Surprising Discoveries

 

How strange to see, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Les Paul’s Gibson guitar. Les Paul was American.

Vaya con dios, he used to sing, when I was 14, when I loved the songs of true and star-crossed love. He sang with his wife, Mary. Les Paul and Mary Ford. How tenderly they sang! Entranced, I clutched my heart.

How neat and clean they looked in photos. That was the norm, back then. Even the jazzmen wore suits to perform. He was a jazz and blues singer; country too.

I find out now, new, he was also a luthier – what a beautiful word! – ‘a craftsman who makes stringed instruments (as lutes or guitars or violins).’ He made, of course, guitars. An inventor, he made ‘the log,’ a solid-body electric guitar which became the Gibson Les Paul. 

His innovations in over-dubbing (I find out so late) paved the way for rock’n’roll. Did Les Paul help to give us Elvis?

(Elvis, who was all rebellion. Long hair, skinny pants, wild dance. He too could be tender, but not at first. You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, he sang when I was 17. I was less enchanted then by melancholy love, more enamoured of fire.)

Rest well, Les Paul – living into the 21st Century, dying in 2009, aged 94. Thank you. May God go with you.

NaPoWriMo Day Eleven.

Also written for Friday Writings #172  at Poets and Storytellers United: 'Prose, Poetry, or Both At Once?' Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to mix prompts. Had I stuck solely to NaPo, I'd have tried a villanelle. For P&SU, while incorporating aspects of the NaPo prompt, I essayed a prose poem. We could choose a prose poem or a piece of poetic prose. This is certainly not poetic prose! Not nearly beautiful enough. I fear it might be simply a piece of prose. But I did try to make it a prose poem, with cadence, rhythm, and sound.

Lunching Alone Today

 

Lunching alone today, it occurs to me

I’ll never again run into Patsy at the Club.

A little later, as my mind serves up images of her 

sitting at a table, on her own or with friends,

or approaching across the space to say hello to me

(sometimes accompanied by Sarah, who is still 

very much alive, being such a lot younger) 

I understand that I was wrong. I’ll always 

be seeing Patsy, whenever I come to the Club.

I wrote this on my phone while still sitting there. Then, as I left, I ran into Sarah just coming in. We hugged and commiserated. I thought of including this sad-sweet coincidence in the poem, but it was already written and felt complete as it is.

Shared in NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Ten. (Off prompt. Written before the prompt was posted – though it does naturally have some of the subtle sound effects we were asked for. )

Lidded Ritual Grain Container with Lozenges and Scrolls, 6th–5th Century B.C.E.

 

Is it the colour or is it the form,

so full and round,

has me fall in love with this shapely urn

meant to hold grain?

I don’t care what it was made to contain

in the line of imposed need,

its duty,

its purpose to feed.

I simply warm

to its plain beauty; 

I yearn

to clasp and hold 

the whole to my body, or bang

my fingernails on its outer shell

to hear its long, reverberating clang.

It is very old,

coloured faint pink and soft green

(which I think of as colours of healing),

a closer look revealing

those patterns of lozenges and scrolls.

The label says bronze, so I know

it would have that clanging sound,

if I struck it like an instrument: a deep knell

ringing for its past people

and all the places it and they had been – 

like a solemn church bell

that tolls

deep and low

in a lonely steeple.

NaPoWriMo Day Nine

Image of the container, in  the online gallery of the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, from the Chinese art collection: click here and scroll down.