shall we wait
you and I
for the wind
to blow upon
our luck, shall
we wear our hearts
outside, shiny
like a pebble
with tears
the night owls
cried

shall we wait
until our world
has ended, blown
distant on the
curve of light
shall we forget
the beat and
flutter of each
eye which smiles
in memory
beneath the sun

shall we seek
out laughter
like a child
lost and dumb
seeing faces
tied with wishes
unfulfilled
hearing thoughts
of loneliness
and knowing
no-one comes
no-one comes

where shall we
find ourselves
you and I
when the days
are done and
the mystery has
disappeared
what shall we
do when the wind
has blown us
hollow, the
wringing hands
are open-palmed
and the song is
sung

we shall wait
you and I
on the other side
we shall beg
for understanding
and a place
to lie and when
this world is
ending we too
shall bend, like
lovers crying
far away from
all the glistening
moments that
our hearts have
spent

flighty pulse,
near growing still,
resound amongst
the rocks whose
crevices our
lives unwound

past years and cares
and fears, sped on mossy
autumn tears

the hours are like
water and the drinks
are done

I have awoken
slightly broken
to the death of doubt
which hangs about
my neck, a pendant white
upon my chest

breath and sweetness
and the lasting taste of
an idea

the wasted time,
the air which
doesn’t clear

the years and tears
weighing life’s arrears

lifting up the static
shutters which ruled
my sight and
stole your light

my mind as smooth as
tiles,
water on my brow,
space to mull awhile

hanging from the
tip of thought, I stop
I walk, gesticulating
upside down, mouth
atop my head as if
a crown

I laugh inside,
two memories collide,
simple sounds left
hanging in the morning
dried

there’s nothing left
but everything to learn,
which is a shame,
with all the days we
had and all the
hours spurned

there’s nothing left
but for the lives we
bore and the love
we burned

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned” -ZARA (William Congreve)

the terror of the body,
hair and cheeks framed
in posterity, alone

flesh foundations
bereft of tone,
the brevity of life
when life’s shell is
no longer one’s own

faces, distant places
life but in a spell
eaten swiftly, quelled

mirrored windows,
misery and pride,
the sky a lid bolted
fast, a memory of
breath clasped against
the chill

dreams and voyages
meat and bone,
the summit of a hill
and past that hill
life in an eye now closed

stars fell down the long
black slope of sky,
heat rising off the road,
knuckled hills drawn close
from the valley below

the creek was clear
and opal fine,
trailing moss braided
yellow from the end of
summer shine

open ground with cedar
cobbled on the skyline’s
brow, thin blue ridges
of the mountain soaked
with snow and cloud

the air was thin and
frail and woody as if
sieved through pine,
this stony mesa
fragile in ascended time

the fence posts crippled
from the wire scars,
the flood plain and the
batten bridge, the boarded
shops without an open
sign and the deserted
cafe in which you found
the quieter side of self

outskirts of a town,
deserted streets,
decades cloaked with
tyranny dust
and mistrust blown

soldiers and sandbags
and stories of terror,
rural faces like
leather, stubble and
rubble and the
threshing of corn fields

miniature houses
behind farms and barns,
the hub of military trucks,
fear and charm fused
in a strange keening sound

tin-roofed huts
set against a blasted
forest, hills eaten
into craters with
bargain ex-Soviet
mortar and shell

a woman with grief
holds outstretched a
photograph, her daughter
playing in the sun,
beside her a handsome man

spirals of conflict
mark her face, eyes
adrift, witness to
the killings she describes
in riffs of speech,
words sorrow soaked

there are men who call
her liar, she says, snake,
there are looters here,
she says, bandits, war-lords
on the make

further down a darkened
valley, buildings squat
and wide, each erupted
from an RPG, confetti
strewn from inside

rocks climb unending
left to right,
days of molten heat and
the deadened mercury
of stony night

the carcass of a dog
stains the yard,
shot and gutted poultry,
livestock burned and
hung from wire fencing
innards charred

brain and blood coats
the corner kitchen
and the window pane,
footprints archived
in the blood and clay

beyond, a stack of huts
licked with fire, the
stench of flesh
still heavy from the
cooked dry pyre

there is no-one left
and little evidence of
when there was but for
tell-tale signs
like a child’s scalp or
a basket of matted hair

the stones endure the
evening chill,
the moon shines down at will,
flies feast in corners
buzzing, gorged,
larvae gathering at the
loosened soil.
Possessions and history,
skin and bone, carcasses
unmasked, unnumbered,
each a dormant memory
to be atoned

Born in the working-class district of Bethnal Green, London, he was the first of nine children. He left school at the age of thirteen and began work as an apprentice metal-worker at the Arsenal. He continued his education through attending a series of evening classes, studying French, German, Latin, music and art. In 1882 he passed the Civil Service exams and five years later passed the University of London matriculation exams. He joined the Foreign Office where he became a librarian.

Gray is best known today as an aesthetic poet of the 1890s and as a friend of Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. He was also a talented translator, bringing works by the French Symbolists Mallarmé, Verlaine, Laforgue and Rimbaud into English, often for the first time. He is purported to be the inspiration behind the title character in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, but distanced himself from this rumor. It should also be noted that Wilde’s story was serialised in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine a year before their relationship began. His relationship with Wilde was initially intense, but had cooled for over two years by the time of Wilde’s imprisonment. The relationship appears to have been at its height in the period 1891-1893

Gray’s first notable publication was a collection of verse called Silverpoints (1893), consisting of sixteen original poems and thirteen translations from Verlaine (7), Mallarmé (1), Rimbaud (2), and Baudelaire (3). In his review of it Richard Le Gallienne distinguished it from the output of many of the ‘decadent’ poets in its inability to accomplish “that gloating abstraction from the larger life of humanity that marks the decadent”. Gray’s second volume, Spiritual Poems, chiefly done out of several languages (1896), defined his developing identity as a Catholic aesthete. It contained eleven original poems and twenty-nine translations from Jacopone da Todi, Prudentius, Verlaine, Angelus Silesius, Notker Balbulus, St John of the Cross, and other poets both Catholic and Protestant. Gray’s later works were mainly devotional and often dealt with various Christian saints. The Long Road (1926) contained his best-known poem, “The Flying Fish”, an allegory which had first appeared in The Dial in 1896. Gray produced one novel, Park: A Fantastic Story (1932), a surreal futuristic allegory about Fr Mungo Park, a priest who, in a dream, wakes up in a Britain which has become a post-industrial paradise inhabited by black people who are all Catholics, with the degenerate descendants of the white population living below ground like rats. The novel is characterised by a vein of dry humour, as when a Dominican prior wonders if Park could have met Aquinas. Gray’s collected poems, with extensive notes, were printed in a 1988 volume edited by English professor and 1890s expert Ian Fletcher.

During his lifetime were published his The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894), Poems (1895), Ireland and Other Poems (1897). He was one of the Rhymers’ Club, and cousin to Olivia Shakespear (who dedicated her novel The False Laurel to him).

In 1892, Johnson converted to Catholicism. He repudiated former friend Oscar Wilde and directed a sonnet at him called “The Destroyer of a Soul” (presumably the soul of his cousin Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he had introduced to Wilde the previous June). In the following year, Johnson wrote what some consider his masterpiece, “The Dark Angel”.

“The Dark Angel” also served as one of the influences for the Dark Angels chapter of Space Marines in the Warhammer 40,000 fictional universe. Their Primarch, Lion El’Jonson, is also named after the poet.

Mary MacRae (1942 – 2009), English poet

[Mary MacRae] wrote and published poetry the last ten years of her life, after ill-health forced her to take early retirement from teaching. She taught for fifteen years at the James Allen Girls School (JAGS), Dulwich, London. Her commitment to writing led to her deep involvement with the first years of the Poetry School under Mimi Khalvati, studying with Mimi and Myra Schneider, whose advanced poetry workshop she attended for eight years. In these groups her exceptional talent was quickly recognised, leading to publication in many magazines and anthologies. MORE [Second Light Live]

Elder

by

Mary MacRae

This poem is  excerpted from Mary MacRae’s book, Inside the Brightness of Red.

Reprinted here with permission. All rights are reserved by the publisher, Second Light Network.

·

A breathing space:

the house expands around me,

·

unfolds elastic lungs

drowsing me back

·

to other times and rooms

where I’ve sat alone

writing, as I do now,

when syncope –

·

one two three one two –

breaks in;

·

birdcall’s stained

the half-glazed door with colour,

·

enamelled the elder tree

whose ebony drops

·

hang in rich clusters

on shining scarlet stalks

·

while with one swift stab

the fresh-as-paint

·

starlings get to the heart

of the matter

of matter

·

in a gulp of flesh

and clotted juice that leaves me

·

gasping for words transparent

as glass, as air.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

My profound gratitude to poet Myra Schneider for the introduction to a new-to-me poet, Mary MacRae, and to poet Dilys Wood of The Second Light Network (England) and editor of ARTEMIS Poetry for granting this interview. J. D.

JAMIE: Clearly, and as has been stated by others, Mary was profoundly inspired by art, nature (particularly flowers and gardens), and love. What can you tell us about her life and interests that would account for that?

DILYS: Mary writes tender and accurate poems about wild nature, creatures and landscape, drawing on her stays in a cottage on an untamed part of the coast in Kent, England and visits to her daughter living in remote West Wales. In her London home, it’s easy to guess from her poems about garden birds and flowers how much time she spent at the window. She almost always sees nature in flux, changing moment by moment, unpredictable, mysterious, a spiritual inspiration. One of her great strengths as a poet is catching movement.

Many of Mary’s poems focus on love between close family members. This may relate to a difficult relationship with her own father, which she sought to understand, and the relationships which compensated (with mother, sister, husband Lachlan, daughter and grandchild). A back problem prevented her from holding her baby daughter and she often refers in her poems to young children. She clearly has a yearning towards them.

JAMIE: She wrote poetry apparently only at the end of her life and for ten years. What were her creative outlets before that? How did she come to poetry?

DILYS: Mary was a dedicated teacher of English Literature and language in a leading girls’ secondary school. She was also deeply interested in music and painting (these are strongly reflected in her poetry). Though she had written as a young woman she followed the pattern of many women creative artists in becoming absorbed into her home life and her paid work, only turning to writing when her illness released her from the daily grind of intensive teaching. The remarkable, rapid development of her poetry shows how strong her latent powers really were.

JAMIE: Was writing poetry a part of her healing process when she was diagnosed with cancer? If so, how did it help her?

DILYS: I’m confident that Mary’s diagnosis with cancer enabled her to change her life-style and from then on concentrate on her poetry, urged by the sense that she might be short of time. There is no evidence that Mary wrote therapeutically to come to terms with her cancer. In fact she only ever addressed her illness in relation to the possible unkindness of fate in cutting her off from beloved people and life itself. The poems written in the last 2-3 years of her life give the impression that her dedication to writing, with the spiritual experiences which accompanied it, enabled her to bear terrible distress. She records this distress, using imaginative and metaphorical approaches to focus it, and these poems make heart-wrenching reading.

JAMIE: Can you tell us about her process? When did she write? Where? For how long?

DILYS: I have the impression that Mary’s life revolved around three things, people she loved, gathering experiences that would feed her poetry (travel, listening to music, visiting galleries) and very hard work in direct furtherance of her writing (extensive reading, attending workshops with other inspirational poets, writing, revising and submitting her poems to criticism from critics she respected). She used notebooks to make a full, accurate record of those experiences – landscapes, human encounters, thoughts – that would feed her work. There is an extract from one such entry in the section about keeping a journal in the resource bookWriting Your Self, Transforming Personal Material by Myra Schneider and John Killick. This book also includes a contribution in the chapter on spirituality which reveals much about Mary’s attitudes to life, nature and also her writing process.

JAMIE: Do you have any advice from her for other poets and aspiring poets?

DILYS: Mary was a dedicated writer, entirely sincere in her commitment to poetry as opposed to ‘career’ as a poet. She was always ready to enjoy and praise the widest range of subject-matter, approaches and styles from other poets, providing she thought they were ‘busting a gut’ to get their poems right, and not indulging in the trendy or superficial, which she despised (whether from well-knowns or unknowns). She put much emphasis on wide-reading of both past and contemporary poets and she herself had absorbed a huge amount of other poets’ work, always quoting fully and accurately. She liked using another’s work as a starting pont for her own (the Glose) and particularly admired the work in strict form (includingSonnet, Villanelle and Ghazal), which began to be more acceptable from the mid-1990s (eg from such poets as Marilyn Hacker and Mimi Khalvati).

JAMIE: Are any other collections of her poetry planned? If so, when might we look forward to them?

DILYS: When putting together ‘Inside the Brightness of Red’, Myra Schneider and I went through the whole of Mary’s unpublished work and selected all those poems we felt were both complete and would have satisfied her high standards. What remains unpublished would be mainly fragments and early versions of poems she did more work on. There will not, as far as we know, be a further book, but Mary did achieve her aim of being a significant lyric poet, whose work is very attractive, polished and, above all (as she would have wished) deeply moving and consolatory.

* The Second Light Network aims to promote women’s poetry and to help women poets, especially but not only older women, poets develop their work. It runs weekends of workshops and readings in London usually twice a year, a residential extended workshop with readings and discussions at least once every eighteen months and occasionally other events. It is nationwide (England). Dilys is the main editor of ARTEMIS Poetry, a major poetry magazine for women produced by Second Light twice a year.  It includes a lot of reviews and some articles as well as poetry by Second Light members who receive it free as part of their subscription. An e-newsletter is sent out every few weeks. A few anthologies of poetry have been published by the network but now this magazine developes books under special circumstances only – such as Mary’s collections.

Thanks to Second Light Web Administrator, poet Ann Stewart, for the following: The books (Inside the Brightness of Red and As Birds Do) can be bought: via order form and cheque in post: http://www.secondlightlive.co.uk/books.shtml or here online: http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/shop.php (typing  ‘ Mary MacRae collection ’ in the filter box will reduce the list to just those two books).

modern life,
expressive and precise,
cinematic endings lost
in disappointment, absurdity
and that perfect single
moment which weights your
palm like a freshly honed
whittling knife

a tender time
polished white and brown,
dripping, shining, broken
loose, thinly stretched
in gauzy sheets
beneath the tiny
indents of our feet

between the stubbled earth
and the landscape tilted
on its side, a space in which
to fall, fused with spiny
energy, a floating paradise
between your life and mine,
the shoreline crowded with
misshapen people, each a solid
question mark

calm, contented
bare and naked

folded out, leg to head,
kneeling beauty
skimmed with distance

melting mouth
from air expelled

threads of solace
on snowy hill

a whitened figure
billowed, shivered
caught like a sail
keening, propelled

a woman spinning
down the slope

For Sunday Morning:

It is rather busy around our home on Sunday morning so I am posting this “Valentine” on Saturday night . . .

It will be easy for you to guess the full name of this famous British author, whose family gave him the nickname of “Will.”   He wrote 154 Love Sonnets, each of which would be perfect as the “sentiment” inside of a Hallmark card.  However, I only chose one for today.  Below the sonnet, I have included some keys to interpretation.

If you saw the film, “Sense & Sensibility,” with Emma Thompson, this sonnet will be very familiar to you.   Before the film [1994] I had never heard the poem:  When I heard Marianne [Kate Winslet] recite the sonnet, at the word, “bark,” the image of a dog floated before my eyes.  I hope at least one of my readers will assure me that I am not alone in this . . .

Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds


Admit impediments. Love is not love


Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark


That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks


Within his bending sickle’s compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out ev’n to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here are some clues to the interpretation of this sonnet, from The Top 500 Poems, Edited by William Harmon, Columbia Anthology:

“Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar claims to be as ‘constant as the northern star’ – that is, the Pole Star that seems not to move, while all other stars revolve around it and which can still be used in informal navigation.  Ink has been spilt over the reading of Line 8, which probably refers to the star [whose elevation or celestial altitude can be known by instruments] but may refer to the bark [ship].”

William Shakespeare (baptized 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist.  He is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon.”  His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. [Wikipedia]

the earth is flat,
and we are back before
the birth of science blew
our dreamy superstition
to smithereens

an age of afterlife
and old-fashioned hope,
soft-headed faith,
religious comforts learned
from books by rote

paradise lost, parallels
crossed, logic and reason
sway the bridge heaven and
hell, leaving us dismayed
and contradicted, at once
alive but still just particles
in space, measuring the
distance from our besmirched
birth to death, slung low
like a lantern casting
shadows on our future face

the solid world meets the
waves of probability,
dissolved like matter in
the sea, blocks of classical
belief eroded by new history

we are flesh but we are
flimsy, infinitesimally
clustered like beads of
energy shifting upward
against the driven gravity

we speculate to accumulate,
desperate for the road of
possibility, join the freedom
wave yet somehow keep our
lives sensibly contained

we observe but are observed,
carried through our decades
like a dull persistent ache,
not calamitous but not
quite properly healed

in relief there is grief
and in grief the helplessness
of living, tongue and flesh
pinioned by bone, crowned in
mystery by a semi-used brain

we are bacteria and weight,
we are bowels and sap,
we are fragile hearts and
a collected sum of dates,
when we dock and celebrate
this voyage the humanness we
believe innate will fail,
and we will not find the
words, the understanding
will be bound and sealed,
thoughts once distinct will
turn and heel, forever merged

the articulacy we crave will
run itself into the future
far beyond, and we will stay
behind within the confines
of this life, enduring all
things unto the end

laughter and light
once flimsy, reduced

thickened air,
a lungful’s bed,
the droop of eyes
in face, the woolly
head

rib-cage tightening
like a rubber band

thoughts migrating,
stellar faces

lengthy memories,
tenements of family,
dust which dwindles
as time mingles
seamlessly

scattered sand,
the colour tallow

oil drifting
on a tar rich sea

twists of drift,
patina pebbles,
the greasy air
which harvests
oxygen, drives the coast
with wind, bends
gorse like a comb
through thinning
hair

a piece of glass,
reclaimed breath

images collapsed,
mouths dying, bereft

the particles of
clay and rust,
flesh and bodies
decoded into consciousness

time amputates
the months from years,
weeks from months,
days from weeks

the sky cuts
down the days
with rain and
sheets of wind

trees bend, mute

the telegraph
pylons sing

the skulls of
mammals hunkered
down for winter
poke dustily
through drifts
of leaves

cracked existence

water and the
season’s rags

nature’s leftovers
clinging to my
tread, I navigate
the heavy field
with walking feet

bone-tired
senses wired

the days are drowned
in endless dusk

my face
has bumps, abrasions
from different days,
the shapes which
enter each thought
enter only sideways

my sight slows

the morning hangs
sleepily
from branches

bodies shrinking

stones which
moan
into the dawn

life repeated,
blood delight,
the trail of dark
water in the wake
of the little rowing
boat, upward
to the light

nickel and the
desert moon,
ribbons of waltz
marked darkly
in lines, musical
interlude broken
with time

coloured glass
in rows
upon the desk

like bulbs expired
bereft of light

winter’s curl
in shadow ice
marked out

imprinted
interred from sight

social, moral, emotional
catharsis which like a sprite
lives not in air or the soul
but somewhere in the hinterland

smokes our eyes, smarting wide
keeping us awake

everyone understands pain
and through this we ignite
and burn, genially bound

one manifestation of humankind
blazing bright

innocence, born sanguineous
reasoning the dictates of
each joy

measuring the inconsequence of
every strife

it is not we
who control
the boat of inspiration

not ours
that dry bright
light, strobed far off
in watery worlds

we are like new,
re-imbued,
shyly awkward
in a spiral avenue

we are the late afternoon
we are the language of the dead
we are the rolling wooden floors
about which slides ball-bearings of time

mind’s despair
hobbled within happiness,
classic spirit ballad
captured, menstruating
images which dramatise
his century, unbearable
but elementary, monstrous
as the narrow streets
beneath his trainer cleats,
loss of shine and time,
a lie as great as skyscrapers,
the world grown legs
mechanised and sleepless,
and lipstick smeared behind
the hands which dirty-up
his inner-space