This t shirt is going to be my summer stand-by now that the weather had finally turned warm. A present from my girls. You couldn’t get closer to accuracy if you tried.
Tag: Bowie
Five years
Wind back five years
(that’s all we’ve got)
this day, two friends left
walked together, perhaps, who knows
through the coloured light
leaving this world a little darker
a little quieter a little emptier.
The sky will be fierce clear tonight
and amid star-dazzle
and serious moonlight
we’ll tell ourselves we see
our big beautiful Branwell
stretching across the universe
to the Starman on the other side.
Birthday: One
Photo©Jean-Luc Ourlin
This day, a symbol, a turning of the path,
is more, an aging, a dimming of the light.
So easy at the dark time of the year,
when nature sleeps and the stars weigh down
with such heavy, insupportable glitter,
to feel the end in the endlessness,
the slipping from warm closeness
into the cold nothingness beyond.
She gives me a card, the child, on this day,
a message of special words
that bring the sun a little closer,
the spring a little nearer.
‘We could be heroes’
and this is the day.
Flash fiction: Pine cones
As an introduction to this story, an explanation is probably called for. Like most families, we have quite a few traditions. Some of them are complete fabrications, like husband’s pine cone fire tradition. All year he collects pine cones. There are lots of pine trees hereabouts so by December we have a huge basket of them. We shake out the pine nuts, and on Christmas morning, husband burns them in the fireplace while the children open their presents. He does this every year. So, pine cones…
For months now I’ve been sleeping badly with hours of wakefulness in the middle of the night. For the last ten days my head has been full of big brown cats, strange houses and David Bowie songs. Branwell and Bowie are obvious; the strange houses is because we’re house hunting and every so often I think we’ve found ‘the one’ and can’t stop thinking about it.
Last night was no exception, waking about thirty minutes after putting the light out, then lying awake until five in the morning. When I did drift off eventually it was into a most peculiar dream. The night before, I’d woken up screaming because I’d had the nightmare again of something horrible standing in the bedroom doorway behind me. Last night’s dream was just…strange. Here it is in the form of a short story.
I wake and stare at the low, bare beams of the roof, through a hole in the tiles at a scrap of pale grey sky. Who’s in the bed with me?
Husband.
Where am I?
New house.
Where?
No answer. I throw off the pile of white sheets and heavy quilts. There’s a noise, a scuffling, scrabbling sound, an animal with claws, coming from…the roof.
Under the moonlight
I stand on the bed and climb out through…a skylight onto a flat roof with a concrete block bird nesting box about two feet by three feet by two feet high, and on the far side, over the guttering, a big hole for the birds birds? to get in.
If you say run
Hanging over the lip of the hole is a large, black, reptile skin glove. The scuffling is coming from inside the box. I reach out a hand
If you say run
and the glove whips back inside the box and is pressed against the hole.
They don’t want you to see.
Let’s sway
If you should fall
I fall backwards, into the…bathroom. Bathroom? Don’t make me laugh. There’s an enamel tub, the same low, dusty, cobwebby beams as in the bedroom and a howling gale through the broken, dirty window.
Put on your
The floor is covered in mouldering cardboard boxes and pieces of broken furniture. My breath makes clouds of vapour. I get in the bath.
While colour lights up your face
Oh my God, am I really doing this? I get in the bath and sit in the water going numb.
Put on your
There’s a soup tureen perched on one of the boxes. A white porcelain tureen covered in dust and bits of plaster. The lid doesn’t fit because there’s a plastic bag full of something stuffed inside.
Pine cones.
Of course, why wouldn’t there be? I watch as the lid wobbles.
I’ll run with you
It wobbles because the contents of the plastic bag are moving. I stare. A scaly, clawed foot sticks over the edge. A bright black eye stares back at me. Whiskers twitch. The lid tips onto the floor and a creature bounds out of the tureen, a cross between a pineapple and an armadillo. I scream.
Run
Pine cone.
Pine cones, says husband coming into the bathroom and letting out the animated pineapple pangolin. He’s holding a box with a pair of black, reptile skin gloves hanging over the edge. He shows me the wriggling, scaly creatures inside, with yellow teeth and twitching whiskers.
Pine cones.
The pine cones roll onto the floor and sprout legs. We open the door to let them outside into the garden. For, thank goodness, there is a garden.
I see the pangolin scuttle into the hedge. Then I take husband’s arm and squeal with joy. Creeping back through the hedge there are more pine cone pangolins, a mother and two…kittens.
Tremble like a flower
The mother pine cone is…a large, beautiful Bengal cat/pangolin and the kittens are just plain ordinary honest to goodness brown cat Branwell kittens.
Can we keep them? I ask.
They live here, husband replies. Pine cones.
Let’s sway under the moonlight, this serious moonlight.
Poetry challenge #14: Take a favourite line
This week, since it’s what I’ve been playing around with, I’m throwing the challenge out to choose a favourite line, of a song, a poem, a play or a novel, and let it inspire you. You can change it, transform it or reproduce it in any poetic form you like.
We’ve been listening to a lot of Bowie, for obvious reasons, and I’ve used a few of his lines already. Here’s another one, in the form of a triolet.
The stars look very different today,
Their web of singing spangles glowing brighter,
I hope the colours falling stay that way.
The stars look very different today,
The blue Earth failing couldn’t make you stay,
But the universal dark is growing lighter.
The stars look very different today,
Their web of singing spangles glowing brighter.
Get out those old records and anthologies and be inspired! Looking forward to reading the results.
If you say run
Something I might be doing for as long as the spirit moves me, is taking a line from a Bowie song as inspiration for a poem. Some of his lines are so good. I came late to his music, being the geeky kind of kid who preferred Mozart to Michael Jackson, but when I did, I was a fan for life. This is a very small tribute to a rock star who was the only one the world ever needed. He said it all.
If you say run, I’ll run with you,
If I say stay, will you listen?
On the bough, the blackbird’s singing,
On the river, wave tips glisten.
Here is peace, light dripping softly,
If you say run, I’ll run with you,
Though in this calm, love grows easy,
Beneath a sky, eternal blue.
I take your hand, your heart strings strain,
As you try to outrun the night,
If you say run, I’ll run with you,
To darkness’ edge, to find the light.
Blackbird calls, the gulls are crying,
Stay, they tell you, and try anew,
But though the road be long and dark,
If you say run, I’ll run with you.
Adieu David
Somebody else died today. Not so important to me personally as Branwell, but possibly better known.
Adieu
Stars die,
Glitter, dust,
And the firmament renews,
In a blaze of light.
Stars die,
Glitter, dust,
Songs are sung,
Memories pasted in halls of fame.
All die,
With one gull to lead the way,
To the same rainbow bridge,
Bowies and Branwells.
Jane Dougherty Writes 
