The lighthouse keeper fires up the light.
All you have done is seal up a crack.
Reading at night can’t shut out the doubts.
Nothing you think is quite as it seems
and unwelcome thoughts keep coming back.
Praying is futile. You drift out of dreams,
hanging suspended, close to the edge.
The horses are running.
They’ve broken the lines.
Water is rushing over the ledge.
All that was small has now become large.
Author: A. Gouedard
Skipping Ropes
Down by the river, down by the sea
Johnny broke a bottle and then blamed me.
When he doesn’t blame me, he will blame you
And I can’t tell if his lies are true.
The game is up, the game is down.
The rules are bent and turned around.
We’ve got no access to the facts.
The words on the page have all been cracked.
The news is fogged and the page is torn.
The road they tread is so well worn.
They’ll find a way to bend the law.
These games are played behind closed doors.
I saw a broadcast on TV,
I’ll blame you, you blame me.
The same this time as the time before.
Jump the rope and head for war.
The wind, the wind, the wind blows high,
It blows little Shana through the sky.
She was young and she was pretty
She was the girl from the target city.
Chatanooga Choo Choo (written in a 1940’s themed cafe)
Churchill yells from the wall, ”Let’s go forward together!”
I look across the table. The Victoria Sponge is behind us. On closer inspection it’s dry and too heavy, rather like the days that are memorised here, in glamourised nostalgia.
I was born a little after the war and all I recall is the sweets still rationed and the bombsites; the sad, damp wall-paper flapping from shattered bedroom walls in the wind.
My newsfeed bleeps from my phone. Missiles aimed at Syria.
Back then Pearl Harbour was bombed.
The Chattanooga Choo Choo just keeps choo-chooing on.
Let’s stay at the tea table and just keep moving around. I’ll be the Hatter. You pour the tea. Be ‘mother’.
People have got to stop killing each other.
We’ll meet again.
Don’t know where.
Don’t know when.
Collaborators
On Day 12 of NapoWriMo (for which I am writing a poem a day throughout April) I was sitting in a 1940’s themed cafe called Fourteas in Stratford-upon-Avon. Two of us come from the UK and two from Australia. We have known each other online (as avatars only) for quite a long time but had met face to face for the first time only 2 days before.
The Day 12 poetry prompt for of the day was to write a Haibun about your surroundings. I wrote The Rain it Raineth Every Day (my post for April 12th) but suggested we all do one while sitting in the 1940’s cafe.
This is the result ~
from Keith ~
I’m sitting here out of the wind and rain
with the water running down the drain.
Oh, how I wish I was home, in the warmth of the sunshine.
Oh, happy days, happy days
I’m drinking tea
instead of coffee
Oh, happy days, happy days
We’re soon to leave these lovely people
to make a twenty-hour flight.
That will give us a fright.
Oh, happy days, happy days
We are going on a cruise and that’ll be swell
so hopefully all will be well.
Oh, happy days, happy days
We’re still sitting here with sandwiches and tea
and hope to be reunited with thee and thee
Oh, happy days, happy days
From Cath
Rain-soaked streets and drab shops
Bring back dog-eared layers of memory
Dragging dreary days filed in melancholy feeling.
Make do and Mend. Waste Not Want Not.
I remember factory girls clattering past,
Cloths tied around their heads,
Brushing by laughing and gossiping.
It was austere, all right.
They never had brie. Or grapes. Back then.
Only bomb-sites. And empty buildings.
Slipping realities. Sitting in a 1940s café with
A good friend I’ve only just met.
Are pixels more real than flesh?
Or prims less fake than war-time décor?
And what about that waitress with a German accent?
In the street, we dance Swan Lake in boots and coats,
With a real swan.
Who hisses. Pissed off.
It still rains.
from Barbara
Four fabulous friends, who met on the internet, find each other in real life, laughing and having a fun and living the moment, enjoying each others company and hoping the day will never end. Amid spiced tea and sandwiches, precious memories are made, never to be forgotten.
Passing food amongst us all
Amid many smiles
Happiness is tangible
and from me
Churchill yells from the wall, ”Let’s go forward together!”
I look across the table. The Victoria Sponge is behind us. On closer inspection it’s dry and too heavy, rather like the days that are memorised here, in glamourised nostalgia.
I was born a little after the war and all I recall is the sweets still rationed and the bombsites; the sad, damp wall-paper flapping from shattered bedroom walls in the wind.
My newsfeed bleeps from my phone. Missiles aimed at Syria.
Back then Pearl Harbour was bombed.
The Chattanooga Choo Choo just keeps choo-chooing on.
Let’s stay at the tea table and just keep moving around. I’ll be the Hatter. You pour the tea. Be ‘mother’.
People have got to stop killing each other.
We’ll meet again.
Don’t know where.
Don’t know when.
Footnote: The word ‘prim’ is an abbreviation of ‘primative‘ – a word to denote a building block in alternative reality
Afternoon Angels
Afternoon angels,
open-handed,
offer us
apocalypse apples
from the Nine Omens Orchard of Dread.
I awaken,
shaking my head.
There were birds
born of bullets,
packed in hospital ice,
their beaks, shrieking,
for lemon and life.
The rain ran in shivers
but found no swelled rivers.
I set the sails of the season.
Clouds.
Winds.
Shrouds.
Hammer
I heard him arrive with a hammer.
It wasn’t the sound that a woodpecker makes.
It wasn’t a bang on the door,
or a well-ordered pattern of beats.
It was a hammer,
hurled through the air at my head.
All the cups on the table were smashed.
I knew it was risky to move.
I dreamed myself up in the blue
and saw myself as a seagulls wing
soaring above it all.
Seagulls remind me of ballet.
Ballerinas have silk pointed slippers.
Thinking of them, my head starts to swim.
I awake to the jaws of a shark.
The table is overturned.
It’s time to exit the dark.
Proverbs
I wouldn’t dare judge a book by it’s cover.
I might miss the silver lining, hovering there.
There is many a slip twixt the cup and the lip
and a worm can always turn.
Cut your coat to suit your cloth.
There are still more bridges to cross.
The age of miracles is past
but the exception may still prove the rule.
Speaking of rules, there is one rule
for the rich and one for the poor.
Power corrupts. Here is the wish I would grant;
May their bread fall buttered side down.
In this world of Chinese whispers,
distorted facts and appealing fictions,
all pearls roll before swine.
It will unravel in time.
If we listen with care
we may hear a whisper that’s pure.
April showers are plentiful
but they bring forth the flowers of May.
Children and fools tell the truth
and let’s hope the truth will out.
We live to be loved, and to love, again, on another day.
Blue are the hills that are far away.
The Rain it Raineth Every Day (a haibun)
Shakespeare’s county is April wet. The trees stand, drawn in dark brown lines, shrouded in a soft grey mist. Fine rain falls in constant drizzle every day. Acting as a tourist guide to visiting friends I lead them from Tudor tea shop to Tudor pub, huddled up against the cold. The smell of beer soaked into old wood greets us at The Garrick door. We can shelter here and wait for the time when the play is about to start.
Now as friends we gather here.
The play’s the thing and
the rain it raineth ev’ry day.
On a plinth, Shakespeare sits, in thought, high above it all. I was taken there often as a child. The sun shone then, every day it seemed. I squinted up at him and shielded my eyes against the sun as he sat quiet, dark against the light, somewhat of a mystery. But the light changes hour by hour, and the weather season by season. He is a man of this town and the surrounding fields and his birthplace and his grave are here.
Sundays were a pilgrimage
with a hey and a ho!
When I was a little tiny child.
The wind and the rain has always been plenty.
Present mirth, hath present laughter:
What’s to come, is still unsure.
~~~~~~
(the last two lines are by Shakespeare – I thought I should allow him to add the last few words and the title)
The Last of England ~ 1855
We stand in the gallery
in front of a frame,
my Australian friend and I,
on a day that’s shivering cold,
misty and grey.
The room is warm and welcoming.
Two people wrapped in blankets
sit on the stern of a ship
gazing out at us, from a painting,
gazing back at the land they are leaving behind.
They are emigrants, I say, seeing the title.
Yes, she says, they are going away.
They look so sad, don’t they?
Don’t they look miserable?
They do look very sad, I reply,
but they began an adventure that day.
Over cups of tea and coffee,
as days grow shorter
the phrase repeats and repeats,
we can do that next time.
We’ll come back.
Next time. Next time.
Next time? I ask.
Yes, next time.
Next time this
and next time that,
but we are none so young
as we used to be.
Certainty is an illusion of youth.
The future is only a time beyond now.
The future is always uncertain.
We hope.
Next time,
we hope.
Butterflies Wings (Afternoon with Macbeth)
Time passes,
time drags,
time repeats,
time snags,
Time ticks by.
There he lays.
The room is dark.
The room is cold.
Childrens’ voices pierce the veil.
Here is the killing of a King.
Lady Macbeth reaches out.
No-one grasps her bloodied hand.
Time rolls round
and time rolls round.
The end is set
by moments marked on a digital clock.
Death marks the walls with fast drawn chalk.
This is the circle ambition brings.
Generations repeat the sin.
In the street outside,
with early signs of April rain,
the swan bends down and folds its wings.
In the cafe down the road,
by the window where light falls
on polished wood, the books are glued,
their pages shut, their words unknown.
An old man shuffles by alone.
On every table in the room,
the yellow rose is in full bloom.
Shakespeare’s lips are butterflies wings.
Four friends meet and seal a bond.
They all know the plays the thing.
The Dreaming Path 