Monday Poem: Princess

Princess

I saw your dream, held in an open hand
offered to anyone who dared even pause
in that impatient busy city street.
I saw the dance on the wide-open stage
of your outstretched palm. I saw a desire
to live for happily ever after
like the end of so many fairy tales.

But princes are rarely handsome these days.
Princesses like you are lucky to find
even these bare handfuls of happiness,
only in dreams held out in open palms
by the side of indifferent pavements.
And the song you sing is lost once again
left to drown in the crowded rushing roar.

Monday Poem: The Note

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

The Note

The note is held, there,
in the centre of the still room.
It seems even breathing stopped.

As though that one note
holds all living pulses
within its own bounds.

It fades, slowly to silence
like a snowflake falling
down on warm ground.

Fading, disappearing
and - finally - completely lost.
And breathing returns.

The heart remembers
its own particular rhythm
and blood starts to flow.

I look at you
as you look at me
as we both acknowledge

all notes come to an end
and all ends in silence.

Waltzing’s For Dreamers

There is a leader in The Grauniad, praising Richard Thompson, to which I’ve added the following comment:

By your mid-teens - if you have any intelligence and soul - you are already heartily sick of the twee banality of pop music. So you move on to rock, then by your mid-twenties at the latest you ought to have realised that rock's pompous self-aggrandising cod-Romanticism is just as hollow as the pop you left behind....

Except....

There are a bare handful of true artists who sit - often uncomfortably - almost within touching distance of that pile of detritus. People like Van Morrison, Dylan, Springsteen, Zevon and a few others like Richard Thompson. Most of them operate around the edges; get called a cult and a well-kept secret and so on.

You would like them to get more success, get the rewards they undoubtedly deserve, but then you see what happens to those that get the success - are they made bland by the success, or are they successful because they are bland?

I remember reading somewhere that only the mediocre can have true mass appeal - and it is obviously true when you think about it - and one thing Richard Thompson could never be is mediocre.

Monday Poem: Kneeling

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

Kneeling

I turn back towards
a ghost of memory.
On some sun-defined morning
I could have found her there,
kneeling by a limpid rock pool
holding her long black hair
back with one hand,
as she stared, still,
into the deep of the pool
seeking through light-sharpened water
for some significant shell or stone.

Collective Failure

Reem Maghribi on The Grauniad’s Cif says ‘Cultural and religious groups should not be addressed collectively but as individuals who have a vote and a voice within a democracy.’

Here is my comment on it:

This is - quite obviously - why 'the left' has failed. At first it believed the myth of the class war, but when it discovered that the 'working class' did not act as one homogeneous group following the path the liberal middle-class laid out for it, when it found that collectivism could not work, the left began to cast around for other groupings; women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and now religious groupings and so forth that it could claim to 'represent'. All this too has failed as this article points out in the case of treating all those of one religion as one.
Collectivism is the problem, never the solution.

Monday Poem: Flying

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

Flying

I hoped to break free soon, and learn then how to soar
on up toward the bluest skies and, reaching out,
forever taking handfuls from the empty air.

I searched for that one place I could see all the sky
forever arcing overhead, and catch a glimpse
of those who learnt the perfect art of flying free.

But all our greying skies are empty dreams these days.

I want to step beyond the edge, where pleading eyes
cannot attempt to drag me back to fall on down,
as we always do end up, falling slowly down.

I feel desire to fly, but don't know how to dare.
Instead, I wander deserts, past skeletal frames
of those who fell down from the unforgiving sky.

I see the empty hands that once almost took hold,
that grasped, imploring, reaching for the distant skies,
now only bony brittle sticks just thrusting up
from underneath these piles of heaping dusty sand.

So now, I only watch the dust, and how it falls,
and settles slowly down again, after each step
I take towards my home. And how, in time, the sands
will shift and bury all these dreams that used to soar.