Napowrimo

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/ A. Gouedard / Leave a comment

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

Hammer

/ A. Gouedard / Leave a comment

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.

The Rain it Raineth Every Day (a haibun)

/ A. Gouedard / Leave a comment

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

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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)

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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.

Night Lines

/ A. Gouedard / 2 Comments

i don’t
like
the sound
i hear
in my
neck
swishing and pulsing
veins
it seems far too loud
i am sure
my heart
beat
is
speeding
each time i turn over it’s worse

this is the sleepless song of the night

at dawn
sweating
the slow
drift begins
into sleep
suspended between in a dream

wet
wet from the snow melt
out on the moors
the track
deep
in mud
the grass is a
s   l   i   d   e
we struggle
up
to
the
top
of
the
hill
the wide-open expanse of the world falls beneath
we all stand together
filling our lungs
catch
ing
our
breath

The Saddest Lines

/ A. Gouedard / Leave a comment

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Escribir, por ejemplo: ” La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos”.

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

Tonight I can write the saddest of lines.
But these words above never were mine.

I encountered death as an infant.
I created myself as someone I’m not.
I wasted my gifts and took the wrong turnings.
All that I loved most faded away.
Sometimes it’s hard to put food on the table.
Each day is a struggle. I think I might break.
Are these tired words sad enough for you yet?

Let’s step up the horror, in case we forget.
Seven million people died of cancer last year.
Five thousand people sleep rough every night.
One hundred elephants are slaughtered each day
They hack out their jaws to trade in the ivory.
The ocean’s polluted and forests are dying.
The politicians are lying.
No one takes action.
Everyone’s looking for things they can’t have.

Don’t speak to me of her love you once had
or play with the thought of her infinite eyes
and the way that you lost her love and ask why.
Pablo Neruda I hear you complaining.
Pablo Neruda silence your cries.
Each moment of love is a gift. Don’t expect it.
There’s perspective above,
in those trembling blue stars.

 

dead-elephant_lznp-2776

~~~~~~~~~~~

The quote in Spanish is from “Poema 20” and is part of “Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada” (twenty love poems and a desperate song) from Pablo Neruda that was published in Santiago de Chile in 1924.

Happiness in Easter Park

/ A. Gouedard / Leave a comment

In the park,
by the lake,
loud geese clamor
to be fed.

Little girl
in new red shoes,
polished
to a gleaming shine,
gazes at her face reflected
in the mirror of her toes.

Sitting on a wooden bench
she swings her feet
in quiet pleasure
and spreads her fingers
wide apart.

The sticky chocolate
melted fast.

The swans
spread out
their wide,
white wings,
lifting up
in springs
rare flight.

On a branch
the blackbird sings.

Everything is full of light.

Digital Dreams

/ A. Gouedard / 5 Comments

In my digital dreams
of brutalised beauty
the last look loners
never look back
nostalgia is nothing
but an onslaught of senses
enigmatic eels fill up my screen
the rosie romantics
have lost their ideals
the violets are vanquished
by unseasonable change
i quietly quit
without yielding my self
to fanciful fractals ~
isn’t life strange