Category: poetry

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New Morning

Wasn’t really expecting a poem today, but here it is:

New Morning

Coming out of the darkness, temptation whispers
how good it would be to return to oblivion
and slide back down into happy dreams.

‘That’s not how it works’
cries Morpheus, slamming
the door on your pleading.
He won’t take you back
any more than the womb
will take back the newborn.
This is the new day.
You’re on your own.

Though the smiley sun
may peep round the curtains,
the darkness still hovers
at the back of your mind.
Thoughts cluster like midges,
buzzing and nipping
with spiteful glee
as you pull round the blankets,.

There is no escape from
the heartache that lingers,
the memories that creep near
and poke bony fingers
at the half-healed bruises
you thought you’d forgotten.

You must make the choice
(though you know there’s no option,
and choice an illusion),
or regret it forever.

Every day, every morning,
the same demons taunt you
till you gather your strength,
and all of your will power
and get out of bed.

Linda Rushby 14 May 2020

And here’s one I opened at random yesterday and found left on the computer when I started it up this morning:

Look Inside

What do you see when you look inside?
Fear, frustration, disappointment?
All of those.
Loneliness, anger, regret?
Not so much as once there was.

After all this time and striving,
don’t you think it should be clearer?
After all this time and striving,
this is as clear as it is.

Do you long for the striving to end?
Do you think of what that means?

Linda Rushby 17 January 2016

From the tone (and especially the last two lines) I thought it was a ‘chemo’ poem (I’ve got at least one of those, and probably others lurking around), but was surprised to realise it was a year earlier, from January 2016. I don’t really remember it, but it definitely feels like another first-thing-in-the-morning poem.

This is pretty much how every day starts for me – any time between about 4 and 7, that limbo of ‘should I get up now?’ or ‘I’m sure if I stay here I’ll doze off again’, and sometimes I do, but mostly I don’t and realise after a couple of hours that there’s no putting it off any longer. Today was perhaps a bit worse than usual because of quite a heavy therapy session yesterday, in which at one point the therapist said: ‘you’ve had quite a lot of heartache’ which is why that word popped up, and in retrospect, I think: she doesn’t know even the half of it, and do I want to go back through my emotional life and dig it all up and show it to her, including the most painful, shameful and embarrassing bits? But maybe that’s what I need to do.

Aside from that, I’ve said in the past that sometimes I think getting up in the morning is the most difficult and stressful thing I do all day, and this is what I mean.

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Writing Joy

Everything I say or write
comes from a thought,
a spark inside my mind.

That almost – almost – follows a haiku structure. Just needs a little tweaking to fit it into that 5/7/5 syllable pattern. That’s what the words do, when they occur to me, they often lay themselves out in a rhythmic structure – usually iambic, often in short, sharp lines like these. Sometimes I’ll combine them together into longer lines, hexameter or even heptameter, and then I might throw the odd shorter line here and there, maybe at the end of a stanza. So, in the three lines above, the first two could be combined into a single line with six feet, followed by one of three.

Don’t ask me why I’m sitting here analysing my own poetry style this morning, god knows, it’s not as though I don’t have other things to write about – though having said that, I can see why I did it that way, it was just that the first sentence that came into my head when I sat down at the keyboard did so in that rhythmic way, so just for fun I laid it out as a poem – albeit a pretty trivial one.

You may have noticed that when I’m writing prose, I often go in for long, rambling sentences, lots of embedded clauses, lists of this and that, shamelessly long processions of adjectives and adverbs, diversions and distractions, self-references, repetitions and contradictions, mixing metaphors with abandon, alliterating whenever I can get away with it, indulging myself in ways that no decent editor would stand for thirty seconds. That’s when you can tell that I’m writing for myself, for the sheer joy of the words and the exhilaration of it all and because – well – I just can’t stop myself. Personally, that’s when I think my writing is at its best, when I read it back and it makes me smile for the fun of it and the magic of it. That’s what I think of as my Tristram Shandy style, and I hope you (if there is a ‘you’, whoever and wherever you may be) enjoy it too, and don’t find it too irritating or forced, because it isn’t forced, not at all, even though (as now) it may sometimes be self-conscious, that’s not because I’ve deliberately set out to write this way so much as I’ve stepped into that stream and allowed myself to be taken along by the current, because I’m enjoying myself.

Isn’t that something like what I was writing about yesterday? I remember using the metaphor of being a surfer – being carried by the waves of thought, not able to control them but managing my responses to them. Oh, so much I thought about saying before I sat down in front of this keyboard this morning, and none of it has been said, or will be said in the twenty words remaining to me. But I’m glad I’ve written this, and hope you who’ve read it are glad too

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Day 37 – Migrants

Unexpectedly came over all poetic while sitting in the garden, even though it’s not April any more.

Away above the clouds
and the gulls with their shanties,
black dots against the blue,
too high and fast to see.

Riding on the sun’s wake,
all the way from Africa
the swifts are returning
with summer on their wings.

Linda Rushby 7 May 2020
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Day 30 – Columbine

I had three haikus up my sleeve for today, but this one popped out randomly when I was eating breakfast in the garden.

And it shows I can rhyme – sometimes – but only with my tongue firmly in my cheek! 😉

Columbine, where is your Pierrot?
Waiting at the theatre door?
You will find him, never fear; oh
love will triumph evermore.

You deserve a ream of sonnets,
so delicate and pinkly pretty,
but you’re really granny’s bonnets,
so please accept this little ditty!

Linda Rushby 30 April 2020
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Day 29 – Paper Flowers

Wrote this yesterday evening. Spent most of the morning clearing a space on the table from my previous papercrafting projects.

May or may not be finished today – don’t hold your breath!

Tomorrow I will make a paper sunflower.
I have the stamps, the dies,
the coloured paper.
A small act of creation
with glue and pencils, paper, ink
a little effort.

It may not be
a thing of beauty.
Just a pleasant way
to spend the time.
But there are worse things
I could do.

Linda Rushby 29 April 2020
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Day 28 – Work in Progress

I started this two days ago, couldn’t see where to take it or how to finish it, lost it because it was saved on my laptop instead of PC, realised I’d got nothing to post for today, found it again, read what I’d done, added a bit, still couldn’t see where it was going, but what the hell, maybe it’ll make sense another day, and this all I have for now.

In the draft I’d given it the title ‘Changes‘, but ‘Work in Progress‘ seems as good a title as any.

Sometimes I reflect
on the changes I’ve made in
my external life.
The things and the people
that I’ve left behind,
including: two husbands
three cats (two came back)
five flats and five houses,
three countries,
four counties,
two professions
one novel unpublished,
one novel unfinished.

The things that remain
are those in myself,
the voices that taunt me
for sixty years
the person inside,
the grief and the sadness
that come back to haunt me.

What changes, what stays?
Is there no final answer?
All the layers, the strata,
the sedimentation
that makes up the whole
of the soul that continues
the core of the woman
who can’t see the future
who can’t see the ending,
who has to keep going
who hopes to make progress
and someday, perhaps,
will rest on her laurels
and look at the whole
and see it completed?

Linda Rushby 28 April 2020
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Day 27 – Meeeow!!!

No poetry at all today, so here’s one I prepared earlier (last week in fact, same day as the Power Tools).

My cat listens.
She sits upright,
her paws just-so
her tail wrapped around
and looks me right in the eye.

‘It’s okay’ I tell her,
‘Don’t worry,
I’m not talking to you!’

Her eyes narrow.
Perhaps she’s thinking:
‘Silly old bag.
Don’t you realise
I’m just a cat?’

Linda Rushby 27 April 2020
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Day 26 – A Close Shave

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
to prove that I am able
and this is how much I got done
before I cut the cable.

Linda Rushby 26 April 2020
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Day 24 – Dark of the Moon

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.
Don’t fall off the edge,
Don’t shatter the glass.

Linda Rushby 24 April 2020

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.

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Day 23 – Where Poems Really Come From

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?
Grab a towel and a coffee,
sit down at the keyboard,
and write the bastards out into daylight.

Linda Rushby 23 April 2020