Choice gem from my facebook chats: it's a WINNER...

My response to the simple question, "hows things?":

"goood. busy. working on a funding application for barefoot in the park. and musical's got a song structure! as has my set of performance poems. SO everything's chugging along nicely...
like an oversized, pregnant steam engine waiting to burst its guts across the rails."


Where did this come from? I could probably psychoanalyse, and say the steam train stems from my father's love of trainspotting, and the pregnancy from how swollen my brain feels at the moment from the excessive number of activities I'm involving myself in..... But that would ruin all the work of the image in the first place. Dayyym.

Oswald's Pale Persicaria is Up Here

I've just read Alice Oswald's poem "Pale Persicaria", from her newly-Ted Hughes' award-winning collection Weeds and Wild Flowers. It's beautiful, and really resonated with a poem I wrote recently, called Up Here, just below this blogpost.

Especially the fourth stanza, with its daintily optimistic, intangible, delicate frustration:

"Smoke-faint floating hope
Impatient hope. Immense
lustless listless wishfulness
under her angle-poise heart."

In fact, there are so many lines I want to snap up like a dragon and hoard for future enjoyment. So here are the first two stanzas, for sneaky future peeks -

"In a ditch by the roadside,
full of sorrow sleepless,
under her breath, encouraging herself,
hands clasped in hope, long fingers.

No openings, no outlets in her eyes.
Lit dimly from within,
enclosed in longing.
It's dark in love. No sign. Still waiting."


FYI, I read the poem through this fab facebook application:

http://apps.facebook.com/fiftytwopoems/

P.S. I have to say, that checking out a cheeky photo of the flower itself on Google, it's not quite as delightful as Alice Oswald's poem. But I guess that's what the imagination is for!