecting me and before this morning I had been feeling angry that he had left me in my dreams as well. But now I see that that was a good thing. I’ve had six dreams over the last thirteen months where I have met him. I can’t call them anything other than meetings, where for a moment we were together again – him flesh and blood once more, tangible, solid -  somewhere else, somewhere outside of the real world, and we talked and touched and were together. Every time I woke up from one of these meetings I was devastated to be back.  Since the one-year anniversary of his death last month, these meetings have vanished, as if he has gone somewhere else, off on another journey. But an hour ago, in my dream, I wished him back, and he was there. The tears have not dried yet.

This blog was going to be for the writer in me, as I think I said in another post, to honour the new person I am becoming, but it seems my fingers have other plans as I type this. Revealing a little bit about the book yesterday, reading other’s blogs and learning how happy they are with their husbands, fiancées and partners, and finally acknowledging to myself, just before I went to sleep last night, that I want him back, no questions asked, but back HERE, now, has meant that, for today at least, this blog has needed to be my diary. I’m not writing this for anyone, I’m just writing it. The book, my life and now my blog have blurred into one and right now there is nothing I can do to change this. Why is the light of the dawn so unwelcoming, so cold? Why do cigarettes burn your throat so painfully at 6am? I will still type out the poem I had picked as it feels incredibly relevant right now.

Write

Write that the sun bore down on me,
kissing and kissing, and my face
reddened, blackened, whitened to ash,
was blown away by the passionate wind
over the fields, where my body’s shape
still flattened the grass, to end as dust
in the eyes of my own ghost.

Or write
that the river held me close in its arms, cold fingers
stroking my limbs, cool tongue probing my mouth,
water’s voice swearing its love love love in my ears,
as I drowned in belief.

Then write the moon
striding down from the sky in its silver boots
to kick me alive; the stars like a mob of light,
chanting a name, yours. Write your name on my lips
when I entered the dark church of the wood
like a bride, lay down for my honeymoon,
and write the night, sexy as hell, write the night
pressing and pressing my bones
into the ground.

~ Carol Anne Duffy, Rapture

Edited to add: the photograph is one of mine, not very well reproduced on the net, but one i chose yesterday to share.

Balm to my bruises

This is the sea I live beside, and the laughing beauty in the brine is Anna, who in true London-girl style rolled up her jeans and ran into the waves as soon as we reached the beach. Her jeans got so wet that she was shivering as we walked along to the pier and bought chips swimming in vinegar, eaten with gusto sat on the pavement alongside the grockles*. Anna is a travel journalist extraordinaire, and this week she is off to Verbier for skiing fun, and next week it’s Tobago to lie on the beach and watch turtles. I’ve made no secret of how I’m sick with envy.

So I’ve been blogging for a week now, and it’s becoming more and more addictive, you were all right. The best part of finding new blogs to read is that generally there’s a whole archive of posts waiting to be explored, so I find myself like I did last night, staying up till midnight reading them. I’ve discovered I’m susceptible to blog envy; I’ve also realised I may have to start two more blogs: 1. The Moaning Blog and 2. The Witty Journo Blog, as inspired by this very witty blogger, just to mix it up a little. For now, though, I’m loving the connection I’m feeling with this sisterhood I’ve found ~ balm to my bruises.

I don’t know what picture of myself I’m drawing in this blog, but I like the fact that it’s exercising so many writerly muscles. My inner critic is an ugly medusa who turns somersaults every time I write, banging her gnarled fists against my tender dreams and telling me I’m rubbish, that the words I write are flimsy and impotent. Writer’s block is such an insidious condition isn’t it, yet I’m not blocked so much as having a natural pause, waiting for the meeting with my agent to get the go ahead to carry on. Writing TB is a very emotional experience for me – there’s a link on my website that until recently gave a description of the book I’m writing, but I’ve now changed it to say ‘under construction’. I’ve just realised that I mean this quite literally. TB, you see, is a fictionlised account of the last year of my life. Write what you know, that’s what they say isn’t it? What was going to be a book of grief, a beacon to help others find their way back to the shore has now, at my agent’s very intuitive suggestion, become fiction – or ‘fact-ion’ as she called it. For two years the man I loved and I had a very unique relationship, for reasons I’m not ready to go into here just yet; suffice to say there might be readers who’ll be helped by this book, but most of all, I’m writing it for me. Even if it was never to be published, it’s helping me grow in confidence about who I truly am – a writer – and allowing me to stitch together not only my new existence, but make sense of the past too. As I put my proposal together I learnt that Joan Didion’s wonderful book, The Year of Magical Thinking, won the US National Book Award award. I took this as a sign ~ I was doing the right thing. Didion’s book is beautifully written with her typical journalistic candour and questioning mind. My book will be very different, but both, I hope, add to the canon of work already out there that opens a window on grief and loss.

Song to a seagull

“Friends, even passionate love, are not my real life, unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening.” ~ May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

The quiet reflections of yesterday’s Sunday Scribblings have left me in a thoughtful mood. My hormones and the moon usually batter me like a ship at sea, and today is no different. At the risk of this blog turning into melancholy ink on my fingers, here’s what i wrote this morning. Tomorrow I will endeavour to lighten the tone, if only for my own sake!

When I moved into this flat I was drowning in my grief.  Most of my time was spent in bed, though sleep was not a friend back then. Mundane tasks such as brushing my teeth were not worried about; food was begrudgingly eaten, though I could not see the point. It was as if his death had struck a bell in my head, and the sound reverberated in my ears, deafening me, razing the old me to the ground, clearing a space, my blackened insides barren for so long. Yet today I must acknowledge the new shoots that have grown. Four seasons have passed since I arrived here, and this morning I woke to the sound of the pigeons that are nesting in the roof. They walk along the ledge outside my kitchen window, a courtship so sweet as I watch them pecking at each other’s head, the male puffing up his feathers, peacock-like, the female coy and running out of his reach. They have been doing this for a week now, but I fear their cosy existence is being threatened by a new arrival. My new visitor is a seagull, majestic and curious, a tuft of feathers on top of his head, so I know that it is always the same one. He peers in through my windows, though I think he is more fascinated by his own reflection than me typing at my desk. Yesterday afternoon he brought a friend by for Easter tea so I threw old bread out on the ledge for them. A magpie stopped by too and the grey clouds mirroring my ambivalent thoughts about my father broke open and I became an ornithologist for a while, watching the theatre taking place a metre from my face.

Last year I wouldn’t have seen these birds, but today they make me smile, and inside that moment there is peace. I no longer live so violently in the past, the future a mystery but not one I fear. Life carries on, and for so long I didn’t want it to, but it has cajoled me and courted me, and while I may not be ready to spread my wings and fly out to find love again, there are two buds on my back: the wings are sprouting, and that doesn’t make me feel so guilty any more.

** Above is one of my favourite paintings by my beautiful sister, the woman with paint on her fingers…**