Authors Electric

First of all, thank you so much Griselda Hamway, for gifting me this date when I'd failed to blog on 20th. Our very much loved choir leader, Pauline, died recently. She’s had inoperable brain tumours. One afternoon soon after her diagnosis, I shared this poem with her.  CONSERVATION OF MATTER I am closer, now, to my after than I am to my before. This lively mass of atoms I now know as ‘me’, was here at the beginning; scattered after the Bang, then gathering, dispersing, re-grouping times out of mind, shapes out of imagining: Slime-mould, starlight, dormouse, willow tree, man, beast, parasite, building block, blade of grass, hover fly, china clay, drop in the ocean, grape-pip, earthworm, raincloud, prickle, soot – and when I break, dissolve, when I am no longer me – the atoms will re-form to be slime-mould, starlight, dormouse, willow tree? I wrote it to comfort myself and was so relieved and pleased that it comforted her too – and she asked me ...

January, named for Janus the two-faced god: the traditional time to look back and look forward. For me, he can close his eyes on 2023, which wasn’t the best year by a long chalk. We had bereavements of a particularly painful kind – the sudden and unexpected deaths of very dear friends we had shared most of our lives with, who died within days of each other. Then there were various ‘bits dropping off’ – old age galloping on apace!  Sonnet: Old Age I saw you from a distance in those days The days of carefree, self-regarding youth The days when ‘how I want it’ stood for truth Your world unfocussed in my shortened gaze   What were false teeth, what walking sticks, grey hair? What was a ‘span’ of three-score years and ten? Beyond a fleeting frisson now and then Your presence was ignored: not my affair.   But since I have long passed the given span My vision is corrected, no short sight Can help me to avoid your company You’re here now. First you crawl...

‘Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.’ This quote was recently posted on Facebook and attributed to Albert Einstein, but such attributions tend to be random. I don’t know where it comes from, but I like it – especially now I’m so old in years I can hardly believe it. It chimes with a poem I’ve known for years but now can’t find, which, after a catalogue of sorrowful things, contains the lines ‘still let me live as love and life were one. Still let me turn on Earth a childlike gaze and trust the whispered charities that bring tidings of human comfort. Still let me raise on wintry wrecks an altar to the spring.’ I’m not even sure I’ve got it right, but I think the sentiment is clear, and like the Einstein(?) quote, it invites us to seek joy and trust and wonder. If that’s childlike, I’ll take it. It is much needed in these times. Being childlike rather than childish informed much o...

  Oysgeshsternt is a Yiddish word. It means crowded with stars. I heard it recently at the Purbeck International Chamber Music Festival as part of their Forgotten Voices programme. I love it – the programme and the word. We stayed on after the concerts had ended and had a few more days walking around various beautiful places in that part of Dorset, including the church at Moreton with its etched-glass windows by Whistler.   We’ve not been back home long, and I am spun out and all out of ideas, so having started with oysgeshsternt, I’ll go on with a theme of heavenly bodies and share some poems about the night sky and various planets. I’m not sure it fits with what Authors Electric is about, but it is the best I can do for now.  SKY-WATCHING   Out in the street as the evenings drew in that time between supper and bed, we lay flat on our backs, looking up at the sky,   naming constellations, tracking the moon from sickle blade to dinner plate, ...