Love And Hope

Not a great deal has happened today. Although I did keep a promise, and by doing so, gave myself a little more hope. Something important to someone like me, who doesn’t get out very often.

Because, you see, I am seriously disabled by multiple sclerosis. Although if you have been a regular reader of my blog you will already know that.

I sometimes have to remind myself, because as long as I can still speak clearly, I am still able to write poetry, to write articles in care talk magazine, and keep in touch through new technology with a network of people most of whom I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for being diagnosed with this condition in the year 2000.

It is mothers day in the UK, probably celebrated differently in different countries. But I am sure the same sentiments will be felt, that of love for the person that has been responsible for one’s upbringing. I am 51, and my mother is 92, but still alive and present in my life. Although she lives many miles from where I live on the south coast of England.

She lives in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge and Avebury. In a market town called Marlborough.

It is a beautiful place, reckoned to be the town with the widest street in England. This is because the street has been the home to a regular market every week for perhaps 1000 years. Therefore the street is wide enough to accommodate a market, and yet in modern times to still allow for road traffic each side of where the market takes place, in the middle of this wide thoroughfare.

I suppose that is one of the promises that I kept today, to ring my mother and to tell her how much she means to me. I didn’t send flowers this year, although my sister, that lives in the same town, or at least on the outskirts of it, did send an arrangement virtually identical to the one that I would have sent in any case. And so I simply sent my love, which I suppose in some ways, is far more important. And probably in the circumstances means more.

The other promise that I kept was made to my weekend carer, who is one of my greatest fans as far as my poetry is concerned.

He is not a native English speaker, but nevertheless is always extolling the virtues of my writing.

If any of you have read the blogs within which I have included poems, you can judge for yourselves as to the merits of my writing.

What Antonio had asked me to do was to look at the website of Faber and Faber, with a view to sending them some examples of my poetry.

This publisher was established in 1929, and is one of the most prestigious in the United Kingdom. They were the publisher of my favourite poet, TS Eliot, and it would be a great honour if I were able to have some work published by them.

We can all dream.

They are one of the few publishers that will still accept unsolicited poetry, albeit with some restrictions. You must send only a maximum of six poems, and they must be sent by post, not by e-mail or by fax.

If you don’t hear anything within eight weeks, quite simply they are not interested.

I have of course previously already sent some of my poems to them, and nothing has come of it.

But of course, if we have dreams, and we cannot expect them to be achieved at once, or easily.

And so, I have been thinking today about a selection of half a dozen of my poems that I could send to them, since it has probably been two or three years since I last sent some examples of my work to them. I just hope that I don’t send any that I have already sent, although I suppose it is quite likely that it might be a different person that would read whatever I send. I hope so.

And so, on this memorable day, I shall complete my selection from my main poetry archive, which these days stretches to over 200 poems.

I will include one here, that I am particularly fond of. It has been included in one of my self published collections, and so may well already be of no interest to such an esteemed publisher. Never mind.

Anyway, I have watched a film this afternoon that is all about hope, The Shawshank Redemption, so why not add Hope to my afternoon activities, and follow it up with a hopeful letter containing my hopeful poems. You never know.





Deadheading The Flowers


Careful in the garden, be circumspect
don't pull the weeds before you've checked
what's living lives, what's dead is dead. 
The heat from these composted roots
will drive this season's coming fruits
when mother Sun will raise her head. 

The Winter is a time of change, of resolution
after growing time.  Seasonal motions
cannot maintain the flower-beds
without the cutting-off of heads. 

Fragile beauty and a dying sun
how much we lose of what's begun
before new life establishes
among the brassicas and the radishes. 

Be careful when you make a change
check there's nothing misarranged
before
you start
to dig.