Category Archives: Poetry

The Worst Day Ever?

Some of you may be familiar with this poem already, as it’s gone viral since being tacked to a bar wall in London, where it was photographed and posted to Twitter. The poem has a gloomy message read in the conventional way, but if you read it bottom to top then things improve; it’s all a question of attitude.

I hadn’t seen it before, but it appeared in my Quora feed one morning, and I thought that its message was applicable to the loneliness of the long-distance writer:

The Worst Day Ever?
by Chanie Gorkin

Today was the absolute worst day ever
And don’t try to convince me that
There’s something good in every day
Because, when you take a closer look,
This world is a pretty evil place.
Even if
Some goodness does shine through once in a while
Satisfaction and happiness don’t last.
And it’s not true that
It’s all in the mind and heart
Because
True happiness can be attained
Only if one’s surroundings are good
It’s not true that good exists
I’m sure you can agree that
The reality
Creates
My attitude
It’s all beyond my control
And you’ll never in a million years hear me say
Today was a very good day

[Now read it from bottom to top]

Image result for Chanie Gorkin poet

The Laughing Heart

I’ve mentioned Charles Bukowski before, and here’s Tom Waits reading one of his most inspirational poems. 

Image result for Charles Bukowski
Called 
‘The Laughing Heart’, it should be the mantra for any writer:

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you. 

Charles Bukowski

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was a much-loved poet, and rightly so – he was a real sweetheart and so skilled. His death in 2013 was one of those which made me go “oh no” when I heard of it. His text message to his wife, shortly before he died is moving. His son Michael revealed at the funeral mass that his father texted his final words, “Noli timere” (Latin: “Do not be afraid”), to his wife, Marie, minutes before he died.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney

I always think of his poem ‘Rite of Spring’ at this time of year, when the temperature dips below freezing in Cornwall. Having lived on a remote sheep farm on a high part of Bodmin Moor, I know what it’s like to be at the mercy of the weather. My water supply pipe once froze for several days, so this poem resonates with me, and its suggestive sensuality seems to be saying more than just a struggle to restore the pump to working order:

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 Rite of Spring

So winter closed its fist
And got it stuck in the pump.
The plunger froze up a lump

In its throat, ice founding itself
Upon iron. The handle
Paralysed at an angle.

Then the twisting of wheat straw
into ropes, lapping them tight
Round stem and snout, then a light

That sent the pump up in a flame
It cooled, we lifted her latch,
Her entrance was wet, and she came.

Seamus Heaney

He wrote evocatively about ageing and continuity, including this poem ‘Digging’ from his first published collection of work ‘Death of a Naturalist’:

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By god, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it. He fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The colds smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney

Heaney’s powers of observation were acute, as shown in this two-line verse which perfectly captures a moment in time :

The riverbed, dried-up,hall-full of leaves.
Us, listening to a river in the trees.