Wild Hares
Thursday 8 February 2024
Thursday 25 January 2024
It's a while since I last blogged (if that's the correct past tense) but now I've decided to do so on a regular basis, maybe at least 4 times a year. I'm going to publish those stories on here which have been rejected a good many times by the magazines, hoping they will find a small readership on the net. The first of these stories is entitled IN WHICH POOH IS SHOT TO DEATH WHILE ROBBING A BANK. Pooh and his friends are now out of copyright. I wrote this story many years ago to amuse children on my visits to schools. Hopefully I will find a wider audience of at least six or seven on my blog pages.
In Which Pooh is Shot to Pieces
While Robbing a Bank
By
Garry Kilworth
We planned the raid in the basement of a downtown tenement. Pooh was holding forth, saying, ‘I see it this way, Rabbit: we go in, three of us, Eeyore takes the doors, you move to the counter and I stand (he pointed to a pencilled cross on the ground plan of the bank which we had pinned to the wall) here.’ He put his paw on a spot under the bank clock. ‘Then I can see the whole layout: the teller and the clients, and of course, the guard. It’s my special job to cover the guard, so don’t do anything to distract me, will you?’
Eeyore looked up, briefly, from his task of cleaning the guns. His mournful expression revealed his thoughts: we had been through all this, several times, but Pooh needed to travel old paths a dozen times before he felt the knowledge was securely buried in that famous little brain. Eeyore was also aware of the extent of the danger, how desperate this enterprise was. Pooh was a creature of instinct, unable to view possible future consequences. It was his reaction to instinct which led to our downfall, but I attach no blame to the bear. He had been created thus and the fault lay elsewhere.
‘That’s fine, Pooh,’ I heard myself saying, ‘we seem to have it all worked out now.’
I was watching Piglet – poor, unhappy, nervous piglet – playing with a rosery he had found in the corner of the basement, counting the beads and frequently losing his place. Piglet was our wheels man, but I had arranged for Owl to sit in the car with him. Owl couldn’t drive of course, his anatomy not being fit for such a task. Piglet had trouble too, even though the vehicle had been modified to enable use with trotters. Piglet was Piglet, good behind a wheel, but very, very nervous if you know what I mean. Owl was a calming influence. I was just thankful that Tigger was not one of the gang. Kanga had taken him and Roo to Florida some time back, thinking to get work in Disneyland as guides or something. Tigger would have been too gung-ho, would have been bouncing all over the bank, would have begun blasting at the flicker of an eyelash. We couldn’t afford to take the risk on his excited temperament.
I had seen the notices: Bank Robbery is a Federal Offence, Punishable by Life imprisonment. We all knew the possible consequences, and God knows, we didn’t want to hurt anyone, but what the hell was left to us? We had tried everything else, in England, France, Australia and finally, the land of opportunity and cartoons, where characters such as ourselves might find openings in the movie industry, these United States. We had chosen a bad time to migrate, however. There was a recession on, the Wall Street index had slumped so badly people were wondering if it had a prolapsed spinal column and the movie business was suffering from investment malnutrition. I mean, I felt I had a responsibility towards this motley bunch of lovable characters and all my efforts at finding some sort life for us had ended in failure.
Pooh was still talking and reached out for his honey jar instinctively. Piglet cried, ‘Pooh, y-y-you promised . . .’ making the bear pause and frown at his little friend. He stopped his speech in mid-sentence and let his paw drop to his side, the protestations forming on his lips, knowing he had vowed to kick the obsessive habit, if just for the period of the robbery.
‘I wasn’t . . .’ he started to say, but Eeyore snapped a gun breech shut, loudly, the sound startling the whole room. The donkey looked up and said in a gloomy tone, ‘Sorry,’ before putting the oiled weapon down carefully on the newspapers he had spread to keep the carpet from getting stained.
Pooh came and sat beside me, on the overstuffed sofa.
‘There’s too much sentiment in the world, Rabbit– and not enough compassion,’ he said.
I agreed with him for once. I mean, that schmaltzy goodbye at the end of Pooh Corner might be fine for some, but where did it leave the animals of Hundred Acre Wood? Where did we go after that? We couldn’t stay in the forest. There was nothing there for us. The end to our story had not been written in sufficiently definite terms for us to know what to do with ourselves, once we had ceased gambolling through the trees. You can’t live on old, dry leaves and sentiment.
Owl come in from the kitchen. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week and his shoulders were hunched. Owl’s weighty concerns were of the type carried by those who worried about the world and its children as opposed to Eeyore’s whose interest was personal doom. Let’s face it, Eeyore held the monopoly on dreary statements in which the word VICTIM appeared in capital letters, bold type, black border round the edges.
Owl nodded at me, but kept quiet, since Pooh was still talking, though to no one in particular. Before we left England, Owl, being the most intelligent of this group of friends, had tried to help Piglet trace his ancestors and build a family tree. They started and ended with Piglet’s famous grandfather, Trespassers Will, failing in their attempts to get any further, even though there were more than one or two Williams on the gravestones in the churchyard abutting the wood. It was a bitter disappointment to Piglet, who even asked a passing sparrow if she had heard the name. ‘He was a writer,’ Piglet told the bird. ‘You can see that. He wrote his own name, or most of it. Perhaps he was interrupted before he could finish it?’ The sparrow said she would look in Highgate Cemetery where several famous authors were buried, including Karl Marx and Bram Stoker, but Piglet never heard from her again.
‘It’s doubtful T.W, was a writer of any kind,’ Owl told me privately, ‘given that Piglet’s ancestors – if of the same make-up as our friend – would have the attention span of a butterfly. Yes, he could obviously write his own name – the sign bears witness to that – but a whole novel or manifesto?’
I had to agree with him. He was a wonderful guy, Owly. I loved him like a brother. I loved him because he spoke good sense, and he knew, he knew the fate of each one of us was inextricably bound up with the fate of us all. He once said to me that we were like the beads of Piglet’s rosery, strung together, inseparable. When one of us suffered, we all suffered. There’s a French term for it: Folie a deux, malady of two, but it could equally apply to multiples. Heck, one of us only has to get a cold in the head and we all walk about in the dumps.
Pooh was talking too loudly again. ‘It was all too open-ended. A feeble fade-out, leaving us wondering what we were going to do now the last full stop had gone on the last sentence of the last book. Look at Alice’s adventures. She gets crowned queen and then wakes up in bed realising it was all a dream. She could get on with her normal life. We didn’t have that luxury. We were just left in limbo while that traitor Christopher Robin walked away to his normal life.’
I said, ‘That’s not quite fair, Pooh. Chris had to go. He was leaving childhood behind him. You can’t blame him for growing up.’
‘Oh, you, Rabbit. You were always his favourite,’ growled Pooh, savagely.
Pooh almost never growled like a real bear, so I thought it best to leave him to chunter on for a while. I could have pointed out that the two books were named after him, so the idea that I was Chris’s favourite was laughable. But there was little point in arguing with him when he was in this mood. I watched him kick a table leg and knew I was right to allow him to seethe on his own.
‘I don’t even know what I am,’ cried Pooh, his paws high in the air. ‘What am I?’ For a moment I thought there were tears in his eyes, except I knew they were glass so that was not possible. ‘Am I a toy? An animated toy? It’s all so vague. It doesn’t say, anywhere, exactly what I am, or what you all are.’ He choked back the full force of his anger. ‘Christopher knew,’ there was resentment in his tone. ‘He knew what he was, all right - a real flesh and blood creature. Oh, yes. No worries there, for the wonderful Christopher Robin. But the rest of us were just left in a state of hollow ignorance. Bloody right.’
Piglet was staring at his best friend with wide terrified eyes, his little front trotters shaking so much they were clicking against each other.
I decided I had to intervene again, even if it meant a shouting match.
I spoke quietly. ‘Have you ever stopped to think, Pooh. Do you ever, stop to think? What are we all doing on this desperate enterprise? Good grief, robbing a bank? Thieves, perhaps murderers if we have to use these weapons Eeyore got from us in Chicago. You aren’t helping, you know. We’re all in this together and if you lose it now, we’re done for. Each and every one of us will end up with nothing and our pockets and a jail sentence to boot. We’re relying on you to stay strong. I think you can. I think you’re made of stern stuff, that’s who I think you are. A bear of little brain, perhaps, but one with a strong backbone, a bear with grit and full of purpose. I admire you.’
He calmed down and looked contrite. ‘Am I really? Grit?’
‘Yes, you are. A true friend. Solid and steadfast.’
‘Thank you, Rabbit. I’m sorry, I truly am.’
Eeyore muttered, ‘When you two have stopped kissing each other . . .’ and handed me a thirty-eight, modified for a rabbit’s paws and fully loaded. ‘I’ll use the machine gun,’ he said. ‘I want them to remember Eeyore. This donkey’s going out in style. All my life I’ve been full of self-pity, whining and moaning about my condition, but by the lush green grass on the old millpond’s bank, they’ll know Eeyore’s been in town.’
Piglet cried, ‘Wha . . . what does he mean? I want them to remember? We are going to pull this off, aren’t we?’ His tone was full of anxiety.
I wish then I could have painted the picture for him, of just how it might go, so that we had the choice of dropping the idea there and then and letting it lay where it fell. Even then I think we might still have gone ahead. We had come to the end of the line. There was nothing more for us. Our fate was inextricably bound to the idea that we would either end up rich, dead or in prison.
How it went in the end.
How Piglet panicked once the alarms started ringing and despite Owl’s protest roarrf away from the scene, only to bury the Chevy in the concrete corner of 2nd and 30th, killing them both instantly.
How Pooh, once a junky always a junky, took his eyes off the guard, when the word ‘money’ was mentioned, thinking he had heard something else.
And Eeyore, spraying the ceiling with a whole mag of slugs, careful not to hit anyone because that was Eeyore’s way.
And then Pooh – Pooh, lying on the cold tiles, blasted to pieces by the agitated bank guard, an ear by the door, a leg torn off and guts spilling out through the wounds ripped in his stomach by the guard’s forty-five.
Pooh, his voice full of shocked surprise, saying, ‘Jesus and Mary, look what’s coming out of my belly – common fluff and sawdust?’
Then he said, ‘Rabbit, get going, get out of here. Don’t worry about me.’
One of the customers leaned over his scattered remains and cried, ‘It’s Winnie-the-Pooh!’
‘Don’t call me Winnie,’ croaked the bear. ‘I hate that name.’
We had had our good times, in the Hundred Acre Wood, when none of us knew what was in the stars for us. Blustery days, campion days, days full of bees and honey, when searches for the Small were organazised by Pooh and stornery twee rhymes filled the flower-scented air. Days when the wind got tangled in the trees and days when weak winter suns formed a haze of light behind the wickerwork of branches. Gone, all gone. Every one.
I told all this to Kanga, when she came visiting me in the slammer. I saw the sympathy behind her eyes and I had to look away because there was a lump in my throat. But what do you do, when it’s all over, no hope of another book and no one needs you because you’re out of date, too old-fashioned.
Afterwards, I sat in my cell and thought about Pooh’s last words, as he lay strewn over the floor of that damned bank:
‘At least this is a real ending, Rabbit. I suppose that’s all we could have hoped for – what we all wanted, deep down. It certainly wasn’t the money.’
Now we’ve written our story, without any help from anyone else. Some may call it a tale of failure, but when you consider Eeyore’s suggested title - In Which Pooh Discovers that Death is a Happy Ending – well, you can see we look on it as a success story. I didn’t use Eeyore’s suggestion because I am
the author and the author always gets to choose his own title. Ha!
Anyway, we were all involved and we all went down together. Even Tigger and Roo, who were in Miami when they heard the news. The pair of them went on a rampage, busting up the town. I hear Tigger bounced some seventeen cops before they took him down in a hail of lead. I wish I could have been there to see it.
And wherever Tigger is now, and Pooh, Piglet and Owl, well, I just know it’s better than that misty limbo we found ourselves after Pooh Corner.
Maybe they’ve found that elusive heffalump at last?
Monday 18 July 2022
SONGS OF THE EARTH, SEA AND SKY
(Personal Journeys) Douglas Ciluird
Crab-claw Books
Limited Edition ___ of 50
This one is for Malcolm Edwards
Songs of the Earth, Sea and Sky
Copyright © Garry Kilworth 2022 Published in 2022 by Crab-claw Books. All rights reserved.
The right of Douglas Ciluird to
be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First Edition
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, or locals, or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
Crab-claw Books
38 Tropicana II Las Palomas La Herradura Almunecar Granada Spain
Author’s Note
I have written five books of poems, including this one, plus 76 novels and 11 collections of short stories. I can see there’s a danger here of quantity overshadowing quality. Naturally, not all my books are what I had wished them to be, but some are what I set out to achieve. There are several pieces of prose I would like to consign to an oubliette and others I hope will remain in the light. I have no idea yet where this particular volume of verses will fit in. I decided, as a homage to forebears who crossed the Irish Sea from the Kilworth Mountains in County Cork and for other less explicable inner reasons, to bring this volume out under the Gaelic version of my surname.
Most of my poems are short and I wanted to write an epic in the sense that it is longer by far than any other I have penned. Here it is, along with the usual handful of briefer efforts. On the surface it looks like a long run of what we called in the Air Force ‘when- eyes’. When I was in such-a-place. Those who move home a great deal mark their individual memories by where they were living on a certain date. There’s a touch of showing off, but there’s also an indelible recollection, an impression that’s printed on one’s brain which one is eager to share. One of the extra poems in here is dedicated to those men and women who live their lives in one city, town or village without ever having the desire to move. They are indeed just as blessed as those that trot around the globe. Both paths in life have their rewards. All in all, I hope the reader of this epic poem just enjoys the way I have embellished and flirted with
5
my visits to other lands and perhaps nudged the memories of their own travels abroad.
I do not have good photographs of all the places I have been. In the 1990s and early 2000s I only used video, which does not provide good stills, any frozen frame being fuzzy. Any pictures I took in the days before I owned a digital camera are re- photographed prints and of poor resolution. The tiger we saw in Rambanthore is a good example. Where I have no acceptable photos at all I have taken a picture of a symbol or artefact to represent the subject.
Douglas Ciluird, 2022.
6
Songs of the Earth, Sea and Sky (Personal Journeys)
I
I have been to the Ran of Kutch to see in the wild hinterland
an ass as noble as a horse with two-tone coat of umber sand.
7
I have been to Gujarat
where dark-maned Asian lions kill: smaller than their cousins yet they murder prey with matching skill.
8
An orangutan, gazing down,
studied me from up on high. His gentle eyes revealed to me, he has a better soul than I.
9
I have been to Ranthambore seeking cats with sheaths for paws: saw a tiger and his mate shred a deer with sickle claws.
10
I have been to Raratonga, Tahiti, Fiji, Aitutaki - Oceania’s lovely islands, sadly now too far for me.
11
I have sailed Alaskan seas
where killer whales and humpbacks glide, churning the waters, stirring the deep, mixing the hues of twilight’s tide.
12
Off the Turkish Kerme Gulf I saw a rare Monk Seal. She was eating octopus:
a slimy, squirming meal.
13
I have slept in the Hadhramaut, found scorpions, spiders and skinks escaping from the desert’s cold, inside my boots and blanket fold.
14
I have walked the Yukon Trail, watched a grizzly eating fruit: wanted to go to Yellowknife, but that was much too far to suit.
15
In Addu Atoll’s jade lagoon I swam with giant rays, big as boardroom tabletops gliding over coral crops.
16
In Tamanagara I have sought
(aware I was a walking feast) a giant python, plump as me, a huge, reticulated beast.
17
In Australia’s vast Outback, where deadly snakes bask in the sun, I camped in a swag for several days without encountering a single one.
18
I have been to the Western Ghats
and seen long-legged lizards leap from leaf to twig, from twig to leaf: kangaroos of the reptile heap.
19
A fact I learned in Rajasthan (a most peculiar thing) not every Singh is a Sikh but every Sikh is a Singh.
20
I once roamed the Serengeti, found a splendid greater cat, a leopard lazing in a tree, nature’s prime aristocrat.
21
I have been to Hiroshima
in the cherry-blossomed spring: first the bomb and then the silence, now - again - the linnets sing.
22
I have been to green Guilin,
its mountains ‘sharp as pins’,
where crooked dwarf pines hang their hair and the River Li begins.
23
I have been to Yosemite
and climbed El Capitan: meadows, domes and valley trails, lay below in spindrift veils.
24
I was caught out in a typhoon, where high winds and water meet:
Hong Kong junks and harbour sampans tossed up on a Kowloon street.
25
I have been to Istanbul
and have sailed the Golden Horn: I wish I’d been a Byzantine before the Christ was born.
26
I have seen the Grecian ruins where democracy was sown:
with those seeds, you ancient Hellenes, western politics were grown.
27
I have seen Tunisia,
the place where Carthage stood, where Romans razed Queen Dido’s city leaving naught but blood.
28
I have been to Uppsala,
saw tombs of royal Viking dead: their kings lay underneath the earth on which my Saxon boots did tread.
29
I saw bowls of coloured spices,
in the souk of Tangier town: cumin, cinnamon, fenugreek, cloves – subtle shades of downy brown.
30
I skated with her on the Rideau Canal on a magical midnight hour when my pronoun changed from me to us and never went it back again.
31
I have been to Ecuador, taking pictures on the line - the Condor bird, I never saw, but capybara, he was mine.
32
I have stepped on solid lava, pocked and pointed underfoot: Bali’s aa and pahoehoe
cut right through my leather boot.
33
I have been to far Malacca where the Nonya man agrees: ‘Oran Cina bukan Cina’ –
‘I am not Chinese Chinese’.
34
Once were garbage tips where children from Manila fought for scraps: chicken bones and slops were stuffed in pockets and in filthy caps.
Junkrubbishtrash
35
I have been to London town
to see our Liz, the Queen:
I rang the bell three times but she was nowhere to be seen.
36
I have lived in Leeward, Windward, islands in a turquoise sea:
full of music, laughter, colour – each one owns a piece of me.
37
We canoed in Sarawak
to a longhouse hung with heads: enemies of a Dyak tribe, bunched and dangling over beds.
38
I have been to Delphi’s ruins, asked the Oracle my fate: she told me I would have to wait and wait and wait and wait.
39
I have been to Iceland’s fields and stood in awe before Law Rock. The Althing sat in year 930 -
parliaments were on the clock.
40
I tried to scale the steep ice wall, Franz Josef Glacier in NZ:
it was too sheer and so I climbed the smoother glacier, Fox, instead.
41
I swam warm in seas called Red,
in Meds and Blacks and seas named Dead, China, Coral, Caribbean:
just our North was cold and mean.
42
I have been to Arnhem Land where the Yolngu live still: there the rock art is superb carved into Injalak Hill.
43
I have been to Rotorua: volcanic beauty in the raw: one requires a nose of stone where rotten-egg-smells soar.
44
I crawled through a Cu Chi tunnel, deep and tight and long and black: the more I tried to flout my fear,
the more the world weighed on my back.
45
I have sailed in ancient seas,
on the waves Odysseus used
to reach his home in Ithaca, bewitched, bedevilled, sadly bruised.
46
I have been to Tuscany, imbibed the beauty of a land, where the finest art appeared, created by an Angel’s hand.
47
48
II
Have you been to Trollfjord where eagles poise on peaks, then hurtle from an Arctic sky to snatch up silver streaks?
49
Have you been to the Taj Mahal? This sultan’s symbol must be seen, blinding in its marble white, tomb of Jahan’s Mughal queen.
50
Have you walked in Chang Mai’s hills – met Kayan Lawhi on the way?
At night the trails are cool and dark, though blistering hot the live-long day.
51
Have you seen Kuala Lumpur railway station’s deft design:
a wedding cake with stilt cupola, fretwork arches, serpentine.
52
Have you seen the red Alhambra? Bathed by moons and kissed by suns: honeycombed its halls and pathways where its precious water runs.
53
Have you seen that ancient wonder, flayed by days and stroked by nights: Petra, home of Nabataeans, carved by hand from sandstone heights?
54
Have you seen that marvellous city, sitting on a sea of light? Venice, its basilica
and Ca’d’Oro’s golden sight.
55
Have you seen the Aussie croc: the Saltie that can eat young boys? - or sweet girls, it doesn’t care, even if a lassie cloys.
56
Have you been to Kinabalu,
seen the gully known as Low’s?
A deep, green gorge that swallows people on whose bones the star moss grows.
57
Have you seen my Spanish village, white-washed house with red-tiled roof? La Herradura is ‘The Horseshoe’ scalloped like a giant hoof.
(¿Has visto mi pueblo español?
¿Mi casa encalada, su techo de tejas rojas? La Herradura es ’The horseshoe’ impreso por una pezuña gigante.)
58
Have you seen Semana Santa’s deep, mysterious parades? Sombre, sinister to strangers, dark, profound arcane displays.
59
Have you seen Aguila village? Their fiesta will enthral. Eat your heart out, Rio folk, this carnival surpasses all.
60
Have you seen Al Jebel Shamsan’s wide, volcanic hollow cone? There the white-housed town of Aden nestles in its well of stone.
61
Have you been inside the boatyard of the Viking town, Roskilde? There lay nine enormous longships crafted by a long-dead builder.
62
Have you seen the golden cone, Wat Saket in Bangkok,
blinding in its brilliance when the sun’s at noon o’clock?
63
Have you been to Napier,
for which New Zealand is renown? Art Deco architecture reigns
in every house throughout the town.
64
Have you been to Corsica, where fragrance overflows and spills wild scents of flowers, herbs and bark, down its aromatic hills?
65
Or to far Macao’s casinos, where obsessive gamblers play? There the old colonial houses lapse in elegant decay.
66
Have you been to Chicken Town tucked inside Alaska State? Population seven souls, mining gold at paltry rate.
67
Have you been to Wadi Rum? The sand is pink and fine. There the Bedu noses are
superbly aquiline.
68
Have you been to Bay of Fires, Tasmania’s mouth of golden sand stretched along the wild, wild shore of Van Diemen’s Land?
69
Did you see Kowloon Walled City, the massive slum in old Hong Kong? One square mile of shanty dwellings, happily it’s been and gone.
70
Were you parked in Singapore when kampong villages were there? Now there is a Sky Park perched above a modern thoroughfare.
71
Have you been to Quebec City where the proud St Lawrence flows: stiff in winter, swift in summer, prince of both the seasons’ shows.
72
Have you seen the Amazon, shorter river than the Nile? It’ll always come in second, if by just a single mile.
73
Have you seen Calypso’s Isle, slept on Gozo’s golden sand: or Cyprus rock where Aphrodite stepped from seashell onto land?
74
III
I will go to Everest, tallest mountain of them all: Mallory is buried up there somewhere in its snowy wall.
AAAA
75
I will go to Machu Picchu, famous ancient citadel, haunted by mad Incan ghosts, glaring at the tourist hosts.
Inca
76
I will go to Samarkand,
a city beautiful, arcane, on the way to China’s riches: rhubarb, silk and porcelain.
77
I will go to Galapagos where iguanas snort and spray Sally Lightfoot Crabs with sea salt every hour of every day.
78
I will walk that wall in China keeping Mongols on their plain,
walk from Shanhai Pass to Gansu – then I’ll walk it back again.
79
I will go to Angel Falls,
that long and plaited rope of water dropping silken from the sky: nature’s own Rapunzel’s daughter.
↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
80
I want to visit many lands
but I’m running out of time: mortal years spin round the clock – faint, the distant final chime.
81
I will die and go quite soon, out to swim among the stars, as I pass I’ll touch our sun, then drift on past Orion’s Bar.
82
Extras
Bozburun, Turkey
Stacked
against the house,
a gable of olive logs, wonderfully ancient and ugly, contorted, knotted, gnarled, sawn from trunks
that once writhed slowly out of the arid earth
of Baba Dagi.
After yielding
jade and dusky fruits, branches for peace, colours dragged
from a grudging soil, they will now warm
the wood-cutter and his wife, with a final brilliant blaze, before these craggy, tortured, iron-hard lumps of life become just wraiths.
83
Standing by Groyne B101 Felixstowe
When I was a boy, these groynes were blackened wood wearing garbs of green: ancient, slimy monsters crawling from the sea at low tide.
In the new century, those groynes were gone, great granite rocks became breakwaters: magnificent sleeping dragons, mica glistening in the sun, feldspar, quartz, hornblende burnished by breakers, defying the pull of the moon, commanding the currents, the ebb and flow of tides, the North Sea drift,
the swells.
Coming from Norway they were the new Vikings, invaders from over the sea, the legacy of King Canute – and this time they really did do what King Knut could not.
84
Great
Today I learn
I am
a great-grandfather
with three begats to my name. It feels
mythical
and I hold his little hand fusing four generations. Yesterday
his first smile
filled my world with light. He is my grandson’s son. He is my sun.
85
Domicile
To live and die in the same village, in the same house,
a life bookended by the same bricks, could be rich in many ways.
To know intimately every tree, every track, wood and glade;
to know most neighbours
since birth,
must be satisfying.
A soul would be safe in such
a cosy circle of dwellings and friends, the graveyard full of familiar names, the lodges, nests and dens
of local wild beasts and birds
no secret.
The world traveller is aware
of the general,
while the stay-at-home
privy to detail.
86
Pros and Cons
I like to be there,
but I don’t like the getting.
I enjoy a rainstorm,
but dislike the wetting.
I love cuckoos calling, though I hate their habits, and I’m fond of the fox, when he’s not ripping rabbits. I love the ocean
when I’m not going under and a lightning-filled sky, without loud thunder. Life’s full of stuff
that one loves-and-hates, going in doorways
and out through its gates.
87
Sky and Sea
Next in might and wonder to planets, stars, comets, an awe-inspiring cosmos, the infinite universe, black holes and dark matter, the swish and whizz
of distant suns,
there is the sea.
I can stare at the sea, ponder on impartial power, its many forms and shapes, many shades and hues, feel overwhelmed
by terrifying waves, heart beating in my breast like wild surf on shingle.
88
The Bird Ringer
He holds in his hand
a feathered ball with a beating heart, index and middle fingers forked gently round the nape
of its neck:
a wild thing with wild eyes.
I wonder at its fear,
rage or even contempt
for the holder.
The ringer blows on its belly, stirring the softest of down.
‘A juvenile.
See the grey area?’ Minuscule measurements taken and logged and then, indignantly
the bird is upended in a paper cup to be weighed.
Freedom!
A wide-open sky
instantly swallows
the tiny speck,
leaving just marks in a ledger:
a banal code for a beautiful creature, a marvel of nature, whose home is not the earth,
but the infinite air.
89
The Silence
We sit in one room, one-minded, in quietude.
This we call Meeting for Worship initially a mental falling-away from the world around me,
a drift into calmness,
a shedding of personal cares, jagged thoughts, pressing problems.
This is the Silence adored by Quakers
for being what it is:
one hour of
stillness,
severance from shopping lists, bills, boilers that break, dentists and doctors, Myself.
A time to consider Concerns:
war and poverty, unnatural disasters and other lunacies at which we chip hoping to uncover a saner-shaped world beneath.
90
Death
Death is not something
you meet face to face
at the end of your life. Death is always right behind you, following you from birth, tapping you on the shoulder, nipping at your heels, trying to overtake you,
until finally,
he does.
91
Á Deux
You must brace yourself before roaring off on a Harley-Davidson Softail Deuce, with its twin-cam balanced engine.
The Twomey effect, which applies to clouds, counts double for this great machine.
I don’t want to sound bipartisan,
but in a duel with any other bike
ne’er the twain
shall meet again.
(That’s a rhyming couplet for those who like their lines in tandem.) Then again, a pair of these hogs can form a duo upon the motorway to give you twice the danger. Yeah. Yeah.
92
Pickin’
When we were young we would go pickin’ hips and haws,
sloes from blackthorns, crab apples, blackberries from brambles, elderberries
to make wine, mushrooms from meadows, conkers to conquer, acorn cups
to make pixie pipes.
93
A Magical Morning
A magical winter morning:
the day of the first frost.
The pines have silver sheaths
and crab apples hang heavy
with shells of icing sugar. Fallen leaves have turned to glass and crackle underfoot. Everything glitters and sparkles
in the slanting winter sunshine. Overhead, the wide Suffolk sky
is blue, inlaid with white cloud. Somewhere in the trees, a bird sings: happy or sad I know not.
Cold, it is, but a cleansing cold.
A freshness is on the earth.
My skin feels alive to the wind’s touch and my heart is thin, light crystal. This is a fleeting gift.
94
Incense
These wraiths that waft around my room fill my head with formless dreams and lift me on a fragrant cloud
into a place devoid of schemes:
a touchless, edgeless, floating space that frees me from the human race.
95
Blondes
Blonde, blonde, blonde sends me high into beyond. Lovely Scandinavian girls send my wilding dreams in whirls. Debbie Harry, Dragon Lady, nothing dark, nothing shady, Goldie Hawn and Shelley Long: how my heart blooms into song. How I love the luminesces
of long golden, golden, tresses: Pony tails of sunlight’s rays send my mind into a daze. Carole Lombard, Sandra Dee, Doris Day and Grace Kel-ly – and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet, there is one who bests the best: my lovely, loving, blonde Annette.
96
Felixstowe – Dusk over the North Sea
Night is drifting softly in, beyond the distant strand
Way out there a cloud bank, becomes another land
Pale blue melds with deep blues, forming darker rays Here on the quiet hinterland the borough slowly greys
One by one sharp squares of light appear around the town And busy roads and noisy streets begin to settle down Then suddenly a coruscation, rids the dusk of scars Dockland cranes have sprung to light, festooned with feral stars Next a strumpet ship arrives of several thousand tonnes
A gaudy hussy who has spun her own bright web of suns She drifts on slowly, slowly past the watchers of the earth Careless of the many eyes that guide her to her berth Then the sky’s last pale-blue pools, seep silently away
Into the oil-dark ocean, to end the run of day.
97
Paintings by Annette Kilworth ‘Cranes by the River Li’ ‘Sally Lightfoot’
Cover art for ‘Tales from the Fragrant Harbour’ by kind permission of Vincent Chong
Kuala Lumpur Railway Station was licensed by iStock
My thanks for assistance go to: Tamzin and Dean Howell Keith Brooke
Cath Beacher Deborah and Peter Bush Robin and Glynis Moseley Mara McCaffrey
98