And sometimes it rains outside a poem …

 

I want to say, to my friend who shows me

beautiful images of rain, beautiful words

for rain – inside rain poems, inside monsoons …

and I know they are real, those rains,

those pictures in poems; but I am inside 

the shell of my walls, thankful for light

(so many here now have none) as dark falls

outside, where rain has not stopped falling

for days, for long nights, as the rivers rise.

Two nights ago, on this hill, I hunkered down

pulling my walls in around me, waiting 

for cyclonic winds. They never arrived

and I’m thankful. Cyclone Alfred danced

and flirted with the swirling ocean, took 

his time coming to land, looked around

and headed a little further north of here 

than originally planned – a flighty cyclone,

a teenager, randomly changing his mind:

a playful lad, not a fighter. But although

he's not fierce, he's big. Even as, at last,

he calms and slows, the fling of his arms

casts rain clouds east to west, north to south,

day after day after day, night after night after 

night … while the winds hit places nearby,

power lines crash and tangle, trees are uprooted 

or lose their branches, as everywhere the rain

falls and falls, and all the rivers continue to rise.

Written in response to Rajani Radhakrishnan's 'Rain after rain after rain' post on Substack.

Surviving Cyclone Alfred

 

‘Glad your ordeal’s over,’ 

they tell me, full of concern

for both me and my little cat. 

Some add, ‘You never needed

to suffer so much stress.’

How to explain? For me

it was necessary (even though,

I now know, much of it wasn’t)

and an adventure (even though here

nothing spectacular happened).

Poppi was extremely comfortable 

on piled blankets, enjoyed her supper, 

and is always happy near me. She did

protest the disruption – on principle – 

loudly, once, then settled and slept.

I’d set up the bathroom early. (‘Choose

your smallest room,’ officialdom said.) 

I’m old and slow, Poppi’s old and deaf.

I knew I couldn’t wait for some moment

of certainty, urgency, then start to move.

The night before, I was very scared.

It was the unknown, the waiting.

I got up, made camomile tea,

read Tarot and I Ching, glugged 

Rescue Remedy, went back to sleep.

I always need something to do.

On the night itself, there were things 

to do. I couldn’t read, instead kept watch 

on Alfred’s slow, erratic progress. ‘Keep 

the updates coming,’ family begged.

The comfortable chair soon wasn’t.

Sitting up all night in one position

was a strain on these elderly legs. 

I hauled out the shower chair, added 

a cushioning blanket, propped my feet.

By morning – with news of downgrading

to a mere ‘tropical low’ – I went to my bed.

Poppi checked the view from the windows,

then came, as usual, to supervise me. I 

disappeared into the soundest, safest sleep.

I’m too high for flooding. I have supplies.

No tree crashed on my roof. My windows 

didn’t crack. I haven’t lost power yet. 

Others are not so blessed. Alfred wasn’t

the strongest, but his reach was wide.

I hear right now an ambulance – or is it  

a fire truck? – sirening past, just down the hill.

(The firies do water rescues too.) I almost

wish I was Catholic, so I could cross myself.

Instead I send light. As I do to the whole area.

In hindsight, I see, much that I did 

was unnecessary, some of it foolish. 

But I’m proud I achieved things 

I never imagined I could, physically

and mentally – yes, ‘at my age’!

Before the event, my niece-who-is-like-

a-daughter phoned to say, ‘What an 

adventure!’ (In drought country, she envies us 

all this rain. Everything’s relative.) Only  

a small adventure, I tell myself. But yes!  

Parting of the Ways

 

She went academic; I went all witchy and stuff.

But we’d always shared everything. There was

that serious glitch when my husband (who was

having an unrecognised breakdown at the time)

did some shoddy carpentry for her and her husband –

but both the husbands became exes soon after that.

Then she and I reconnected. She told me all about

her new love (a wild Irish singer) and her new career. 

I told her all about mine. Something in her voice

went slightly cold, a little strained, like taking a back-step. 

Was it ‘Reiki Master’ or ‘Tarot reader’ which frightened her, 

or the tale of awakening to magic? Maybe it was my journey 

through awareness of reincarnation, all the gradual clues.

Or was it her new status? In my time as a mere undergrad,

the halls of academe had seemed to be about freedom, 

adventures of thought, a nonconformist’s delight. On staff,

as I’ve gradually learned from friends, it’s now more often

about playing acceptable games, hierarchy, and saying

the approved lines. I guess you can study witchcraft,

but not from the position of believing magic is real.

(Though you’d think the Irish lover might have been cool

with all that.) Would I have compromised her standing? 

Her advancement? Did I turn into an undesirable friend? Or 

did she truly despise whom I’d become? (She would have been 

fascinated, once.) The off-putting was always carefully polite.

One day I decided (as intended?) I just can’t be bothered any more.

Sharing this with Friday Writings #167 at Poets and Storytellers United.

The I

Time after time I imbibe my fine libations

(prescribed). I try to find ways to tie my mind 

to this tiresome task, reminding my wild self 

my life depends on it, and why I desire

this life to unwind slowly, not lightly fly

too fast into nothingness. To stay a while yet,

to fight to be I. ‘I am the light!’ I cry.

And my mind, even on the slightest shift,

the tiniest tangent, never mind one so mighty,

replies by trying to define the why of this cry:

why I, so minute, so minor, aspire to be light,

in fact to be THE light. The sun in the sky?

Dare I fly so high? What lies behind this

quiet pining to become in time a kind of fire?

I shy away from further enquiries, liking

questions better than replies which might

or might not provide bona fide answers

to guide my soul in the right direction. 

Night falls – lightly, silently, but timely,

defining the (rightly) finite kind of this

fine exploration or wild speculation or

benign diversion … now silence is mine.

Written to my own prompt for Friday Writings #166 at Poets and Storytellers United, in which I invite people to choose one letter/sound and see what happens when they concentrate on that in a piece of writing. 

I think a lot of nonsense has happened in this case! And it's hard for me to discern what effect the 'I' sound has, except perhaps to slow the movement down at times. In this case I wasn't choosing a sound to have an expected, particular effect. I was more exploring, to see what effect this repetition might have. I wanted to see what a vowel sound would do, and chose this one at random.

Torch-bearing

 

We Goddesses of Shining Light – who do not

claim to be ourselves divinities, only

that we seek to embody, as best we might,

Her good qualities –

have been slowly ageing, over all these years

of meeting and sending out our love as light

to the whole community, and thence the world.

Now we’re old and few.

We no longer dance in circle when we meet,

nor sing to Her, but still we breathe in, breathe out

a flood of light, which first we see as a star

and then as our torch

beaming wherever needed. We have become

a small circle of elders, the grandmothers

who, someone on facebook said, are needed now.

Well then, here we are!

How will you use us, world, before we leave you?

That is not ours to know or even to ask.

It is enough that we meet, as do other

small wisdom circles.

The world has no listening for our wisdom.

We are wise enough to understand this fact,

wise enough to know our only task: send light,

continue sending.

This is loosely based on the Sapphic stanza (aka Sapphic ode). I was inspired by Rajani Radhakrishnan's recent use of the form. Named after Greek poet Sappho, this form (in its 'lesser' version) has 38 syllables in four lines in a pattern of 11/11/11/5, which I have followed. However, I have ignored patterns of long and short syllables which are also classically used.

Written for Friday Writings #165 at Poets and Storytellers United, in which we are asked to use the word 'torch' in a piece of writing.