Connection

Oh, the lust I had 

for that man of magic!

He was drawn to me too.

Power and Karma fused.

But the rite disappointed ...

and we lived far apart.

Email, MySpace, facebook.

Years of friendship growing

to include our life partners.

Confidences shared

in deep understanding.

Workings across distance.

And, just occasionally,

an affectionate exchange

turning ever-so-slightly flirty.

For Friday Writings #131 at Poets and Storytellers United, we are invited to write about re-purposing something – or someone. So I couldn't help thinking of this particular magical collaborator, a one-time lover who became, by mutual choice, a longstanding friend instead. We were undoubtedly bonded by a powerful karmic tie; it seems we initially mistook the nature of the attraction. Or perhaps – as my time in his country was short, but our connection both fated and necessary – our guides made sure it would be almost impossible for us to resist interacting!

Dragon and Mountain

I asked my dear friend Phill, a digital artist, to create for me a sacred image to signify, formally, a role I’d been given. A man overseas invited me into a tradition of dragon magic with communities in various countries – an honour. I loved and admired him; I already worked with dragons; I agreed. Each locality was designated a ‘tor,’ mine named for the town where I live. 

I requested a design suggesting our local mountain: viewed from my location, ia high, pointed summit on the left, then two humps descending to the right. I saw it shaping the word ‘Am,’ for Being. Asked what colours I'd like, I chose green and purple, the colours of the Women’s Movement. (I've since learned that there is a sacred Indgenous women's site on the mountain .)

Phill put this image inside a sphere. He added – unasked, but inspired – a seven-pointed star in the background, symbol of the Faery realm, in a form that could be viewed as loosely woven fabric or gently radiating light.

The magical man’s dragon tradition grew warlike. It was metaphorical; even so, I rejected that identification. The dragons I knew were benevolent. I couldn’t, in conscience, establish a branch of his tradition here. I resigned. He saw this as betrayal. 

He had overcome many challenges, requiring a warrior’s mind-set, so I didn’t seek to change him but I wouldn’t join him. He cut off all communication with me.

I decided to keep the symbol I'd designed, reclaiming it as a statement of my own being, my own connection to the mountain (which I have felt from the first encounter).

The artist, my soul-brother, died: cancer, sudden and quick. From his hospital bed, at my request, witnessed by his family, he gave me permission to save all his digital art to do whatever I like with. I've no particular plans; I just didn’t want it lost if his website lapsed. 

Later, it happened that I was one of a group of white Australians given by a local Indigenous elder the freedom of this land, Githabul land. It includes the mountain.

sometimes at twilight

I look up at the mountain

and glimpse a dragon –

its shadowy back a swathe

along the darkening ridge

Written for Poets and Storytellers United at Friday Writings #120: A Touch of Formality

Parting Company

How quietly we come to the end — do we? —

of a karmic connection through many lives.

This time, we loved each other: with the body briefly, 

with mind and heart and soul in the years since.

But now he wants to build monuments, fight battles …

would do me honour as long as I supported.

He carries the blood of Cherokee warriors 

and Slavic shamans. He resonates with Norse deities 

and Viking axes. I follow a different path. 

 

The heritage, genetic or magical (mine Celtic / Hindu,

while I’m drawn to Egyptian and Graeco-Roman gods) 

probably doesn’t matter. It’s where we choose to go

this time around which shapes us; what we choose to do.

Even when we performed the Rite, he was after power;

I did it for lust. But I loved him too, not for the wild man, 

the joker, the adventurer, but for a core of tenderness

I saw within, and for his truth-telling. I don’t know why

he came to love me too, but he did. Perhaps for the same.

‘That’s your teacher,’ his angels told him, the moment 

when he first saw me. ‘Don’t let him get the upper hand,’ 

mine said two weeks earlier, predicting our meeting 

when we were still strangers, unaware of each other.

I didn’t forget the advice. Perhaps he did. Now

he thinks I have nothing more to teach him. He wants 

to instruct me. ‘You’ll be looking for me,’ he says, ‘When

they come at you in that final battle.’ ‘Dear one,’ I reply,

‘do you not know, Love is the greatest weapon?’

We are texting from different continents. ‘My circle,’ 

he says, ‘collapses if you walk away.’ I tell him I cannot stay,

will not, to be seen as a party to violence, and add:

‘Like a cat, I usually go my own way.’ He says: ‘Goodbye.’

Sharing this one, on 29 November 2024, with Friday Writings #155 at Poets and Storytellers United. 

Finally

I finally resolve it all in my mind

(as much as one can

grasp the slippery past).

Can finally let you go —

amazed to realise how tightly,

all these years, I’ve clung.

I tell you in thought: ‘You gave me 

everything you could, and then some!

You owe me nothing.’

It feels like

an unfamiliar self

who finally falls asleep.

Then I dream a ballroom

(where we never met in life).

Among the dancing couples,

finally I am in your arms.

Together, we waltz and waltz

round and round and round …

We are free

we are safe

we are smiling. 

Which was followed some hours later by this realisation.

Here Are My Three Grandfathers (3)

Yes, I had three grandfathers. Two I never met. One was an army officer in British India. One was a drunk and a poet. 

The third was a Yorkshireman, and became an orchardist. He brought his family – my Nana, my Uncle Ian, my Mum and my Aunty Frankie – out to Tasmania. Where I was born. 

 

3.

And this is my Grandpa, Francis Sydney Holmes, here with me in my Launceston back yard – Mum’s stepfather, the only father she knew, the only Grandpa I knew, and more than enough. See how happy I look to be with him here!

He took me for walks, pointing out birds and insects, naming trees and flowers, showing me how to see. Birthdays and Christmases he gave me books: Dickens, the Brontes, Dumas.... He wrote me many letters – sadly, none kept – not as to a child, but an equal intellect.

The orchards were in Spreyton, near Devonport. In family gatherings at The Orchard House, my brother and cousins and I would fall asleep by the fire, listening to old family tales and reminiscences, until we were carried to bed. Daytimes we explored the bush. When I was very little I rode on the foot of the draught-horse, gentle Horace, hugging his leg.

Grandpa left me his Remington typewriter. (Everyone knew I would be a writer.) And he left money towards my tertiary education. He did that for all his grand-daughters. Parents, he said, if they must choose, would favour sons.

My father’s father gave me poetry, passing it along in the genes (my Dad had them too). 

My mother’s father gave me my Celtic heritage, the love of craggy rocks and rushing rivers, mountains, and Scotch thistles. When I finally visited Scotland, I suddenly understood. (Surely this heritage also enhanced the magic which came through the maternal line.)

My Grandpa (FSH, as he signed his many letters – not only to me but correspondents all over the world) gave me himself. And so much more. Gave me myself. Gave me the world.

Part 1 and Part 2 appear in previous posts.

I'm sharing this with Poets and Storytellers United via Friday Writings #53.

Here Are My Three Grandfathers (1)

Yes, I had three grandfathers. Two I never met. One was an army officer in British India. One was a drunk and a poet.

The third was a Yorkshireman, and became an orchardist. He brought his family – my Nana, my Uncle Ian, my Mum and my Aunty Frankie – out to Tasmania. Where I was born. 

1. 

When I was born, my father’s father, handsome John Thomas Robinson (Jack) wrote a poem for me, in pencil on a scrap of paper. I’m 83 now, and I still have it.

I had a Grandpa on hand, my mother's 'Pater'. This one, over on 'The Mainland', was my Daddy's father, so I called him 'Grandpa Daddy'.

He never crossed Bass Strait to visit us. By the time we crossed it, he’d left Grandma and gone off to live with some other woman. All six of the seven children still alive supported their mother. (Who never would hear a bad word said about him, even then.)

I thought that he and his brother built the Warburton pub. But no, that was his father (of the same name, my great-grandfather) and his uncle.

He – my grandfather – was for ten years Mayor of Flinders Island, where the youngest four of the seven children were born. He had a farm there, and worked hard, but it failed. Later he worked in Wonthaggi….

While they lived on the Island, he successfully represented its interests to the Tasmanian Government, to set up a much-needed regular ferry service from Launceston.

He was spoken of as a popular, sociable man. I heard that he liked to dance and sing. He was famous for liking the drink – too much! Grandma became a staunch member of The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which is probably not to be wondered at. 

He didn’t live long enough for me to grow up and meet him. 

That’s his wedding picture, holding a glove – perhaps the one she removed to receive the ring. 

I edited Grandma out of this copy. (She was very pretty then…)

Part 2 and Part 3 appear in the following posts.

Sharing with Poets and Storytellers United at Friday Writings #51 where the prompt is to write about the number three. But doing all this in one post would be too long for the P&SU guidelines. You can read the others now if you feel so inclined, or wait until I share them on future Fridays.

Footsteps

I walk in the footsteps of an old self – mine – retracing that strange and painful journey. I pause at certain places … linger … look long. I don’t plan to make this journey again. 

It’s a pilgrimage. 

If, when I began, I thought it merely a revisiting, a ‘trip down memory lane’ (how blithe that sounds!) – by now I intend completion. 

I have been reluctant to let you go. I wanted to tell our story. The saddest story, yes, but also beautiful. I can’t. It sounds just like hundreds of others, when told. I perceive it’s not meant to be revealed – not in its every detail. It was ours alone to live, to know. That was enough reason for it to be! I only want to tell it now to preserve it, but that’s a false and foolish goal. 

We lived, we met, we loved, you died. I walk again, deliberately, in the footsteps of my journey with you, where our paths intersected, entangled…. 

I reach

that final crossroad 

holding

one last gaze –

your blue eyes

Tanka for a dead man

I can’t draw, but

I let my pen wander 

across the page

while I think of you, and

the lines flow gracefully

*********

poems

reminiscences

dreams –

I watch myself writing

letters to a dead man

*********

your notebooks –

old lines that linger 

to show me

you not only loved me

you listened and heard

*********

we quoted

from certain poems 

certain lines –

in ways that made them

secret messages

The Dream Is Always

The dream is always of you,

my obsession, fixation: sad

love, lost love, past love, true…

Are dreams a defence against going mad?

Well, to live sometimes there

in that far, irrecoverable past,

is better, perhaps, than nowhere

to seek you, being always lost.

To seek you, being always lost, 

is better, perhaps, than nowhere

in that far, irrecoverable past –

but well to live, sometimes, there.

Are dreams a defence against going mad?

Love, lost love, past love, true …

my obsession, fixation – the sad

dream is always of you. 

The Love of My Life

The few to whom I tell our story think you must have been the love of my life. I don’t like to think in those terms. I have also loved others well. How could I put you above my dear Andrew, my third and last husband, my happiest marriage? He was such a dear, we were so close, best friends as well as lovers.

But then, I could not say I loved him more than you – even though no loves could have been more different.

You are certainly one of the loves of my life! Though I won’t say I loved you the most, neither could I truthfully say that I ever loved anyone more.

May you rest in peace! (May all my dear, dead loves rest in peace.)

an old lady

many years later

I think of you

whenever love is mentioned –

always that leap of my heart 

The title was a prompt at the Tanka Poets On Site group on facebook.

Remembrances

The light in your greeny-blue eyes, reminder of a summer ocean.

The way one lock of your hair always used to stick up, rebellious.

Your freckles, your flushed cheeks, your whole face lighting up with sudden laughter.

How fervently you would debate a point to understand it better.

Your hands moving swiftly through books and papers, or stilled and warm in mine.

The time I leaned back against your chest, your cradling arms around my waist.

All the lines that you wrote me: letters, poems, and that book inscription.

The path we walked our last day together, sunlight warm on our faces.

Written in response to Magaly's request for a list poem, in Friday Writings #40 at Poets and Storytellers United. Each item in my list is an American Sentence, the form created by Allen Ginsberg.