Sunday 5 July 2015

Postcard 6 from Marseillan: Passing Thoughts and Copper Pans.




Being on holiday, unwinding and getting back into mental shape leads to a kind of transient reflection that finds its way into my notebook with various thoughts and inspirations  scattered across various pages.
After making a drawing of some lovely copper pans D found at the bricolage, I gathered a few of these thoughts together last night and put them together in a series of short lines.
These make not-quite-a-poem just as my paintings make not-quite-a-picture.

Here goes:

How do I know that I am
more than my generation
more than my actions
more than my present self?

Under a gibbous* moon
I was thinking of Barbara –
how she would love this
soft wind from the south
how she would relish the sound
of the  sea as it surges up
from Africa and the far south
Of course she did not know these things, except
for the globe in the front room of
her terraced house, haunted
by debt and the urgency of existence.

A bright star follows
the north star of my imagination,
surviving in this sub-blue sky,
charting my affections above
the curling red roofs in this
village by the Mediterranean

The moon here shines
down on the shadow-play
of palm trees, tall pines and
rustling bamboo, all
filtered by the warm Siroccan wind.

Beyond all this I hear the bark of dogs,
the song of birds, the hungry cry of wolves
the clatter of armour clad feet, beneath
the insistent shimmer of the North Star,
pointing the way home.







* The word gibbous comes from a root word that means hump-backed. You can see the hump-backed shape of the waxing gibbous moon.


No comments:

Post a Comment

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...