turning time’s green page /
beech and oak edged with gold-leaf: /
read to me of fall /
Words and image © Lizzie Ballagher
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Swifts and Swallows
These small birds are feeding now on the wing before their long journey south to Africa. You might just see the blurred flash of a swallow in the centre of this recent photo – far quicker than the shutter!
hungry beaks open
fast wings outfly their bodies:
swallows hunting prey
© Words and image Lizzie Ballagher
Japanese Anemones
A Japanese haiku for this lovely late-summer flower, I think!
flower flurry five-
petalled pink perfection—stars
low as my shoulders
Words and both images © Lizzie Ballagher
Blogging for Dear Life
Driven out by war, forced marriage, famine, political and physical oppression, the migrants of the Mediterranean have slipped from view: not only beneath the waves, but also from news headlines. Numbers of those who died in their attempt to make the perilous crossing reached over 5,000 during 2016 alone. But the disaster and the horror go on; already, at the time of writing (August 1st, 2017), the number stands above 2,380 for this year.
Many NGOs are working hard and with broad financial support to rescue and help the refugees. It’s not hard to name them: the Red Cross, Caritas International, Christian Aid, UNICEF, CAFOD, Oxfam, CTBI…I am bound to have missed many. But will such interventions be enough? I have no answers, for sure; yet when I stop to think about what’s happening, I have to do something.
This poem, “Not Walking on Water”, is one of the somethings I’m trying to do. Last year I read about the Sicilian carpenter Francesco Tuccio and was struck by how one small person doing one small thing could change so much in a wide and watery landscape, as well as in the interior landscape of the many who are contributing practically and financially to relief work in the Mediterranean.
Not Walking on Water © Lizzie Ballagher
Because they could not walk on salty water,
The Mediterranean drank them in hundreds.
Then swallowed hard. Few
Survived.
Print truth:
Sharp death.
Because they could not walk on salty water,
They drank the Mediterranean in hundreds
And drowned in the dark.
They died.
Blunt truth:
Stark bed—
And all because of greedy men
In leaky fishing boats,
In dinghies with outboard motors,
Who abandoned them on salty water,
Turned away, their ruthless pockets filled with money—
Or sailed by on the other side.
Yet there was a carpenter,
A plain man in Lampedusa,
Francesco Tuccio, who, walking the beach,
Found washed-up driftwood—
Flaking-paint flotsam of a thousand vessels—
Timbers of the boats that sank.
Weeping, he took and fashioned some of them
Into a battered cross of welcome, of hope for migrants:
Not nicely planed but bashed together,
Rough wood,
Unvarnished—
Grave truth.
Rugged, the Lampedusa Cross stands sentinel
Now in a wealthy capital, where weeping pilgrims
Keep on coming: to see not jewel-decked marquetry
But coarse-grained carpentry; to fall to their knees on the gallery floor—
Even as migrants keep on coming in their leaky boats
And fall to their knees on Italy’s shore.
By good grace Francesco makes more crosses,
Their lamps of anguish flashing across our benighted continent.
Let them teach us to show more mercy,
Teach us to offer at the very least a cup of sweet water.
These crosses: surely they will drive some nails of pity into us,
Shine some splinters, shafts of light into our darkness.
Oh, blunt yet sharp-toothed truth:
The heartless death of brothers and sisters—
Even as all of us are drowning. © Lizzie Ballagher
This image of Francesco Tuccio’s Lampedusa Cross is © Trustees of the British Museum only.
This image of Francesco Tuccio’s Lampedusa Cross is © Trustees of the British Museum only.
Iceland’s Gullfoss
Iceland (during the week of the midnight sun) has won my heart. There was bound to be a poem…this time about Iceland’s Golden Falls (in Icelandic, Gullfoss).
Gullfoss
Rain drives into my face horizontally,
plasters my hair to my head,
bounces back to drench
ankles, shoes:
rain from sky, from earth, and more rain
(as if water were needed
when the cataract of thunderous Gullfoss
rushes,
gushes,
surges thick and in a roar).
Before I reach the scarp-staired falls
on surreal, nightmare flights of wooden steps
I am soaked
silenced
newly alive…
Water curls, rolls up, around and over,
veils all in gossamer,
in gauze and the haze
of water-mist, then,
magnificent,
drops.
© Lizzie Ballagher
Image © Lizzie Ballagher
Another memory – of my grandmother’s house
My grandmother lived during most of my childhood in East Sussex, southern England. We often visited her for a few days in her old cottage (which, sadly, is no longer standing); and in this poem I recall one of the memories I have of her house.
Pantry
On the north side of Granny’s house
A timbered door was always shut,
Wrought iron latch dropped neatly in its heavy catch.
The silent message was loudly eloquent:
Do not enter. But we had to know
Its mysteries, the marvels beyond that threshold.
So when her back was turned
We crept along the polished passageway
Treading softly as we could, barefoot,
Then two stone steps down
To the icy dimness of quarry tiles
And piles and banks and ranks
Of jellies and jams, hams and jars of Seville marmalade
All tightly sealed with wax, perhaps
Beside a loaf of new-baked bread or dome of cheese—
Don’t let the mice in please—
All just barely visible in fitful light
That filtered through the wire-mesh fly-screen
Over a granite slab
Where, sometimes, in spite of Granny’s
Industrious housewifery, tidy domesticity,
The summer rain came slanting in.
© Lizzie Ballagher
Memories Without Words
Before Words
Before there were words,
Before trees & flowers & birds
Had names
And under morning’s first holy light,
I played below juniper trees
In dry brown dust where no rain fell.
Then scrambled out
To where my mother bent, planting lupins
In the fine damp loam
A rake’s length away:
Lupin leaves studded with rain beads
At their hearts.
I had no words, no names
For the soft rosettes of leaves
Or the junipers’ incense:
Just the wonder of diamonds on greenness,
With trees’ fronds brushing my face—
The heaven of their scent floating round me.
Some say
We have no memory
Until we have vocabulary.
And yet, a mystery:
Before words,
I do remember.
© Words, Lizzie Ballagher. Images: with thanks to Pinterest.
Lupins found in a cultivated bed in Tekoa, Washington
The tricky business of finding a (print) publisher
No craft is learned quickly.
Old wisdom declares that it’s an insipid thing that falls into place too easily. All the same, I still hope (growing greyer by the week) to find a publisher one day for my poems. Meanwhile, I just keep writing. To the select band of followers of this blog: thank you for your encouragement, wheresoever you may be!
Even So
Like a wren without its mate
Singing against the darkness of a late spring dawn
And trusting that another bird may hear,
may yet reply;
Or like a wife on the harbour wall alone,
Yearning for a shadow on the summer sea,
Who waits in weary hope for the fisherman’s return:
For the curved white bow of his sail,
the heave and haul of silver darlings;
Or like a thirsty, burnt-out farmer
Squinting at the ruthless sky to spy
A speck or fleecy strand of cloud
Promising longed-for rain—autumn’s relief
Over wilted wheat & drooping barley,
over shrivelled yields & pod-cracked fields;
Or like that old beloved chestnut mare
They kept for kindness’ sake,
Believing she was barren,
Who wickers for joy at the winter hay-net,
Nudging twin colts as they nuzzle her:
The first soft-eyed foals on stilted legs
she ever bore.
So, even so, I set these poems before you.
And while only the frailest faith survives:
that a pair will be born to a barren mare,
that drying grain will know sweet rain,
that love will burn on a seafarer’s return,
that—like the music of all the love-lorn
in the greenwood’s darkest springtime morn—
these poems may take wings and fly,
I shall continue writing by and by.
Words and image © Lizzie Ballagher
Wind Energy
Of Time & Tide – fifth in a series of new posts
V Winds of Change 2001 – 2017 AD
Bound for global warming,
Men come with granite dug from primordial days,
Banking up the shifting cliffs with boulders,
Invading, though without a cruel conquest:
Without even the whispered prayers of hopeful hearts.
A new army marches here:
The London Array that walks on water,
On currents of roiling, seething change,
Feet treading deep in London clay,
White-bladed arms ever threshing slowly, slowly.
If the wind, the tide, cannot be beaten
(So say the runes of our present race)
In every place the tide must now be bridled,
The great winds’ horsepower harnessed,
Wild waves’ spirits saved, enslaved:
Not by the captive land above the advancing cliffs,
Nor by plainsong in flickering, echoing darkness,
Nor (they think) by the wing & breath of God;
But by smaller, new-wrought strongholds
Raised beyond the Roman fort, beyond the monks’ two towers,
Raised up with new-found music: the song of wind
In wind-turbines bestriding the scrolling & unrolling inky sea.
Words and images © Lizzie Ballagher
Another New Year: the mystery of future time
How can we know what’s ahead in 2017, or indeed in any year? We can’t, but time (the enemy, as some call it) can also be merciful. As I approach the mystery of another new year, I do so as much with hope and comfort as with doubt.
Of Time & Tide: fourth in a series of new posts: here’s another Reculver poem for the first day of January. May the fog lift to bring hopeful, joyful and peaceful days!
IV Sea Fog 1805 – 1945 AD
Bound for oblivion,
Walls crack, heave up, subside, give way.
Tower windows widen like vacant eyes—
No one now watching the derelict Wantsum—
Just shafts of sky above the boiling tide.
Today’s towers stand, though broken,
As tokens & signs for sailors & airmen.
Two thousand winters of history,
Two thousand cloaks of summer weeds
Settle like sea fog over the ruins.
Words and image copyright © Lizzie Ballagher
