I wandered lonely as a shroud - sorry Wordsworth!

Now I’ve started playing with poems I find ideas all over the place.

So here is A Host of Tinkling, with apologies to Wordsworth.

I wandered lonely as a shroud

That floats through salmon, chocs and cheese

When all at once I saw a crowd 

Of tinkling tinsel Christmas trees

Beside the gin, far from the peas

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle in the coffee shops

They stretch in never-ending line

From Marks and Spencer’s down to Boots

Ten thousand saw I at a glance

Tossing their heads in festive trance.

The box of wine beside them shone

Out-did the tinsel strands in glee

A shopper could not help be glum

Beside the tinkling Christmas trees

They seemed to say, with little thought

Look at all the tat you’ve bought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood 

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude 

Oh joy, I can lie back with ease

For I escaped the Christmas trees.

There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu

Is it just me, or was this one of the lines somehow edged itself into your memory during your childhood?  I think my father quoted it from time to time, though he didn't know the rest of the poem. (For those who don't know it - it's here.)

It's a lovely line - in the sense that it bounces along, presents an instant image, leads the reader into the narrative behind the poem. I came across it again the other day - written during the days of the Raj, it tells the tale of a militiaman in love with a young woman, her ethnicity unclear but the implication is that she is Nepali (Kathmandu being the capital of Nepal).

It's a poem of its time. The young woman asked for the eye of this little idol as proof of love, but the idol haunted the man for years afterwards. It wouldn't, at the time, have raised an eyebrow - especially as the lovely rhythms of that first line carry on throughout the poem.

Now - in the twenty-first century - it feels patronising - even racist. The jaunty tone of the poem contradicts any suggestion that this might be a love poem, even implies attraction between people of different ethnicities is slightly comic.

In addition, this yellow idol - diminished as it is by the loss of an eye - bears no relation to any of the Hindu deities I came across in Nepal.

Does this matter? Maybe not - it's a poem of its time. We've moved on, and surely anyone reading it could recognise that times have changed. And yet that sing-song rhythm lingers. I've come across people who, when I mention I've been to Nepal, quote this line. For some it seems to include all they know about the country.

I don't want to suggest we cull every Victorian poem that celebrated the Empire. But I wonder if we need to read them with one eye (yellow or not) on the times in which they were written and another on the wonderful opportunities we now have to celebrate our diversities and our commonalities.

Grandmother's Angels

A few days ago I was enjoying a little twittering about angels, as you do, as a result if which I've been asked to post this. I hope the poem speaks for itself - and will say no more about my grandmother, since she's not here to defend herself!


GRANDMOTHER'S ANGELS:

My grandmother spoke about angels,
they stood at the foot of my bed.
They counted the sins of the daylight;
they counted the sins in my head.

They glared as I crept beneath bedclothes,
sought solace from teddies and dolls.
But they knew of the time when I ate all the sweets;
the time when I drew on the walls.

The time when I farted, blamed Great Uncle Ted,
who was quite unconcerned by the pong;
the time when I failed at my spelling,
the time my additions were wrong.

The time I was late down to breakfast;
when I left my bike out in the frost.
The time when I hid the crisp letters from school
that warned I was weaker than most.

Yes, they saw it all, these angels of mine,
that stood at the foot of my bed.
Did they count the sins of my grandmother?
The disappeared when she was dead.

Poem from Cambodia

I've been asked to blog this.

I met Phillay, driving his tuk tuk, last time I was in Cambodia, and he told me his story of survival from the  Khmer Rouge. (I'm assuming you all know something about the terrible times that the Khmer Rouge brought to Cambodia.)

I promised to tell his story when I came home - this is an extraordinary tale of terror and courage that we need to hear it, however uncomfortable that might be. But when I came to write it, as a story, I found it simply too painful. I couldn't hold it together in the boundaries of a story - somehow the horrors fell out of the edges and contaminated everything.

But I could write it as a poem. By attending to rhythms, and line lengths, and the general sound of the piece I could, at last, give his story a shape. This is not everything that happened to him, but it gives you a flavour of how his life has been. (You need to know that Pol Pot was the President of the Khmer Rouge, and that Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia.)

THE UNBEARABLE RIGHTNESS OF BEING

His father was a military man; with house and car

and uniform and no defence when Pol Pot knocked.

Phillay, then seventeen, was driven from Phnom Penh

to dig canals from daybreak, with the promise of

just one small bowl of rice at nightfall and

anything else that might float by:

fish; crabs; snails; leeches.

His body soon cadaverous.

Malaria bit him. 

A friend carried him to hospital, protection

from the last indignity of dying in the fields and heaped,

like compost, in stinking ditches.

He found a brother and a sister there,

shared their bed, kept breathing

while they died beside him and he ate their rice

until the smell betrayed their non-existence.

It saved his life.  He tottered from his bed to glimpse,

across a compound wall,

the Director’s daughter.

With his eyes he loved her; and in his head:

he rested on her breast and slept.

Yet dare not touch her, knowing babies

would be ripped from her, swung by the ankles

against a tree, their brains in offal fragments

lest they tell the tales of loving

They moved him on, the men in black,

to jute mills, to the rice paddies.

But love hung, like a window, above the fields of bones.