Who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Last week we found a copy of A Poem For Every Night Of The Year at a charity shop. What a find indeed! L. and I have been playing a game where he chooses a day of the year (“the last day of the year,” “my birthday,” “next Thursday”) and I read the appropriate poem. Oh, what wholesome fun we do have around here. This poem, which even mentions our own fair silver city, was the poem of the day on which we bought the book. It’s a great one to read aloud, with its metre reminiscent of a train slowing in the cities and speeding through countryside.

The Night Mail, by W.H. Auden

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Thro’ sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver’s eye upon the gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms
Fed by the fireman’s restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails
Thro’ southern uplands with northern mails. Winding up the valley to the watershed,
Thro’ the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

You can also listen to it here… sounds like spoken word, don’t you think?

Three things: Garden, berries, and birthday (and break)

This is my favourite view of my garden at the moment. I only see it if I am hanging out laundry (and, being in Scotland, this is not often), or when I intentionally go and stand in this spot specifically for the view. You can see it is not a big garden–I am in one corner, and the opposite corner is very close to the metal grid in the background–but man, I am so grateful for this piece of earth. I cannot believe that only 18 months ago it was entirely covered in gravel and plastic. Now birds come and steal my herbs to make nests with, worms hide in the soil, and we stuff our faces with slightly-under-ripe berries. There’s still so much work to be done… but there always will be. That’s why we garden, right?

Berries! I may have eaten my weight in berries this week. We have a not-so-secret spot to forage raspberries , and each time we visit we each eat so many that we swear we will not return… but we do a couple of days later when the next layer of berries have ripened and we’ve forgotten about our sore tummies. Raspberries are my favourite fruit of all time, but blaeberries (wild blueberries) are getting up there too. We did our first blaeberry hunt of the year this week and were rewarded with more than enough for a big batch of pancakes. We also go for the view. The heather is blooming and the rowans look so magical. On the downside, the low bushes are very easy for a 1.5 year old blueberry picking child to get lost in.

I’m one of those rare people who likes to inform people of it being my birthday. Not in advance, but on the day it actually is. That said, my birthday is tomorrow. Which still gives you time to post a card into my letter box. But I don’t expect you to, and that is why I usually don’t say anything until the day itself. This year is a special one, as I was born in the Year of the Rooster. The personality stuff attributed to these signs makes absolutely no sense to me, but I do like the fact I am in a gang with people who are separated by 12 (and multiples of) years from me. I am celebrating by heading to beautiful Edinburgh for a few days with my family and there we will eat a lot of Malaysian food, hike up Arthur’s Seat, visit the zoo, drink coffee, and wander the streets looking for mischief. Hope you enjoy my birthday too!

I should also mention, I’m going to be taking another blogging break. I’ll be away from my computer a lot in the next couple of weeks. So see you in a while!

Haiku-sday: Reflected light

Wet fuchsia leaves

scatter the six o’clock sun

across the ceiling.

Pairing up the scattered shoes

My second Louise Erdrich book of the year–LaRose. The story is gripping, and a part of the gripping-ness is wondering how the characters will shape up too.

Landreaux opened the door and LaRose ran straight past him, clutching his stuffed creature, shouting for his mom. Landreaux turned back to wave good-bye but Peter had quickly swung back out onto the road. Landreaux closed the aluminum storm door and then pushed the wooden door shut behind it. To see LaRose and Emmaline fly together would hurt so he bent over by the mud rug and took a long time pairing up the scattered shoes and setting them in lines. When he finally came to them, his long arms dangling, they were talking about how to use a potato peeler. 

LaRose sat down at the table by the window, in feeble winter sunlight. The edges of the storm window were thick with frost. Steam had frozen in gray fuzz upon the sides and sills. He peeled the potato skin awy from himself, bit by skimpy bit, onto a plastic plate. Emmaline shook chunks of meat in a bag with flour, then pinched up each chunk and dropped it carefully into hot grease. The cast-iron skillet was smooth and light from fifty years of hard use. Her mother had left it. 

Landreaux sat across the table and opened out the  rest of the newspaper. The rustling it made caused him to notice his hands were lightly trembling. (pp. 88-9)

Three things: Holidays, flower film, and a sense of humour

Summer holidays started this week and we’ve been having a nice time going about at our own pace. Only one day so far has seemed like hard work–the one that started with an entire bucket of water spilt in the hallway (‘I just was taking it through for my Lego submarine…’). So, not bad stats, so far. Today we met up with friends at the nearby woods and stuffed our faces with wild raspberries, whacked nettles with sticks, and made this wee mandala. A perfect morning concluded with a joyful walk home in the rain.

Have you seen this beautiful short animation, The Secret Life of Flowers?

This lovely poem.

Swan song

En pointe a feather spins.

Past gossamer treetops it flickers, through

a web of powerlines, down–straight down–a few feet

in front of our car. It teeters a moment and,

its point slipping out from under itself,

sways to the ground between our car and the one in front,

like it is now actually dead, and not simply birdless.

 

We’ve been stuck at these lights now for five minutes,

and the block ahead is jammed. The baby

is cranky. I’m impatient. Then there’s this feather,

this determined, delicate feather

dancing with enough weight as it takes to stop time.

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things

I came across this hopeful poem again today…

God’s Grandeur, by Gerard Manly Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.