Rolling Pin

An old, pretty, wooden rolling pin,

Easy to disregard,

Easier still to misplace or lose,

Is freighted now with memories,

Even while resting here in my hand.

 

With hand-painted petals at either end,

Like some native, jutting breasts,

But time-bleached and worn,

A humble, quotidian thing,

Pricking at my senses.

 

This one I had from my mother

Who, sentimentally it must be,

Had it from hers, like me.

She clung to it, with other inconsequential objects,

Right till the end.

 

I think of her, Gran, her shrivelled form,

And just how hard it must have been.

Widowed early, yet with a clutch of children,

Resourceful, a postmistress in the outback,

Along with other things.

 

In a sort of trance, I now can retrace

My childish steps, in high summer,

Through the old sprung wire screen door to her kitchen.

A great table, nearly taller than me,

Is charged with bowls of Christmas pudding fruit.

 

Then is this really the same rolling pin

She somehow managed with her sole, good arm?

If so, how privileged, how humbling it seems,

To be connected thus with one so worthy.

Might anyone ever think even half as well of me?

Stone Step

It seems an idle thought 

To covet a neighbour’s worn stone step.

And yet, thus polished, cupped, hollowed out,

How tenderly it betrays

A million million journeys from and to.

“Il aime les vieilles pierres,”

Declared the padre, once, perceptively of me,

In the craggy little hilltop foreign town,

Where every step is worn like this,

And even I may boast my own.

Against winter snowfalls and mountain rains

Our clustered roofs, vertiginous all,

Of silvery shale like sun-glinting carp,

Need gentle, light-footed artisans

To caress and coax each into health.

So while town-folk gather for mute, dull chores,

And chat and chide and jostle in bars,

Above me, in plain view, barely yards away,

Picked out, Apollonian, against an azure sky:

An awkward, beautiful, unlikely god.

In loafers, jeans, and rumpled shirt,

The old roofer tips and tilts on precipitous tile ridge.

A thick rope, lightly held, is his only scaffold.

With envy and longing I watch his silent, fairy steps,

This paragon; such courage: if but I were he. 

Walnut Tree

For not much more

Than the price

Of a rangy automobile

We bought a walnut tree,

Which, helpfully, came bundled

With antique country cottage,

And sun-favoured garden.

We scarce knew what we had,

For a thrilling decade or two:

Venerable, companionable,

This Earthly benediction.

With dimly-remembered

Boy-scout skills I spliced

Hemp rope and cut oak plank

To make, dangling on

Outstretched blackened limb

A high swing, and then to push

Each new startled child

Into endless shimmering

Mountain blue.

From tender buds in Spring,

It unfurled limpid leaves, new-made,

In bright, fanning, umbrella clumps,

And thrust out rich, swelling nuts,

Erotic, prolific,

Cased in smooth round husks,

Nature’s joyous, naked seed.

How prettily it dappled

The West-leaning, end-of-day light,

To carelessly bestow such favours

As seemed fit. In Autumn we waded

Ankle-deep in soft, moist beds

Of copper-coloured, mouldering leaves,

To gather trays of tender fruit

In deftly-fingered husks.

Until one year quite suddenly,

For every sinuous, anxious branch

There came nor bud, nor leaf, nor nut.

It dawned on us quite slowly,

Our beloved tree was dead.

By clumsy human hand

It may have been (it mattered not),

When conspirators and assassins,

With JCB in adjoining field,

Diverted a watercourse. Yet,

How yearningly we thus decried

Such sheer, pitiable folly

As is human wishes.

“Elle est belle,” let out the mill owner

Genuflecting, as it were,

As full-girth trunk rolled heavily

To sweet-scented, saw-dusty floor.

With consummate skill he cut,

A fragrant stack of wide, wide handsome boards,

In whose dark and swirling grain

With eddies, like richest marble cake,

I exulted: this beneficence, this Afterlife.

Fashion (Credo)

The tragedy of modern life

Is that people must be told,

For all that under Heaven is,

What’s good and what’s to like.

Fashion is a perfect scold,

We ignore her at our peril.

If any man stand up to her

He’s left out in the cold.

But Fashion is not clever,

Her head is easily turned.

Though cheaply won

With wiles and flattery,

Beware her infamous moods.

Imagined slights

And dictums spurned

Soon excite displeasure.

What wisdom may we elicit,

In answer to such calls

As: “What to do?”

And: “How to live?”

Do what’s right (as Father said),

And hold your head up high,

In spite of all that befall us

There’s nothing else for it.

Poetry: A Conversation

Poetry is anarchy,

Writing without rules.

Which of us thinks this may be?

None but bloody fools.

Is it not perverse (or worse?)

To throttle free expression?

Admonish not in terms so terse,

We jostle with shadows, illusions.

A poet’s mind, none may bind

With scansion, rhyme and metre.

Such are but tools, as you may find

In any craftsman’s atelier.

The words do dance as, in a trance,

Inspiration wells like happy tears.

Press not intellect into abeyance;

Calm thought suspended kindles fears.

You mock me here, so austere,

Oh flinty Wordsworth to my wan Keats.

You appear to be, apprentice seer,

Consummate acrobat of linguistic feats.

Poetry is incendiary;

To inflame the heart of man.

Liturgy, synergy, pathways to infinity,

Are the poet’s true domain.

Poetry is propinquity:

The queasy thrill of vaulting desire.

Kinder still is obliquity;

Truth in experience is ever mired.

Poetry is threnody;

Empathy, entropy: a cry wrung out of darkness.

Life is as the hand-wove Kashmiri;

God-wrought, flawed: extraordinariness.

Poetry is feeling, emotions reeling,

A divine charter warranting the senses.

Contemplation rather, inward-seeing;

The rendered world in contorting lenses.

Then how are we to ‘wrap’ this ‘rap’,

For conflict makes me weary?

We are the infant in Nature’s lap,

The innocent dream of the Apothecary.