beauty

a very golden sunlight

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

a very golden sunlight
shafts suddenly across leaves
yellowed with glowing
oldness.
Illuminates memory,
gilding years of
subtle pain,
revealing glories
yet unknown,
to come, yes, to come,

the cold grass is dappled
for a moment,
warm here and there.

the red squirrel pauses
with its golden acorn,
tentative, suddenly
awareness rich,
hesitant to scurry
to store its treasure
for another day.

gone grey a moment,
mundanity takes
back its familiar
places, but not forever;
a golden knowing lingers.

ode to the teapot

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Every morning you
wait, hear my
step
step
step
down the stairs
glimpse the dawn
of the dishwasher door
pulled open.

You, teapot, are
fully alert
lest, by an early morning
misstep
of crack or knock
you are relegated from
‘daily’ to ‘occasional’.

sitting proudly on
your dove blue
tray and blossom-patterned napkin
you listen
to the music of bubble
and steam, the faint
pliff of teabag
dropping
from a short height.

And welcome the
sharp, hot, dark stream
into your
shallow depths.

Oh teapot, how
content you are:
two or three minutes
pondering eternity
full of mystery
and mastery you
brew
nestled in your cosy.

And now, revealed
you relinquish yourself
to tilting, tipping,
teeming with
tea perfection.
Your sidekick
mug and you
a happy
mismatched couple.

A moment’s respite
white porcelain
teapot to consider
your antecedents
your factory provenance
and the luck that brought you
to me.

Another cup?

Teapot?

Note: this poem is from the ‘poetry retreat series’. We read Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to the Clothes’ trans. by W Merwin and were asked to write a poem about a familiar object in six minutes.

Waiting

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

I am waiting
for spring to emerge
from the pavement
laid for
work, business, invoicing,
fee discussions and
constant demand.

I am waiting
for cracks to widen
suddenly and maybe
even causing
horror filled with wonder
as I fall in-
side out.

I am waiting
for you and for them,
and for looking back
bewildered on
the past order,
full of tired and
worn-in happiness.

Note: This poem is from the ‘poetry retreat series’.  We read ‘I am Waiting’ by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and were asked to write a poem in six minutes about something we were waiting for. This is unfinished and I would like to go back to it and bring the image of ‘breaking through’ into greater clarity and power.

year of the poem – philosophy

~ extraplorer ~ 2 Comments

The writing and thinking about the (as yet unrevised) ‘washed up’ poem has left a domino rally of thoughts tipping over in my mind.  The idea that the poem was teaching me how to write it was phenomenal.  But the next thought topped it; perhaps it was true of all things.

Paying close attention is the essence, for me, of what it means to be a poet.  The poet leans in to the idea or thought or person or moment or object, listens intently with her whole being, and in that listening, the secrets of the poem are revealed.  No listening, no poem.  No attention, no inspiration. No patience, no-thing.

The idea that this might be true of all things did not itself come out of nowhere.  As I mentioned before, I read some lines a little while ago with the phrase ‘you are truly the poetry of God’. This idea of being poetry has lingered.  I have spent some of the time on the journey between my home and the café where I do my work pondering this; what if life was inherently poetic?  What does it mean to be the ‘poetry of God’ (whether or not one believes in an actual God)?  What am I learning from poems that is true of life?

In my (paid) work, there is a lot of time spent learning theory and models and then ‘applying’ it to people, to work with them better.  This has value, but recently it’s been making me restless.  What other ways might there be to learn better how to create together?

The idea that people (and projects, and all things) have a poetic nature is liberating because it simplifies things down to one thing; pay close attention; the person, thing or project (or self) will tell you who and what it is and is becoming. It will almost reel you in to its field so that you start thinking and acting in the way that will help create it. You do not have to be afraid that you don’t understand or know or have the skills yet, if you pay close attention it will reveal each step when you’re ready. It is beautiful.

This is also very helpful for me because I am continually doing work that I have never (or no-one has ever) done before.  I am constantly faced by projects which are an entire unknown.   I love this idea because as I lean into the project, listen carefully – even do actual listening to the people involved, it will tell me how to co-create it.

(A funny note:  I tried to make this thought process into a poem – I thought it would be fitting -but it would not go at all; it didn’t want to be a poem.)

washed not quite up

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday’s poem, ‘washed up‘ is one of my first poems on extraplorer where I feel like I have not quite got to the proper form of the poem.  Most of the poems I write here seem to write themselves a little bit.  They slide out onto the page, and I usually work to some kind of internal rhythm as I write them, a kind of inner knowing of the form which I can pay attention to, and there it is.

The idea of washed up has been stolen by the Emily poem.  I had an idea for a collection of poems called ‘washed up’, and I might still try to make this because it is a glowing idea still.  But I was also very impatient to used the idea of washed up and somehow the Emily poem came along as I wrote the title.

I like most of the poem (and thank you readers who also liked it), but I think that it has got more to come.  I can tell that what I would really like to do is to make the poem more formally restrained than my normal very fluid writing.  The first stanza captures the feeling of this.

‘She set sail
for distant shores
from home.
She stayed indoors.’

The 3/4/2/4 syllables in each line I think set the pattern for what the other stanzas should be like (maybe with some variation).  For me, this rhythm emulates the rhythm of the sea.   I like the idea that the formal restraint could also emulate some of Dickinson’s writing (for example), while the sea rhythms would make it embody the idea of it being washed along the currents.

Another thing that maybe needs to be sorted out (I have only just realised) is that there is a clash of imagery between something in a bottle ‘Glass bottled / tears’ and a notebook which is what I originally envisaged.  I would like to think about these more and see if they should both stay or only one.

As with the formal constraint, I think the use of some rhyme here and there (‘shores’/’indoors’, ‘tread’/’instead’) makes it also have an element of homage to Dickinson’s writing.

I would also like to work out whether I really like the repetition of ‘small hand’ ‘distant shores’.  I think it might be too heavy-handed.

At the end of the day, I was too impatient to post the poem.  I really wanted to have written something, which is a very different feeling to feeling something is ready.  But also, I feel excited that the poem might be something I could craft. For me this is progress because until now I’ve been scared to do too much crafting in case I get self-conscious and can’t write.  Instead this poem is giving me a little gift because it wants to be crafted!  Amazing!  Maybe there are some poems that want to be and some that don’t (poem as a pet  metaphor has snuck in again, hooray, my favourite).

The poem is teaching me how to write a poem.

Awe.

(I would say ‘back soon’ but it might take me a little bit of time to work this out…)