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last update: 9th Jun 10

 

 

We All Fall Down                      Keeping Time to the Music

 

A Touch of the Rose-tinted                      Ripples are a form of Sound…

 

We All Fall Down

          Ring-a-ring o’ roses, Nursery Rhyme,
          thought to be a folk-memory of the Black Death, 1348-1351.
                    For Kay, living with Alzheimer’s
 

Skull, hands and feet tether themselves by strings
of shadow to the walls, floor, ceiling. Nothing lets go.
They warp her every movement, turn it grotesque
and hollow as the brain inside her head.
She asks – Where am I? but the answer’s lost
among the childhood alleys of her mind. Say – Heaven
or Ireland!
and she’ll laugh but ask again, some
half-a-dozen times in quick succession.
 
She hasn’t moved out of this chair all day, out of this room
for more than a year. Even at meals she’s wheeled
close to the table, a shadow distantly attached
to what’s around her, thin as a wandering soul wrapped
in a skeleton, driven by less than cautious supernatural
forces, losing the background that would make her visible.
Once, her mind drifting away, she’d chase it through
the streets exposed in underwear as unaware
 
as stones dislodged, tipped out of alignment by a rush
of waterfall, slow-grinding glacier or avalanche, hearing
all the harmonious tumult of a summer-evening's bird-song
turn to discordance, shouting harsh-voiced – Shut up!
Shut up! Shut up!
and yet so brittle she might break apart,
an egg-shell bowl of grief – for loss of self, of possibilities,
of hope, for fear of death. Now a belt holds her in, line-thin,
made from the shadow-play of others tilted to adverse camber,
 
an icy wind and madness, ghosts in the air. Dry cold
is more bearable. A face dark-hollowed closes towards her
as the light fades. Shadows of steam run like flies
out of the baked potato on her dinner-plate, earth
clasps a comforter of mist tight to its rheumy chest,
the sun no more than a white spot in a sky
without colour, and a loss of shadow…
Recapturing feeling she leans
 
and then sits still again, waiting her pre-ordained world-end
seeing the flat white sheets, hand-spun, hand-woven,
spread on the linen-fields to bleach, guarded by watch-towers
placed at every corner.
                                             Mind-blind.     Cloud-whispering.

Pat Earnshaw

Commended in the Scintilla competition 2009 and published in vol.13



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Keeping Time to the Music

          There is music wherever there is harmony, order or proportion,
          for those well maintain the music of the spheres; though they
          give no sound into the air….
                    Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82)

Through tens of thousands of years Stone Age men
must have sat at the mouths of their caves listening
to the night’s music: the munch of jaws, feet
whispering through damp grass, the nearness of breath,
shrieks ripping the bare sky;
 
and with luck, on a quiet night, under
the moon’s brilliance, they might hear
the spectral chanting of the spheres, a choir
muted, as planets, stars, the sun went
chasing each other round and round the earth,
their ragged harmony the variable droning
of a swarm of bees, a hari-krishna uum,
the mellow resonance of a gong struck
from the hollow body of a clay frog, all
activating the relentless rotation of time, blips
of events re-inventing themselves decades,
centuries, millennia later as if there was nothing left
for us to discover for the first time ever –
 
Yet who before us has heard the atonal squeals
of the rings of Saturn chiming a greeting
to the space-craft Cassini, luring it in
as a spider lures a moth or a grasshopper
with the ultra-violet flower-illusion
it has spread over its web? Sound
doesn’t travel backwards well. Even
if we had rotatory ears, even if we could turn our heads
away from the present, there would be only silence.
All the vibrations of throats, lips, plucked strings,
blown horns, were dropped long ago
near their points of origin, worn out
by the resistance of air, their faded voices curdling
the atmosphere with a smell of sour milk;
 
and later, was it time or the melody children stopped
in their games of musical chairs, grudgingly circling
the empty seats to be near them and claim them
when the pianist rested his hands, one child always left out
as the notes hung in the air like pigeons
cresting the slanting roof of a mausoleum.

Pat Earnshaw

Commended and published in the Barnet Open Poetry Competition, 2008



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A Touch of the Rose-tinted

          You look rather rash my dear your colours
          don’t quite match your face.
 
                    ‘The Young Visitors’, Daisy Ashford, ch.2.

It’s August and the foxes’ dung is full of cherry-stones.
A shadow slides itself over my shoulder-blades, strange
footsteps follow. Pink balsam flowers, magenta willowherb,
thrive at the path’s verge and the four-year old grabs
fistfuls of crayons, sheets of paper, for his drawings.
 
The pink and crimson colours of your cheeks, enhanced
by pale viridian beneath, wait for the painter’s brush.
You hide your hands freckled as tarnished mirrors;
your sherry eyes, swimming in age, transform
the blazing whiteness of the page to green and crimson.
 
Bilbo the cat blinking his night-time vision
looks on a world that's almost leached of colour.
He doesn’t need the rainbow images of orange, yellows,
reds, blues, greens or purples to know what’s mouse,
bird, meat, what isn’t edible.
 
Caught in a dazzle of the sun, the small boy’s face –
white skin, black hair, red shirt – stared at too long
won’t go away, is carried by my eyes on to
the white-washed wall, his hair turned pale, skin dark,
his head hovering lazily over a sea-green torso.
 
The scarlet opium poppies, glanced at in passing, paste
themselves flame-like on my inner lids. Feathers
in shades of black splatter the field where death
has passed and I remember you – another you – caught
in the shade of moonlit windows, walls and roof-tops,
real and unreal, fading to nothing as the sun sinks.
 
What was so magical about the sun-etched shadows
of the diamond-leaded panes stretching themselves
along the inside wall, opening the never-ending mystery
of Beyond – the sky, door, clouds, feelings…?

Pat Earnshaw

Awarded first prize in the Salopian Poetry Society’s Competition, 2008,
published in Salopeot



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Ripples are a form of sound only if we can hear them

          Ripples are not objects but movements,
          their controlling force not gravity
          but surface tension

Blue skies and the snow falling.
Moorhens run black-legged over the banks
of ponds, leaves rattle the wind
plagiarising the percussion of rain. Trunks
sway like violinists fret-sawing the air
with their bows, undulating their bodies,
sinuous as iguanas racing uphill
over desert sand.
 
Rain pits the water. Circles
glide freely over and through each other
silent as shadows criss-crossing the ground
beneath trees. Some four-legged creature
is disappearing into the undergrowth,
bent on killing. The sun
has gone. Abruptly the wind howls.
 
Ripples of light and shade drop shadows
onto the stream bed, refugees driven
by feckless currents, irregularities of the water –
surface, by the wind.
 
What do the fish hear as the fly is cast,
as the wriggling bait thrashes to free itself
from the unfelt pain spiking it
out of the caught hook?
 
Such a roar of noise tosses itself around
inside the water – tail-thrusts and fin-strokes,
ripples of fear, of triumph, their secret
submarine language, deaf to reflections
downwards from the water surface, that mirror
 
separating sea from heaven, where sometimes
otters float, mussels clamped
to their chests, bashing the shells with stones
to break them open.

Pat Earnshaw

Awarded First prize in the Society of Medical Writers, Hertford Writing Competition;
published in The Writer, Vol 8, No. 1, Summer 2009



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