Just done my poem for today, and I think I know what I’m doing for the final three days, though I’m not happy with the one for tomorrow – but then, I wasn’t happy with the one for today when I woke up, though I had a vague idea, a title and a few lines, it wasn’t until this morning that it fleshed out so it (sort of) made sense. Maybe I can do something with the one I wrote yesterday for tomorrow… or it won’t seem so bad when I read it again.

It has been an interesting challenge, I must say. I didn’t know where it was going to go when I started, but it got me writing and I think it all hangs together surprisingly well, so that it might be worth doing something else with it, but I’m not sure what. In 2018 I did haikus for NaPoWriMo, and I had an idea of producing a hand-made book and I went to a book-binding workshop and bought a book-binding kit (and an online book-binding course), but I’ve never really done anything with it since. I had a title: ‘Month of Fools’, and I wanted to do a lino-print for the cover, but then I completely stalled because the lino-print was so poor, I gave up on lino-printing, book-binding and the whole idea and haven’t touched it since. The lino-printing course was cancelled not long after anyway, and though I have equipment I could use by myself, without the tutor telling me exactly what to do I just can’t get my head around it.

Anyway, if I’m going to do anything these days, I just stick to knitting and crochet, because I can do that without getting too stressed.

Keeping going at something and not getting discouraged or disappointed with the results is the hardest thing for me. I suppose that is one of the themes of my NaPoWriMo (I can’t quite decide if it’s a long poem with 30 stanzas, or a cycle of 30 individual poems, or how to describe it). It’s all very well to write about grasping the flame and letting it burn you again and again, but that’s just a poetic metaphor, and I’m such a coward. I could say to myself: ‘I managed to stick at that, and I’m quite pleased with the result, so why not try something else, like going back to lino printing, or doing this book, or going back to my novel…?’ but, but, but… I’m such a coward. And yesterday, for example, by the time I’d posted the poem, I couldn’t face writing a post for here as well.

None of this is important, I know that. Nothing I do matters, I could not write another word as long as I live, and the world would be no worse off.

Yesterday I went back to the jigsaw puzzle I started in last year’s lockdown and haven’t touched since goodness knows when. I made quite good progress, too.  

Listen to the gulls.
Are they laughing or mourning?
Who are we to ask?

Small bird on the roof,
pecking amongst the red tiles.
How simple your life is.

Linda Rushby 17 July 2020

…also known as cheating!

Why do some days have
no poetry to speak of?
It’s a conundrum.

Linda Rushby 16 April 2020

Ringing the changes
through the turn of the seasons,
promising summer.

Linda Rushby 11 April 2020

Hope comes with the spring,
blossoming despite our fears.
The bees are happy.

Linda Rushby 4 April 2020

‘The net that links us

Is not the web that binds us’

Linda Rushby (unfinished)

I thought that was going to be the start of a poem, but after an hour of rattling around, nothing else has appeared. So now I’m sitting at the keyboard, and – I don’t think this has struck me before – although I usually write as I go directly on the computer (which is why my posts ramble quite as much as they do), it doesn’t work that way with  poems. Mostly they come into my head fully formed, and then I have to write them down before I forget them – like a line from a Paul Simon song of 50-odd years ago :

‘I was twenty one years when I wrote this song.

I’m twenty two now, but I won’t be for long…’

Paul Simon, ‘The Leaves That Are Green’

You said it, Paul. And the first time I heard it I was even younger – sixteen, I believe – though the song had already been around for a few years. I think it was the first time I grasped – or at least caught a glimpse of – an adult understanding of the passing of time. That and Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’ from about the same: ‘I’m twenty four and there’s so much more’. (To me at that time, even twenty seemed impossibly mature).

How did I get here from there? Oh yes, ‘The Leaves That are Green’:

‘Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl.

I held her close, but she faded in the night

Like a poem I meant to write

And the leaves that are green turn to brown.’

That one: ‘Like a poem I meant to write.’ Exactly. If you don’t grab them while they’re there, they get away from you – Poems, I mean, not girls (or boys). I wrote once about ‘catching the words in flight’. It may be in ‘Single to Sirkeci’ or it may just have been a blog post. It might be the one I wrote in Tulcea, on the Danube Delta – which would have gone into ‘The Long Way Back’ – if I’d ever got round to finishing it. Or maybe it was just a random, throw away blog post that at most a handful of people might have read.

Do poems matter more than people? That’s a bit contentious – though once out they’re out there, they can live forever – I’m not claiming this for mine, I hasten to add, but I was thinking of the likes of Wordsworth (whose birthday is next Tuesday – I have a reason for knowing that which some of you might work out), Ovid (who was exiled to and died on the Black Sea Coast at Constanta, from where I went to Tulcea) or even poor Sylvia Plath (enough said).  Even mine will still hang around for a while after I’ve gone, out on the internet and in unsold copies of ‘Beachcombing’. Some have already lasted far longer than the relationships that provoked them – but that’s another matter.

Of course – a haiku!

‘When we are ourselves.’

Linda Rushby

I’ve backed off from the 500 words today and possibly for the rest of the month, but I have a good excuse.

April is  NaPoWriMo, short for National Poetry Writing Month – why April, I’m not sure, it’s not as though it’s midway between NaNoWriMos, being five months to November (or seven depending on which way you look at it). Anyway, it’s been suggested to me that I might join in. Two years ago I sort of cheated and posted a haiku every day, (not to say that writing haikus is easy, but at least the typing isn’t too time-consuming). I intended to make a small hand-made book out of them, never quite got round to it. Maybe one day.

But this is today’s  poetic effort:

Morning beach, waiting
for the sun to come crawling
over the water.

Linda Rushby, 1 April 2020