Jane Dougherty's Blog

The Oracle didn’t send this one, or if she did, it was without me consulting her. Life is so busy at present; I’m juggling too many projects, too many visitors, and several back issues over the last three weeks. Excuses, I know, so here is the poem I wrote for yesterday’s Broken Spine prompt (blood), topical for yesterday and today.

For this one night

Night dark is spangled and netted with stars,
crisp glitter, tears in our eyes,
the cry of an owl.

Almost I can believe I see beyond, to the place
that is always summer of plenty and laughter,
where love never fades.

In the wind that blows
between one year and the next,
I hear the whispered voices, never forgotten,
the soft tread of feet that know the way home,

and in the wavering candle flame,
sparks rising to confound themselves among the stars,
I feel the flutter of so many gentle hands.

As this blog is still gaining followers regularly, I am posting another change of address post. This blog is inactive because it has become unworkable. One by one the functions have broken down, and I have had to move to another location.

If you have enjoyed reading the posts here, please head over here (the link feature has disappeared) https://thefourswans.wordpress.com/category/all-posts/

The hyperlink quite possibly won’t be active, in which case, sorry, I tried.

This (bar technical disasters) is my last post on this blog. In the last few months the minor ‘glitches’ have got worse and now they are legion. The list is too long and tiresome to go into, but just posting has become hard work, and I have decided to emigrate.
There is too much baggage her to take with me, so words and pictures will stay here, a sort of museum, free entry and open all year round.
My new address is https://thefourswans.wordpress.com/
It would be nice to see you there.

Evening, hush

Flower meadow lies quiet
beneath waves of fescue,
feather-bannered stalks, rippling light,
in a south wind blowing,

and through the ceaseless
green-gold movement of growing,
I see white daisy, pink orchid faces
peering back from beneath the waves,
green-gold and rippling,

of the ocean meadow,
the bee-humming sea,
ceaselessly rolling
from hedge to sunset.

For the dverse prompt https://dversepoets.com/2023/05/23/an-artist-gets-his-due/
Inspired by Thorvald Hellesen’s 1914 portrait of Elvind Eckbo.

From the moral high ground

The military man, a structure of medals, sashes,
stiff bebraided collar, booted and belted,
poses, sword in hand for a looming war.

His gaze, fixed on the middle distance,
peers through canon smoke; he listens
to the screams of men and horses.

Look harder and he vacillates,
moral contradictions rocking the edifice
held together by gold and ribbons.

Look, how the middle distance,
the bloody, screaming smoke,
becomes unbearable,

and the unflinching war machine,
white-gloved, stiff upper-lipped,
turns his head, in pity or in shame.

A flight of beauty

I read Crow Gods in one, breathless sitting. Rather than a collection of poems, it reads like a single, sustained exploration of the emotions that link us to one another and the world we live in. There’s a tenderness to all these poems, those dedicated to family, children, memories naturally enough, but even in the humorous evocation of the drunk outside the pub in Obby Oss (and I didn’t need a translator’s note), in the frankly touching portrait of the farmer in Spirit, and in the quiet nobility of standing upright, keeping moving against the tide of illness, as in The crow gods and Fear and Courage.
The bird theme ties this collection together. From delicate goldfinches stitching us to the sky to the almost human rooks, with their black-clad elegance that is never entirely serious, their eavesdropping and mocking, gossipy laughter. Children are birds too, build their own nests, learn to fly but flock with family, never breaking away completely.
It is the tenderness that remains with me after reading and rereading these poems, the ease with which Sarah Connor, in a handful of simple, perfect words, gets so deep beneath the superficial, that she finds that elusive place of common human understanding. Sail is perhaps my favourite of all. The honesty of it makes me want to weep.

For the dverse prompt. https://dversepoets.com/2023/05/22/haibun-monday-5-22-23-memory/
The latest glitch with WP is that I can’t insert links. I also have to reset the font and the font size each post or it’s microscopic Times New Roman. Maybe it’s time to find a new hobby.

Haibun

I remember so much that never was, childish reconstructions of stories of how it was, re-imaginings so vivid they may as well be true, of emigrating across a dark grey sea, the old house on the hill, an army of my mother’s fellow art students making it habitable, the cast iron bath with eagle’s feet and steps to climb into it, playing with fox cubs on a moonlit lawn. Perhaps some memories subsist from infant times, embroidered by repetition of stories told. But how could you possibly remember that? In the end, does it really matter?

Yesterday was spring
and tomorrow will be too
blue, bird-loud and new.

I have never seen the canal in sunlight, never seen its water clear. Plane trees meet high overhead, holding up the unseen sky. Some see a green cathedral and hear angels singing. I see tree gods and hear a symphony of birdstruments, wild flutes, clarinets and oboes. There is no sun here, but an even, green light, and the water waits, still, dimpled with insects walking, and fish lips rising to kiss their feet.

The world has shrunk
this damp spring to still water
pooling at my feet.

Spring is

Spring is a bold thing, bramble-hooked,
barging into quiet corners,
sky-shooting, flouncing fronds.

Spring is noisy as whizzbangs,
scudding bees in the mimosa,
woodpecker tattoos.

Spring is joyously juvenile, striped,
flecked and dappled with sun,
pied and purple, a riot of life,

running in rivers of green
and flower-gaudy, flying with damsels
in the bowed arc of the rain.

She imagined the meadows set forever in pink and yellow and white, like cloisonné enamel work, with flocks of goldfinches and high-stepping deer, hares hiding low and foxes making tracks in the dark. They would not mow at high summer, leave the wild things alone. They could let saplings grow here and there and become trees, let the woodland spead and step prettily among the flowers. Some said without a cut, bramble would smother everything, an unholy mess. Others said it wouldn’t. Sometimes, she decided, the only thing to do is follow the dream and see what happens.