Disturbing the Dust

Autumn rain

2010-10-02T23:24:00.003+01:00

October rainfall

swells brooks and drowns meadows

penetrates branches

NaPoWriMo #28

2009-04-28T17:36:00.000+01:00

Anglo-American Sandwich/Red Letter Day

My ultimate post-modern pastiche (revised)

2009-01-03T13:38:00.005Z

I cannot

splash colours

on scraps of dirty paper

or trill on silver flute

my singing would

scare the crows

from the battlements

at Stirling Castle

this isn’t a poem

to move bones against

clay in buried urns

this is

my map of you

what letters are made of

my ultimate

post-modern

pastiche

Staring Bright: The Ages of Woman

2008-12-07T15:06:00.005Z

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything
(The Seven Ages of Man by William Shakespeare)

Greta Garbo glamour at twenty- one;
bought with your hard earned cash. The photographer
placed one hand at your throat above
the white fur wrap with lighting to gloss
your porcelain skin and cold waved jet black hair.
(Sepia cannot conceal your lipstick’s cherry red.)

Your Cary Grant sifted sheet music
at the Saturday market; a country born lad,
on a farm at fourteen in the year you both left school.
Your sister said, You could do better.
But you started collecting for your bottom drawer;
there was a white wedding on the eve of war.

Your Garbo likeness and your wedding shot
sideboard sentinels to my childhood.
The perfect Fifties housewife, you
traced templates of a woman’s role
onto refractory matter. I am not
the daughter you would have liked me to be.

I keep forgetting to replace the glass;
cracked when you fell over the coffee table
my father never mended. You airbrushed
the time he spent away with another woman
but your forehead rutted like an arid field
and a trough of white ran through your hair.

Sole survivor of your generation,
you answer the call of dead voices
as you drift in and out of your dreams.
You wake in a place where you’re still twenty-one,
and through the kindness of cataract gauzes
you put your red lipstick on.

Published in Family Matters (Forward Press 2008). Copyright Carole Alexander.

More about my mother here.

Autumn tanka

2008-09-21T17:04:00.005+01:00

Wild, wild fuchsia

in mellow autumn sunlight

lures work-loving bees

to suck from purple cups, chant

in muted chorus

Remembrance

2008-09-19T11:10:00.011+01:00

Hiroshima – September 13^th 2001

No planes are flying west

but I’ve flown east

– despite armed guards at Heathrow

rumours and delays

(I surrender scissors whilst

a teenager worries

about unwashed underwear) –

east to where Enola Gay

dropped Little Boy.

By bullet train to

Hiroshima. In the Peace Park.

parties of Australian schoolchildren

envelop the statue of a little girl

holding aloft a golden crane

with rainbow coloured garlands –

Sedako’s medicine papers reborn

as cranes. Her goal

to fold one thousand

then she would be well again.

We tour the museum – taste the charred remains

in a child’s lunch-box – cleanse ourselves with iced coffee.

Under the shadow of the A-Bomb Dome, we watch

cranes dip down into the once black river – rise – and fly away.

‘I will write Peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.'

(Sadako Sasaki 1943-55)

Stitch Up

2008-04-03T14:44:00.004+01:00

I tried to stitch you together again
- just as you were -
but all I could see was
a yellow chick with
a human eye,
flapping its wings
as it tried
- unsuccessfully -
to fly.
I cannot erase
that waddling gait
and yellow webbed feet.

Winter love tanka

2008-02-15T10:54:00.004Z

Our love departed
like frost from garden grass
warmed by the sun -
how the limbs of my plum tree
presage white blossom.

2008-01-19T16:58:00.001Z

No moon tonight -
bare branches revealed by
pressing the shutter.

Fractured

2008-01-14T10:27:00.000Z

I took your body to the Rainmaker,
wrapped in tarpaulin, just as it was
when your subordinates found you.
Thick mud, lacerated with deep fissures,
encrusting your fractured cheek.
I wanted to sink in my finger nails
and claw it all away
but I'd bitten them down to the skin.

I laid you on the stone slab.
Your eyes were blind as marbles,
your perfect nose no longer commanding
respect. This mattered little to me beside
the way you inhaled the aroma
of new baked bread and fresh ground coffee
when I brought you your breakfast.
Your mouth was now locked both
to my kisses and to further strife.

The Rainmaker circled around you.
Many days, hours, weeks and months passed by
until one day a single aqua tear
formed a gully in the fissured surface.

Moments of Reflection

2007-12-11T11:34:00.000Z

view an etched image
of Marilyn Munroe on
a large sheet of glass

see the spectrum of
the hydrogen ion in a
Hall of Mirrors

watch reality
distort shards of coloured glass
in a kaleidoscope

Haiku - Lavender

2007-12-04T12:58:00.000Z

http://www.michaelylee.com/photos/taiwan_hongkong/Day_02/lavender.jpg

love's revival - an
infusion of lavender
pouring out laughter

A call for radical writers

2007-07-07T11:39:00.000+01:00

There's an interesting piece on the 'Comments' page of today's Guardian by Terry Eagleton. It mentions a number of the writers my course: Orwell; Wilde;Woolf; Eliot and Brecht. Eagleton contends that that 'British literature's long and rich tradition of politically engaged writers has come to an end' apart from Harold Pinter 'who has wisely decided that being a champagne socialist is better than being no socialist at all'. What do people think? Is part of the reason for this that there is no obvious alternative to global capitalism? Is there a general political apathy? Aren't most people as appalled as I am at Thatcher's legacy? I have to admit that although I am a political animal I have become weary, in recent years, in what seems to be a losing battle. However, watching the enthusiastic young people on last Thursday's 'Question Time' did give me some hope.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2120880,00.html

Chinese, a big head and inter-racial identity

2007-06-28T12:22:00.000+01:00

Hsaio Hui (Teresa) and

Kai Chiang (Rupert) in Taiwan

I can’t speak Chinese which is a great pity because it is the first language of my only grandchild. Rupert was born in Taiwan on the second of November 2003 by caesarean section. Before his birth, his mother, Teresa,sent me in an email in which she expressed her concern about the size of his head. Her doctor had told her that if all the babies were put in a line, this one would have the biggest head. And this, I repeat, was before he was born! When she asked me about big heads in my family, I did recall that my father’s head had been rather large. Towards the end of his life it was large, round and smiley. Then I remembered that my mother had dressed me in coats with matching hats when I was a little girl and that she had to buy the hat a size larger than the coat. I hated hats and once managed to leave the offending article on a bus. So this child, who we knew to be a boy, had been endowed with a big head by his white Caucasian forbears.

It must have been quite traumatic expecting a baby of mixed racial ancestry however much she loved my son. It’s the fear of the unknown. The poor girl had an awful pregnancy: she was sick at the beginning and too large to move at the end which wasn't helped by her having a weakness in her hips on account of vitamin D deficiency. She was also out for the count when, shortly after Rupert's birth, my son was taking digital photographs and emailing them to us on the other side of the world.

As I said, Chinese is Rupert’s first language. His mother speaks fluent English and has a degree in English Literature. She describes my son’s Chinese as ‘an insult to my country’. I can say ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘thank you’ but that’s about it. As far as the big head is concerned, I now think that Western heads and Asian heads are a different shape and are probably also measured in a different way. When Rupert was a toddler he always looked very dainty beside the other children. He has pale skin, a face the same shape as my son's but his eyes are brown and slightly oriental and his hair is almost straight. Asians consider big eyes to be an asset, so he is thought to be handsome and his Taiwanese amma (grandmother) thinks that he is very smart. Her English isn't any better than my Chinese, but she was able to communicate her approval!

Rupert in England

Here's to retirement!

2007-06-27T11:24:00.000+01:00

I have decided to create a new blog for musings and fictional pieces, keeping my old blog for poetry. I'm anticipating having more time for blogging now that I'm finally giving up work. Things came to a head on Monday following a telephone conversation with a person who is a ... I rang head office to register a complaint and left. This came on top of other pressures and was simply the last straw that broke the camel's back. Anyway, I've been signed off work for a week - the doctor remarked that they don't see me very often - and am giving in my notice. I've realised that I can't make decisions for myself and my mother, who is becoming increasingly demented, whilst I'm working and worrying about what she is doing in my absence. Anyway, I think that what I really want is to be at home with more time to read and write rather than having more money. So here's to my retirement!