At St Seiriol's Well

months later
and hundreds of miles away
I’m still drawing from St Seiriol’s Well

Remembrance Haiku

dawn - war memorial
haloed with frost
poppies and candlelight

November Haiku

late November dawn
full moon
an early Christmas light

Two Autumn Haiku

a chandelier
of red Japanese
Maple


a cascade
of red Japanese
Maple

October Haiku

autumn woods
reverberating



among the fallen leaves
the glow of the setting sun



autumn twilight
upon golden leaves
we walk upon the sun




the river
shrivels grey and wrinkled -
autumn twilight

A Silence

glutinous silence
then thunder
barrelling the sky

The Tree of Life by Terrance Malick

The Tree of Life

written and directed by Terrance Malick

"There are two ways through life. The way of nature and the way of grace. We have to choose which one you will follow."

"Unless you love, your life will flash by."

The Tree of Life

This is without doubt one of the greatest films I have ever watched.

Still Pond

still pond
in the cool of the day
reflecting Eden

Midday

midday - already
twilight under this grey
July sky

Poem for the Nineteen

On Friday 6 July we held a farewell lunch for nineteen colleagues who are leaving the English team this academic year - some have already left. It has been a difficult and painful time for us all.

I was asked to write a poem to mark this sad occasion. It was printed on the inside of the nineteen farewell cards we gave out at the lunch. Here is the poem.

Poem For the Nineteen

We know how to say goodbye.
It’s built into our contracts.

Each year the students
come and go.
It’s part of the ebb and flood tides
of our working lives.

But our colleagues' leaving is difficult for us.
It has smashed our equilibrium,
driven by hard currents
that are out of our control
and has left us reeling.

In other offices
they are dismantling our island collegium.
Slow - matured over decades
now diminished to a remnant
of the colleagues
I have measured myself against.

So let’s mark that for a brief time
we shared together
the great toy of language
kinship in the team room,
incendiary in the classroom.

That ignited these indifferent walls -
that will not remember any of us.
For we are all only just suspended
on the living threads of memory.

I know that I shall be looking through files
in months to come
and find written on some discarded paper
your familiar handwriting
that will inflame the dull insistent ache of loss
that I’ve been carrying around with me.

And I know
for those of us staying
and for those of us going,
it is as if we are all
become exiles – adrift
leaving something precious behind.

© David Loffman

Feathers

there is nothing
of the pigeon - but a
garden of grey feathers

Beyond the Border 2012

We have returned from Beyond the Border. A little damp and splattered with mud but filled to over flowing with stories, a glimpse of other ways to live, friendship and love.

Beyond the Border 2012

Johnny Cash Hurt Video

 

I think this is an extra ordinary song.

Pickle Ditch

During the 1970’s in Colliers Wood in South West London, the river Wandle was diverted to make way for a massive building project - a huge hypermarket – the Sainsbury’s Saver Centre. However the engineers left the original course of the river in which flows now a narrow channel of water known as the Pickle.

The hypermarket is built on the 12th century Merton Priory. The Pickle forms part of its medieval boundary.

Pickle Ditch

Beside a pylon
a gutter of scruffy water -
a floating crust of dust and oil -
the Pickle.

The Wandle’s original line
before they straightened it
and split it in two.

Here where two car parks meet
the tarmac ends.
Opens to a triple scored boundary
of medieval wall and footpath
and the deep black crack of water
ignored by locals
unadorned like a drainage ditch.

This fringe remains of the meadows
that long ago lay here
in the grounds of the Priory.

Of calico drenched in river water
laid out in a billowing haze of light
bleaching slowly in the sun
while the Priory bells call vespers
and a thin river mist gathers.

But now among the verges
lined with Honda and Renault
beside Kiss Me Hardy and Burger King
half floating –
a sunken barrel of beer, police cones,
and an upturned shopping trolley
littering the line of water,
heading north.

© David Loffman

Merton Priory Trust

Reading a poem in public

I read one of my own poems at the Bedford Park Arts Festival last night. Andrew Motion complimented me on it.

Poetry is................

“Poetry, the best words in the best order” S.T. Coleridge

“Poetry is the art of using words charged with their upmost meaning” Dana Gioia

“It should strike the reader of a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a remembrance” John Keats

“Poetry is truth seen with passion” W.B. Yeats

“Poetry cannot be defined, only experienced” C Logue

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquillity” William Wordsworth

“It is a widening of consciousness, an extension of humanity” David Constantine

“A poem should not mean but be” Archibald MacLeith

“Poetry is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart” R.S. Thomas

“Poetry is a way of talking about things that frighten you” Mick Imlah

Poetry is “a little concoction of words against death” Miroslav Holub

“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes. There will also be singing
About the dark times” Bertolt Brecht

“In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start
In the prison of his days
Teach the freeman how to praise” W.B. Yeats

“Poetry is a zoo in which you keep demons and angels” Les Murray

“Poetry is the voice of spirit and imagination and all that is potential as well as of the healing benevolence that used to be the privilege of the Gods” Ted Hughes

“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour” William Blake

“These fragments I have shored against my ruin” T.S. Eliot

“Poetry comes out of wonder, not out of knowing” Lucille Clifton

“Poetry is a place where all the fundamental questions are asked about the human condition” Charles Simic

“Poetry is a brilliant vibrating interface between the human and the non-human” Edwin Morgan

“Poetry can tell us what human beings are” Maya Angelou

Azaleas Rainbow

azaleas
fading - the remains
of a rainbow

Half an Hour

for half an hour
a magpie dismembers
a sparrow

Tonight Clear Sky

Venus and Jupiter
bright beads threaded on the
orbital plane

Perspective

Here is a link to help us get a little perspective.

Click here!

waning moon
slowly turning his
face away

a full moon
painting the frost
coated streets

Through the Night

driving through the night
Mars and Orion to guide us
safely home

Adorned

the moon in her hair
and Venus – a bright bead of light
upon her neck

last night bright

Venus shone down upon all

my wounds and scars

On Monday

we'll be watching films
projected onto the black face
of the new moon

River Sky

the river
covered with ice

the sky
a fathomless blue

Heavy Frost

heavy with frost

the earth reflects back the full moon’s

own grey face

River Lane

River Lane

for Pam

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river 
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, 
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. 
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten 
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

From The Dry Salvages by T. S. Eliot

Almost midnight at the end of River Lane.
An old stump of road that ends in water.
And found a battered old transit
and a man and his guitar
playing alone into the darkness.

We came to bless this river
to pour out our libation of words upon its waters.
But we stopped to listen to his songs.

A voice sharp and clear
like an arrow blade into the night air
returning to us clean and pure
reverberating off the far bank of trees.

A voice woven with water and moonlight.
And in our listening
all things seemed lifted up
made new on this mild summer night.

An anointing.

We slipped out of ourselves and time
as we stood and listened.


© David Loffman

Two Moons

two full moons
rising - double glazed from a
bedroom window

Sun Rise West

sun rises in the west
from a thousand reflected
suburban windows

Playing for Change

Here is a link to a campaign / project I thought you might be interested in.

Click here for a musical treat.


And click here for the Playing for Change website.

On The Memorial Statue of the Rainbow Division by James Butler

At the Summer Exhibition 2011 Royal Academy, Piccadilly, London.

“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look around and see….”

Lamentation 1:12


In transit from Scottish foundry
to Picardy battle field –
the Croix Rouge Farm Memorial.
A bronze statue of an
unblemished soldier
carrying a dead comrade
laid across his arms.

In London -
a brief station of remembrance.
It forms an awkward cruciform of bodies,
commands its own vortex of silence
among the summer visitors
who come and go
through intermittent July rains.

I stare up at this bronze cenotaph.
And as it rains again
I see the bayonet
silvered with water
slung over his shoulder
and follow the soldier’s bowed head down
to the cradled body.

An offering.

And I imagine his slow insistent march South
to that remote farmhouse
its undisturbed fields
clogged with mud
where only a few will come.

The rain is beading down
the bronze bodies
Water falls from the bandaged head
and unmarked dog tags.
And suddenly I hear
the chimes of Fortnum and Masons striking eleven
and the roar of traffic on Piccadilly.


Click here to take you to the website about this statue

Ripples Stained Glass

slow ripples
on the still pond - like
stained glass

Red Stag Woods

the stag’s
guttural roar
as if the trees were speaking

...

the Red stag’s
guttural roar
as if the woods were on fire


Photo Red Deer Bull by Ben Bawden

At Camber

the slurred landscape shifts
I'm walking into grey

Photo by Alex Bienfait

Kubla Khan's 'pleasure dome'

Do you think Kubla Khan's "pleasure dome" is a Yurt?

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
a stately pleasure-dome decree:"

A Flock of Geese

a flock of geese
fly into a power line
and light the night sky

True Grit

I've just watched the 2010 Coen Brothers film 'True Grit'. An absolute masterpiece.

Summer Haiku

We are now half way through the holiday. Here are a few haiku. They are not arranged in any order. Hope you like them.

in morning
light I’m reading
Siddhartha
...


evening light
lays upon the deer park
like a feather
...

water flows
over stones – recalls all
the fallen rain
...

water flows
over stones – reflecting
on the rain to come
...

at either end
of the still pond
shrill water
...

at the still pond
the echos of children
playing elsewhere

...

hidden in
a green labyrinth
children playing

...

after rain
air moves through the house
fresh and cool

This looks amazing. There feels something deeply spiritual in this act don't you think?

Water Chimes

water chimes
over stones - so quickly
the summer passing

Japanese Maple

I'm dry under
the Japanese Maple
watching rain


Photo Japanese Maple 1 by saynine

Enceladus by David Loffman

This is the poem I read at The Troubadour last night.Two things to note. Enceladus is one of Saturn's moons. In 2005 the Cassini probe discovered cryovolcanoes - volcanoes that erupt ice. This ice forms a ring around Saturn known as the e ring.The second point to note is the Roman myth of the God Saturn for whom it was prophesised that one of his children would kill him take his place. As a result Saturn devoured his children when they were born. Goya's painting of Saturn Devouring His Son seems to depict the horror of this act pretty well.


In Saturn’s hinterland
among the trapped
rubble of moons and rings
are the discarded bones
of all Saturn’s murdered children.

Cryovolcanic moon Enceladus
scatters a ribbon of ice
a littered disc of frozen tears.

Drawn from water
under the moon’s crust
stretched by the pull of the planet
the tidal currents of its oceanic mantle.

Water crushed by tectonic plates
and venting from chambers
of the moon's interior
as plumes of ice

that rises and forms
a thick torc of ice
ringing the gas colossus.
Renewed with every orbit
thickening to a blinding white smog.

A bright bead of light
circling Enceladus
drags its shackle of cryomagma
weeping a trail of grief
for all Saturn’s victims.

Stary Stary Night - The End of Season Party at The Troubadour

I'm reading at the end of season party at Coffee House Poetry, The Troubadour, 263-267 Old Brompton Road, London SW5. The theme of the evening is space, planets, stars, comets, moons, galaxies, space - the final frontier.

Monday 11 July

It starts at 8.00 finishes around 10.00 and costs about £5.00 to get in. May be see you there.

Here is a link. Coffee-House Poetry

David

Michael Longley on Radio 4

I found the interview with Michael Longley on Wednesday's programme of Front Row on Radio 4 extraordinary. You'll catch it about eleven minutes into the programme and it finishes at about 21 minutes in the programme.

Here is the link

Ringing the Changes

in the empty
summer garden the trees
ring out the changes

Meaning of ring the changes

To employ alternative methods.

This phrase derives from the practice of bell ringing. Each pattern of the order of striking the bells is called a change. In order to 'ring the changes' all the variations of striking pattern are rung, bringing the ring back to its starting point.

Bell-ringing is of course an ancient pastime and consequently the figurative use of this phrase is also old. Thomas Adams refers to it in The divells banket described in sixe sermons, 1614

"Some ring the Changes of opinions."

The term took on another meaning in the 19th century. While acknowledging that "the expression originally came from the belfry" John C. Hotten's A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words, 1859 glosses the meaning as:

Ringing the Changes, changing bad money for good; in respectable society the phrase is sometimes employed to denote that the aggressor has been paid back in his own coin, as in practical joking, when the laugh is turned against the jester."

Scavaging Ravens

scavaging ravens
like torn black rags -
scattered by the wind

Wind Swept

wind swept -
the trees are beckoning us
into the sky

Ewan MacColl - Dirty Old Town

Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seegar singing - amazing