What can you say
When the sorrow is so thick
It chokes you
Leaving you gagged
What can you feel
When the sorrow is so large
It blankets you
Leaving you smothered
What can you do
When the sorrow is so keen
It cuts you
Leaving you soaked
What can you be
When the sorrow is so fresh
It chains you
Leaving you trapped
Hold on too tight and you crush
Let go and you lose
Tether and you bind a trap
Cut loose and you kill in kind
Tooth and jaw consume
Hunger burns bright
An orange bubble in their minds
Green swirls slicing their stomachs
Mostly hungry
Always empty
Predators of marine paradise
Shadows large and fierce
Hunger always
I am the cactus of the prairie
I am the cactus of the plain
I am the cactus of the equatorial mountain
I am the cactus of the desert
I am thick skinned
I am spiky
I am green
I am beige and grey covered
I am an oasis
I am reaching to the sky
In the desert at night it is cold
Ice in the crevices
The sky is clear and dark
Stars shine there
How do you see them?
For me time moves faster
I live longer
It is relative
My stars are streaks
I live in a blurred circle of white blue
My desert
My sky
All around me is silver glitter
I lift my limbs high
The theme this year is Games because of the Olympics this year – I thought it would be a good idea to write lots of poems on the theme and have gotten a bit carried away – they are all for kids and there is at least one Little Book in there. One thing though I am going to try and remember it sooner in 2012 so that I can have a nice ready poem for the blog!
Progress of the Olympic poems will be found on Orange Monster which is where all the kids and illustration stuff ends up.
Tomorrow Saturday 24th September 2011 sees the Exhibition in Braille a touchy feely art attraction set up by Centre Arts to raise money for the Gloucester County Association for the Blind. Tickets cost £5 and are avaliable at the doors which are open 12-7pm.
There are some really cool things there for you to touch and feel and an interactive braille table to boot!
Here are a few sneak peaks but you can not know the majesty of these pieces without actually going and feeling them!
The exhibition has been put together with the blind and visually impaired in mind and as such bright vibrant and therefore easier to see colours have been used in some of the pieces and there is also a bueatiful light sculpture.
Then we come to my piece – the giant coral I have been working on for what seems like forever!
Which I set up last night 🙂 Complete with beads for the molecular sand! There are also MP3s of some of my poems that I felt where a good counter point to the visual/textural piece there to listen too 🙂
Upon a Welsh Mountain Side
Above a disused slate quarry
Below a turgid sky
In a fine hazy drizzle
A monstrous pink flapping monster
Perched on the edge
About to take flight
Fear sticks in the throat
Fear jellifies the knees
Fear pancake flips the stomach
Fear trembles the lips
But dad is there
Smiling
Saying ‘don’t be afraid
Pink pterodactyls are extinct’
And pink bats don’t exist
We draw close
We draw near
The pink flapping monster
Charges us
A shreak of fear
Big strong arms
A bear face grinning
Brow prickling beard
And blue crinkled eyes
A greeting hug
‘I forgot me coat
Had to wrap meself in an old sheet
And with a smile
We went to see today’s
Paleontological find
Footprints in a ribbon’s stream
Beads upon a string
Minute leaves upon a stem
They were made
By a pachyderm
Lifeless land this salt plain
Giant evaporation pans
Leaving just salt
Where once sea
Now desert
Shimmers in reflected heat
Nothing but the footprints
Alone in the heat
Nomadic outcast
In a land
Of sporadic water
Bounding the land in green
What are you thinking?
Basically I have been learning the guitar for a year – this is me at home with books – I did have some guitar lessons during my GCSE’s which was half a lift time ago now. It was about a years worth and as my coordination and musical knowledge were pretty bad at the time the poor teacher spent most of the lessons trying to teach me rhythm and how to hold the guitar without dropping it.
Hence I am quiet proud of what I have achieved in a year around small children and giving birth and what not. I have been working on various things – my husband got me two children’s guitar books which I have steadily been working my way through. One is Christmas Carols and one is nursery rhymes – this turned out to be an important move as part of the problem I’d had when trying to play the guitar before was that I was trying to play stuff that was technically advance and way out of a beginners league.
The other thing has been I have made the music part of the family life – I practice the guitar reguardless of if others are in the room, the guitar was moved from the bedroom where I would sneak off to try and play once every few months (generally just after a musical friend who could tune it had visited) to it being down stairs and easily got to. I allocated a space on our units for my guitar books and plectrums and also a tuner! This has made things so much different for me to the point that I am happy to show my little girl basic guitar. I had previously been trying to tune it from a piano over the road belonging to our landlady and aunt in law but it never sounded right (turns out the piano is out).
For my 30th birthday celebration I have been given the complete beatles cord book and a silver engraved plectrum as well as a multitude of other musical themed things – I had decreed that my 30’s would be musical – I have done five – six years with no choir, no musical theatre etc… and I really can not live like that.
Anyway I decided to video me playing various things and put them up but my husband pointed out that my song There’s a Boy Over There would work as it shows most of what I can do (badly and the singings iffy too!). So here it is and please bare in mind a small person is hugging my foot throughout – you can probably detect the point at the beginning when they moved in with grabby little hands! The video has also got a weird jarring artifact in the middle – no idea what caused that. The clipping is because it is being recorded straight onto the laptop with no external mic and the similar effect in the visuals is because it is a laptop camera!