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Posts Tagged ‘Bill Griffin’

Borderlands // Politics

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on January 15, 2021| 2 Comments »

[ with poems by Iain Twiddy and Martin Figura]

Question: What do these 3 scenarios have in common?

1 – “What do you want for supper?”
“I dunno, anything’s OK, whatever you want.”
“I could make some soup.”
“I don’t really feel like soup but anything you want’s OK.”
“I could heat up that Chinese.”
“Nah, I’m all left-overed out.”
“All right, what do you want.”
“I dunno. What do you want?”

2 – “OK Amelia, it’s time for lessons.”
“But I want to color.”
“You know every morning is lesson time. This week is the letter ‘N’.”
“I don’t feel like letters. I want to color.”
“Hmm, how about color for fifteen minutes and then letters?”
[Silence. Wiggles.] “OK. You can set the timer.”

3 – “Damn, look how muddy the creek is today.”
“Yeah, all that rain, looks like tomato soup.”
“It’s all the runoff from those tobacco fields. Isn’t there a law against that?”
“Hey, it’s their land. They can do whatever they want.”
“Maybe so but it’s our drinking water.”

Answer: 3 scenarios, all politics.

Politics with a little ‘p’: transactions in which each party has a stake. No stake = no politics. If it really doesn’t matter what we have for supper then all choices are equal, but if it does matter and I don’t make my position plain then I’m practicing passive aggressive politics. If there’s room within our politics for each of us to have our positions honored then we are practicing egalitarian politics. And if my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are infringed by the practice of your similar rights, then it’s time for reality politics.

Whose stake is most important? Whose voice is loudest? Whose choice carries the greatest weight? Sounds like we’re edging into the realm of big ‘P’ Politics.

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This week I received in the post from Ireland Poets Meet Politics 2020, an anthology of poems from the Hungry Hill Writing Tenth International Open Poetry Competition. The winning poem is Contactless by Isabel Palmer, about COVID-19, but the range of politics with big ‘P’ and little ‘p’ ranges from war, genocide, and sectarian violence to displacement, racism, sexism, redundancy, and annoying neighbors.

These two poems from the anthology in particular spoke to me: the wholeness of the earth cast aside for the extraction of profit; the wholeness of individuals cast aside once profit has been extracted. Whose voices are stifled and ignored? Whose choices are judged unworthy and irrelevant?

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Borderlands

We found the world had already been claimed,
so ground out, drained, ironed in straight lines
– like the bed of the Red Sea to the verges –
that churches were ships, farmsteads treasure islands,

every centimetre weighed up for worth,
milked for produce, mined for living ores.
So existence thinned to frail causeways,
like streaks of light leaking from bellies of cloud,

to quaggy headlands, trench-squidge tracks, rivers
unassailable through the stars of barbed wire,
where even the wind seemed prevailed upon
to hurry and be gone the way of the sea;

we were deigned becks and streams like beaten dogs,
drains that ushered in, eeled for Holland,
fenced-off trees extending the invitation to climb
like an amputated limb, and holiday lashings

of untrampable grass, the spurt of trespass,
the ballast crunchy as bone between tracks,
feeling the self stripped into sin like a corpse
dumped overnight by the trash-flowered siding.

And so it went on, drilling, implanting – until,
surveying the banished domains, roaming
the crumbling borders – it gradually exposed
how if the world was lack, and doing without,

there was nothing to stop us making it up.

Iain Twiddy

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The Remaining Men

When the men surfaced for the last time and dispersed
some were left over. These men wandered about the town
until the each found their own particular sweet spot.
Then they just stood there, looking out over the scarred coast
through red-rimmed eyes to the rough brown sea.

As the days went by people gave up asking them
why so still and could they fetch someone
or something? They became like street signage,
A-boards, parked prams or tied up dogs; something
to be manoeuvred around. As the months when by

the men became hardened to difficult weather
filling their coat pockets with hail. During the great storm
of Eighty-Seven, their caps blew off and went cartwheeling
down the streets with bin lids. As the years went by
the slagheaps faded to green and saplings were planted.

The men began to petrify into monuments. When
the new road for the business park went through
a lot of them were tipped back onto trollies, like the ones
railway porters used to use, then loaded on to flatbed trucks
with the traffic cones. Most were broken down for aggregate.

The lucky ones were sold off as novelty porch lights
and stood outside front doors on the new estate
illuminating small front lawns and driveways.
As the decades went by, saplings became sycamores
and elms and named Colliery Wood. In autumn

the early morning light on them was glorious
and cycle paths made their way there. The remaining
men were defaced by graffiti and badly worn
by then; many considered them to be an eyesore.
When children asked what they were, not everyone

could remember and of those that did, few were believed.
As the centuries went by, they all but disappeared,
only the circle in the park remained. Archaeologists
and historians disagree about how they came to be there
and what they might have been used for.

Martin Figura

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Both selections are from Hungry Hill Writing Anthology: Poets Meet Politics international open poetry competition 2020, judged by Bernard O’Donoghue. Editor Jennifer Russell. © 2020 Hungry Hill Writing and contributors. hungryhillwriting.eu.

Iain Twiddy studied literature an university and lived for several years in northern Japan. His poetry has appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Harvard Review, Stand, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere.

Martin Figura lives in Norwich with Helen Ivory and sciatica. Together they began hosting Live from The Butchery Zoom readings during Lockdown with leading guest poets. A new edition of Whistle (Cinnamon Press) was published in 2018. His new theatre show Shed is interrupted but ready to go.

My own poem, Phenology Notebook April 7 2020, was shortlisted and appears in the anthology. Thank you!

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Afterword: The essential benefit of having grandchildren is that they provide the grandparents with something to talk about over supper which is not politics!

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2020-06-11a Doughton Park Tree

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We Do Favor

Posted in Christian themes, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on January 8, 2021| 6 Comments »

[with three poems by Wendell Berry]

Y’all sure do favor!

So folks say when they first see my father and me together. He’s 94. I can’t say I see it but others do so there you are.

On the bookshelf in his living room is a small framed photo of my father about age 3, the same age as our grandson Bert right now. Now those two do favor! Two peas in a pod, cut from the same cloth, much of a muchness. Look at them with that one smile between them, look at those eyes, little imps, look at the domes of those foreheads. Let me just scroll through all these photos Bert’s parents have texted us and you’ll surely see how Wilson and Bert favor.

But where are the photos of my father at 3 making a face, lining up his lead soldiers, stacking his rough-cut handmade blocks? Where dancing? I suspect that framed studio portrait was a Christmas present from Grandmother’s brother Sidney – the rest of the family was surviving the depression on grits and squirrel gravy, the occasional bartered hog shoulder, never two nickels to rub together. The rare snapshots we have of aunts and cousins are from Uncle Sidney’s camera, the only one in the family.

Another depression is upon us now. We are all doing without something. Photos abound but Bert is not free to stand beside his great-grandfather, to show us their one smile between them. When will the day return that may show us how much we all do favor?

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The poetry of Wendell Berry returns me to the center: the center of the fields and woods he walks; the center of time that stretches from long before me to long after; the center of meaning in a universe in which I am not the center but which nevertheless makes a place for me.

These three poems are from Mr. Berry’s book Sabbaths, published in 1987. A moment of stillness, of contemplation, of connection to the earth and all that fills it makes any place sacred and any day Sabbath. My dread, my grief, my struggle during these times are no different really from any times. These things don’t recede, they don’t disappear. They simply take their place in this moment: no before, no after, only now, and I and you and all of us connected in the journey to discover within them some promise of peace.

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VIII (1979)

I go from the woods into the cleared field:
A place no human made, a place unmade
by human greed, and to be made again.
Where centuries of leaves once built by dying
A deathless potency of light and stone
And mold of all that grew and fell, the timeless
Fell into time. The earth fled with the rain,
The growth of fifty thousand years undone
In a few careless seasons, stripped to rock
And clay – a “new land,” truly, that no race
Was ever native to, but hungry mice
And sparrows and the circling hawks, dry thorns
And thistles sent by generosity
Of new beginning. No Eden, this was
A garden once, a good and perfect gift;
Its possible abundance stood in it
As it then stood. But now what it might be
Must be foreseen, darkly, through many lives –
Thousands of years to make it what it was,
Beginning now, in our few troubled days.

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X (1982)

The dark around us, come,
Let us meet here together,
Members one of another,
Here in our holy room,

Here on our little floor,
Here in the daylit sky,
Rejoicing mind and eye,
Rejoining known and knower,

Light, leaf, foot, hand, and wing,
Such order as we know,
One household, high and low,
And all the earth shall sing.

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III (1982)

The pasture, bleached and cold two weeks ago,
Begins to grow in the spring light and rain;
The new grass trembles under the wind’s flow.
The flock, barn-weary, comes to it again,
New to the lambs, a place their mothers know,
Welcoming, bright, and savory in its green,
So fully does the time recover it.
Nibbles of pleasure go all over it.

all selections from Sabbaths, Wendell Berry, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1987
Thank you, Anne Gulley, who gave Linda and me this book many years ago.

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IMG_7952

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New

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 30, 2020| 9 Comments »

 

 

[with poems by Dannye Romine Powell]

When we lower her pack from the tree where it has swung all night like a bell mocking the bear, the skunk, she opens it and screams: a fairy crown atop her sweatshirt and socks, a perfect round nest and four perfect hairless mouse pups like squirming blind grubs. We peer in awe, shepherds at the manger.

Mother mouse has hidden herself, not in the pack with her babies. We lift the nest intact, hide it in a bush beside the tree, nestle leaves around. Mother will sniff out her precious ones, reclaim her treasure. But we have other lambs to tend.

We eat, stow gear, shoulder our packs, face the trail, and consider: the pack was in the tree just one night; the nest is woven from meadow grass where we slept; the mother who climbed – how many trips up and back? – was heavy with her brood.

Miles before us, a new year before us – how heavy will each day’s burdens become before night brings rest?

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A new book by Dannye Romine Powell arrived in the mail this week: In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver from Press 53 in Winston-Salem. I meant to read one or two poems this morning but I have read them all. A central persona that weaves through the collection is Longing: she visits rooms in old houses, unfolds memories into the light, shares the pain that others might lock in closets. Grief shared conceives within us hope to rekindle joy. Sharing grief, sharing joy, we become more human.

 

 

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The Secret

Light glazes the near-empty streets
as I drive. Beside me, my grown son asks
if a secret I thought I’d kept buried
is true. A secret
that can still catch fire.
We stop on red. A bird flies
by the windshield. My father’s words:
Easier to stand on the ground
and tell the truth than climb a tree
and tell a lie. Now, I think. Tell him.
I stare at my son’s profile,
straight nose, thick lashes.
I remember, at about his age,
how a family secret fell
into my lap, unbidden.
That secret still ransacks a past
I thought I knew, rearranging its bricks,
exposing rot and cracks,
changing the locks on trust.

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In the Night, the Wind in the Leaves

swirled and rustled
out our open window as if
for the first time,
as if we never were,
the earth newborn, sweet.

And what of us – asleep
on the too-soft bed
in the old mountain house?

Gone.

Also our children.
the ones who lived, the ones who died
before they grew whole. All night

the breeze swirled and rustled
through the leaves as if it played
a secret game, swirling
and rustling all night

as if we never were.

from In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, Dannye Romine Powell, © 2020 Press 53

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Dannye Romine Powell has won fellowships in poetry from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared over the years in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Harvard Review Online, Beloit, 32 Poems, and many others. She is also the author of Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers. For many years, she was the book editor of the Charlotte Observer. In 2020 she won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition for her poem “Argument.”

 

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