Blogger, traveller, poet, indie publisher – 'I am the Cat who walks by herself, and all places are alike to me'
I was going to write something serious today, but this happened:
There are jobs I don’t mind doing,
and some I can’t be bothered.
I’m an independent woman
but I’ll take help when it’s offered.Now in these troubled days, we all
must help our blighted nation,
and I wouldn’t put my friends at risk
in times of isolation.
So I thought I’d cut my hedge alone
Linda Rushby 26 April 2020
to prove that I am able
and this is how much I got done
before I cut the cable.
I woke.
It was dark.I thought I would get up
and walk to the sunrise.
I stayed in my bed
and listened to the radio.We all skate on the surface.
We walk on the knife edge.Don’t look down,
don’t look back.
Shit happens,
keep smiling.
See the bright side.
half-full.
Stop thinking.
Stop doing.You’ll never do enough.
You’ll never be
good enough.
You’re half full,
half empty.Sun rises,
sun sets.
Moon wanes,
moon returns.
Spring rolls
into summer.This is all there is.
Linda Rushby 24 April 2020
Don’t fall off the edge,
Don’t shatter the glass.
Now the words are coming and I can’t stop them – however banal, however dark. Why don’t I just ignore them? Why do I need to write them out? What happens if I don’t? I’m sure I’ve written about this before, somewhere back in the past, in the morass of words I’ve written and then never read again. Do all those unwritten words fester somewhere in the back of my mind? Things that go rotten do one of two things: they infect what’s around them and spread the rot, or they make compost for other things to grow in. What about my thoughts, my words? Which way do they go? Maybe both – but which predominates? They don’t seem to have borne much fruit so far.
Part of me thinks that writing them out helps in a way, it’s therapeutic, it helps to defuse those thoughts – maybe (but they still come back). There might be some value in writing them. But then, what about the next step, is there any point in trying to share them? What is that compulsion that makes me think it’s a good idea? Who reads them, and who of those really hears them, who responds, who finds them interesting, who is repelled by them, who ignores them and moves on? Anybody?
I want to be clear that none of this is directly related to the current situation. They’re just thoughts that come to me even in the best of times (and anyway, as I’ve said, these last few weeks of inactivity have suited me quite well.) Maybe the self-imposed pressure to write poetry has influenced the form that my thoughts are taking in terms of presenting themselves in lines and stanzas, I’m not sure – and the chain of connections from thinking that way, to writing them out, to blogging about them, and so on. Maybe.
Things have happened in the wrong order today. If I’d got up when I woke, at 4.30, how much would I have done already? At least, I would have had breakfast and gone for a walk to the sea. At 5.30 I checked the time for sunrise, and found it was 5.50, so only twenty minutes to get up, dress, make a flask of coffee and get there. I stayed in bed and listened to a play on podcast. Then got up and wrote. No coffee, shower, cat-feeding, yoga/tai chi, breakfast – just this drivel.
Naked in my bathroom,
water dripping from the ends of my hair.
The boiler gurgles as the tank refills
and the words in my head tumble over each other.‘Write us!’ they screech.
‘You know you want to!’
I bat them away.Why can I write nothing solid and finished?
Why do I care for these meddlesome words
which cluster around me like hungry gnats?‘Write!’ say my friends.
‘You know you want to!
We know you can do it!
We all want to read it!’So I write and I write,
but how can I judge it?
The things that I write are just worms in my mind
eating their way through my head to the surface
until they emerge at the awkwardest moments.So what do I do?
Linda Rushby 23 April 2020
Grab a towel and a coffee,
sit down at the keyboard,
and write the bastards out into daylight.
After pontificating about poetry in general before I’d had my breakfast, I just came up with two tongue-in-cheek poems one after another while sitting in the garden.
I decided to share this one as today’s contribution and keep the other one in hand for another day!
Power Tools
My neighbour has a chipper –
I think that’s what it is.
It whirs and whines and screeches,
and disturbs my garden bliss.So many kinds of power tools
Linda Rushby 22 April 2020
that in their sheds must lurk.
When will this hell be over
and they all go back to work?
Outside my window,
two women, two dogs,
and a child in a buggy.White van, grey car,
man jogging in shorts.
You can make a poem of anything if you let your mental flow flow itself into certain rhythms – but why would you bother? Those first three lines could be a haiku in form with the removal of one syllable and transfer of another between lines, but it wouldn’t be a haiku in spirit.
When I was checking up on terza rima last week, I was interested to learn that Italian lends itself particularly to rhyming forms because it’s quite a pure language with very consistent word endings that provide lots of rhymes, whereas English is more of a grab bag of influences from all over the place, and notoriously inconsistent when it comes to spelling, pronunciation and word forms – though by the same token we have the most gloriously extensive vocabulary to pick from. Plus, of course, where they have Dante, we have Shakespeare, who revelled in blank verse, playing games with words, and, when he couldn’t find the one he needed, inventing new ones of his own – which after four hundred years are so deeply ingrained that we take them for granted – I’ve probably used a few already this morning, without even knowing (not the child in the ‘buggy’ or the man ‘jogging’ – or maybe he did use them, but with different meanings).
The other thing I wanted to say about English is that it is very rhythmic, and it’s thought that the popularity of iambic forms of poetry in English (alternating stressed and unstressed syllables) is because that is the natural rhythm of English speech. It can be very banal (tum tee tum tee tum tee tum) like nursery rhymes: ‘Mary had a little lamb’ or sublime: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’
Anglo Saxon poetry, like ‘Beowulf’, had no truck with rhymed line-endings, but was based very strictly on maintaining the rhythm, and also on alliteration – more emphasis on words beginning with the same sounds than ending with them.
Well, this is just me talking off the top of my head from my interest in poetry and language in general, no references, no citations. Just interesting nuggets that I’ve picked up from reading, listening and generally being interested in this stuff. But after having spent three weeks writing poetry every day, I suppose I’ve started to think more about where it comes from. It’s always been a bit of a mystery for me, how words come into my head and settle themselves into certain patterns. Because of the way my brain works, all my writing feels like taking dictation – the words come, then I write them down, or I don’t, and they wander off again.
Maybe in a past life (if I believed in such things) I was a bard, declaiming the old stories in a smoky hall, feeling my way through the rhythms and the sounds of words. I like that idea.
A table, chairs, pots and a pieris,
in spring glory of red leaves and white bell flowers,
all brought here from another life
in another place.The fennel was here before me,
growing over my head each summer,
spreading its seedlings to the lawn and the path.
They die if I try to move them,
but the lavender, rosemary, artemisia,
all came here as cuttings
from that other garden.I watch Miko, watching the bees,
as they visit the wallflowers.
Through instinct, experience, or laziness,
she leaves them in peace,
and folding her ears against the sea wind,
which rattles the fence against its posts,
she slips between the bluebells like a shadow,
looking for shelter.The magpies have fledged,
Linda Rushby 21 April 2020
the tree is quiet, but two perch,
dapper in their white and midnight blue,
on a distant chimney.
The small birds are safer,
but I miss their racket.
Shopping day disrupts my routine. I had breakfast when I got home, in the garden, trying not to think about the fact that I hadn’t done my yoga/tai chi routine or my writing. Well, does it matter, when these routines are self imposed? That’s the slippery slope, you let yourself off for one day and then down and down you go till suddenly you’re back to… well what? Formless chaos, a sense of emptiness, hopelessness, pointlessness… are there any positive words that end in ‘ness’? Goodness me, I can’t think of any.
There are the things I know need doing, and the tasks I’ve set for myself, and the overwhelming temptation not to do any of them… Just to sit in the sunshine, making another scarf, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, ignoring the weeds pushing up through the gravel and these thoughts popping up into my awareness (oh, note to self, that one’s fairly neutral). Kindness, hopefulness, carefulness, busyness – I wonder why business is spelt the way it is? Or should that be: pronounced the way it is? English is wonderful, actually all languages are wonderful, and fascinating. In some ways I wish I’d followed the path from mathematics into linguistics, rather than into statistics, when I chose my first university course. Maybe if my sixth form had been able to accommodate my wishes to do double maths and German at A level, instead of having to compromise on double maths and economics, I would have done it – though I considered applying for a maths and linguistics course anyway – I can’t remember where that was, but it wasn’t Southampton. The road not taken – I would probably still have ended up going into computer programming after graduation, but I would be in a different place, with different people – and that would have made all the difference – I assume. But how much of what I’ve done in my life has been down to the inherent personality and characteristics that were laid down in those first eighteen years of life? Maybe things wouldn’t be as different now as I think – different places, different people, yes, but thinking about the last fifteen years or so, the different places and different people don’t seem to make that much difference to the inner me.
Ooh, this a bit deep, and it’s starting to give me vertigo. It goes back to my ideas of the Crystal Space, the paths we take and the ways through the mirrored labyrinth, the network of possibilities, probabilities and improbabilities, the book that I’ll probably never write but that haunts every now and again.
Well, I came back from my shopping expedition and now I seem to have written quite a lot after all.
I’ve even got a poem, of sorts, which I cobbled together yesterday from a cluster of little poems or ideas which had popped up at different times, each too long to be haikus, loosely connected but all a bit rough and ready – as my poetry often is.
I dreamt I gave birth to a baby daughter,
and when I awoke, though it was fantastic,
at my age, in my state,
for the briefest of moments, I held on to the joy,
and couldn’t let go.
When I saw the truth, I felt such a loss,
as though for a real child.I slept again, and dreamt of my mother
(twenty years gone now).
In a clean, white world, she was cold and distant.
When I spoke to her truly, she walked off in silence.
When I found her again,
I pinned her down, and told her I loved her.When you dream of a child, you dream of yourself.
This much I know.
Is that who I grieve for?
When you dream of a parent, I don’t know the meaning.I don’t like these dreams,
Linda Rushby 20 April 2020
that carry such meanings I cannot untangle.
Please give me the daylight.
Bit of fun this morning.
A work in progress (or possibly regress).
Linda Rushby 19 April 2020
I saw a photograph today,
of a sandstone palace,
frosted with blue and white tiles.
And I thought of Istanbul,
though I knew it couldn’t be.‘Germany’ I guessed,
‘another of Mad King Ludwig’s confections’
(I’ve been caught out like that before).
But no, it was Seville, and I thought
‘Aha, Moorish influences!’
and ‘I must go there one day,
to southern Spain.’But oh, Istanbul,
beautiful, dirty, noisy city of my dreams.
Byzantium, city of Constantine,
with your minarets and domes, gardens and palaces,
cats, magpies and wonderful cafes,
sunshine and storms and clinging fogs,
and best of all, your waterways,
ships and ferries and fishermen on Galata Bridge.The taste of that fresh fish sandwich,
bought from the boat, where I watched them fry it
over a brazier by the water’s edge.
Or the tea I poured from a double pot,
the russet colour, clear as the glass I sipped it from
as fragrant as the roses in Gülhane Park
a sensual delight, sweet as the pastries
in Hafiz Mustafa’s.Perhaps one day I’ll find
Linda Rushby 18 April 2020
my way back to you,
(though somehow I know I won’t)
but you’ll always be there
in my heart.
