A sugar mouse
Off to the gym this morning, where I was fully inducted by a nice lady called Jess wearing spangly eye makeup. She showed me how to use all the machines and weights without making me feel like a weed. Nice to actually talk to someone friendly there, and I really enjoyed my session.
The Pens & Lens anthology from Guernsey, arrived today having been sent me by Richard Fleming. Only one poem per contributor, but my poem The Remembering Cliffs is the first one you see, being on page three (although they've numbered the collection strangely so I appear on p2) opposite a poem in Guernésiais I've never seen before by Hélier D'Rocquione. Very pleased by this publication, out of all proportion to the collection's circulation, simply because it is a poem about Guernsey published there. Some rather good work in it too. Richard's poem Funeral at Torteval ends in a lovely way.
The hedgerow birds, today, seem dumb
as one by one the black cars leave;
you by your crumpled father's side,
comforting him, holding his sleeve,
so full of fragile grace, dry-eyed.
The heart beats now a mourning drum.
The rest of the day spent writing and about 40 minutes playing the Bonetti game. I must be simple minded, but something about seeing the kitten carrying the ball back to me cracks me up every time.
I'd been invited by old school mate Anil to his girlfriend Amanda's party this evening. Lorraine and I went to it (after a cheeky meal). Turns out that everyone else was dressed as a cat. Anil particularly fetching, I thought, in black cats ears and a bib of wooly white hair topped by a bow tie. He also occasionally sported a tail. Quite a bit of chatting with him on many and diverse subjects, and several other pleasant people. Ate a sugar mouse, which I had never done before. And then headed home with Lorraine on a massive sugar rush.
The Remembering Cliffs
The cliffs are full of faces, great granite heads
Petrified just as they lifted from sleep.
Stone heads of Martello towers, blank looks
From the concrete helmets of German gun emplacements
Now so assimilated with the granite and the gorse
That they have lost their particular history.
These cliffs are full of faces, a cliffpath walk
Inevitably winds back into past summers
Bringing to mind voices in the wind, my family
Talking as they walked the remembering cliffs.
It is a haunted coastline and every time a corner's turned
I meet my recollection of those who walked here.
I meet myself as a child who thought God had been born
Floating face down in these waters
His face big as a cliff's face, His body a small island.
It was an untaught myth; my secret belief
And life must have teemed about Him like the wrasse
And the gulls and the mackerel crowding close to these cliffs.
The cliffs are full of faces that stare out to find Him
And I stare too - through the slits and cracks
Of my fortified disbelief, of my adulthood,
Into his comforting presence - into the sea.
Now the sea seems part of a once-swollen certainty
That has yearly drawn away like a lowering tide.
Peter Kenny
Off to the gym this morning, where I was fully inducted by a nice lady called Jess wearing spangly eye makeup. She showed me how to use all the machines and weights without making me feel like a weed. Nice to actually talk to someone friendly there, and I really enjoyed my session.
The Pens & Lens anthology from Guernsey, arrived today having been sent me by Richard Fleming. Only one poem per contributor, but my poem The Remembering Cliffs is the first one you see, being on page three (although they've numbered the collection strangely so I appear on p2) opposite a poem in Guernésiais I've never seen before by Hélier D'Rocquione. Very pleased by this publication, out of all proportion to the collection's circulation, simply because it is a poem about Guernsey published there. Some rather good work in it too. Richard's poem Funeral at Torteval ends in a lovely way.
The hedgerow birds, today, seem dumb
as one by one the black cars leave;
you by your crumpled father's side,
comforting him, holding his sleeve,
so full of fragile grace, dry-eyed.
The heart beats now a mourning drum.
The rest of the day spent writing and about 40 minutes playing the Bonetti game. I must be simple minded, but something about seeing the kitten carrying the ball back to me cracks me up every time.
I'd been invited by old school mate Anil to his girlfriend Amanda's party this evening. Lorraine and I went to it (after a cheeky meal). Turns out that everyone else was dressed as a cat. Anil particularly fetching, I thought, in black cats ears and a bib of wooly white hair topped by a bow tie. He also occasionally sported a tail. Quite a bit of chatting with him on many and diverse subjects, and several other pleasant people. Ate a sugar mouse, which I had never done before. And then headed home with Lorraine on a massive sugar rush.
The Remembering Cliffs
The cliffs are full of faces, great granite heads
Petrified just as they lifted from sleep.
Stone heads of Martello towers, blank looks
From the concrete helmets of German gun emplacements
Now so assimilated with the granite and the gorse
That they have lost their particular history.
These cliffs are full of faces, a cliffpath walk
Inevitably winds back into past summers
Bringing to mind voices in the wind, my family
Talking as they walked the remembering cliffs.
It is a haunted coastline and every time a corner's turned
I meet my recollection of those who walked here.
I meet myself as a child who thought God had been born
Floating face down in these waters
His face big as a cliff's face, His body a small island.
It was an untaught myth; my secret belief
And life must have teemed about Him like the wrasse
And the gulls and the mackerel crowding close to these cliffs.
The cliffs are full of faces that stare out to find Him
And I stare too - through the slits and cracks
Of my fortified disbelief, of my adulthood,
Into his comforting presence - into the sea.
Now the sea seems part of a once-swollen certainty
That has yearly drawn away like a lowering tide.
Peter Kenny
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