A Sweet Unrest

Their giggling progress

I am addicted to Instagram - it's kind of like Twitter only with pictures so there's no worry about spelling/being witty, making it perfect for parents of young children and other perennially exhausted individuals.  I also recently learned how to make nifty photo collages on my phone.  Here you see the result of my two new pastimes.  You might notice the prominence of glitter nail polish, an emergency measure after the sad thoughts of last week.  Similar to tea, there is no situation glitter nail polish can't improve.  

And the same is true of favorite books.  Edwin Morgan's The Second Life is one my new (poetry-era) favorites and it's got everything, all the big things, but I have been resting my eyes on this sweet, simple snapshot.

Linoleum Chocolate by Edwin Morgan

Two girls running
running laughing,
laughing lugging
two rolls of linoleum
along London Road-
a bar of chocolate
flies from the pocket
of the second, and a man
picks it up for her, she takes it
and is about to pocket it
but then unwraps it
and the girls have a bite
to recruit the strength
of their giggling progress.

The Second Life is out of print but many of the poems are in this.

 

(post) Burns Night

Because of this and that here at HQ we're a bit tardy with our traditional Burns Night celebrations but I'd rather arrive late than miss the party completely.  This episode of the Guardian Books podcast talks about the new Robert Burns museum in Ayrshire and features a lovely, lovely recitation of To A Mouse by Scotland's newest Makar Liz Lochhead which starts at about 23:50 and is well worth listening to even if you don't have time for the whole podcast.  This poem contains one of Burns' most famous lines-

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

and she recites it with such feeling but a certain touching lightness too, it's very moving when she gets to this part through the end.

And then I thought I might go off the track a little bit and share a poem from Scotland's previous Makar, Edwin Morgan, who died last August and who has become an absolute favorite of mine.  His work hasn't been the easiest thing to track down but with every yellowed dusty four dollar volume that arrives over the water thanks to the magic of Abebooks I love him a little bit more.

Love by Edwin Morgan

Love rules. Love laughs. Love marches. Love
        is the wolf that guards the gate.
Love is the food of music, art, poetry. It
        fills us and fuels us and fires us to create.
Love is terror. Love is sweat. Love is bashed
        pillow, crumpled sheet, unenviable fate.
Love is the honour that kills and saves and nothing
        will ever let that high ambiguity abate.
Love is the crushed ice that tingles and shivers
        and clinks fidgin-fain for the sugar-drenched
        absinth to fall on it and alter its state.
             With love you send a probe
             So far from the globe
No one can name the shoals the voids the belts the
        zones the drags the flares it signals all to
        leave all and to navigate.

There aren't many things that could follow that but this can, and it wouldn't be Burns Night for me without it, and anyway I was an Eddi Reader fan long before I was a poetry girl and she was the reason I gave Burns any thought at all back in those days.  This is an achingly beautiful version of one of Burns' most famous songs. 

Human Chain

 

I'd heard (via my Twitter feed) (for reals) that Seamus Heaney gave a moving reading from his latest book at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August, so I was very much looking forward to reading it.  And I have, and what I related to most was the sense of loss running through it. 

From Route 110

 

vi

It was the age of ghosts.  Of hand-held flashlamps.
Lights moving at a distance scried for who
And why: whose wake, say, in which house on the road

In that direction - Michael Mulholland's the first
I attended as a full participant,
Sitting up until the family rose

Like strangers to themselves and us.  A wake
Without the corpse of their own dear ill-advised
Sonbrother swimmer, lost in the Bristol Channel.

For three nights we kept conversation going
Around the waiting trestles.  By the fourth
His coffin, with the lid on, was in place.

 

vii

The corpse house then a house of hospitalities
Right through the small hours, the ongoing card game
Interrupted constantly by rounds

Of cigarettes on plates, biscuits, cups of tea,
The antiphonal recital of known events
And others rare, clandestines, undertoned.

Apt pupil in their night school, I walked home
On the last morning, my clothes as smoke-imbued
As if I'd fed a pyre, accompanied to the gable

By the mother, to point out a right of way
Across their fields, into our own back lane,
And absolve me thus formally of trespass. 

 

You can listen to his entire talk here.  He reads several of his poems from Human Chain and one by Edwin Morgan as well.

 

 

Strawberries

 

Suddenly it's very hot.  I spent all afternoon in the garden, with my toes in the plastic kiddie pool as my babies splashed about.  

Anyway, how about an old* favorite?

Strawberries by Edwin Morgan

There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open french window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air
in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates

 

 

 

*(I've only been reading poetry for about two-and-a-half years so as old as that, this was in the second anthology I ever bought)