friday 4 february 2011
turners tricksters
Anyone who's done any wandering around on my website knows already that poetry has become very tough for me, both reading it and writing it. In the summer of 2008, when the stealing of my animals was very recent, I was still able to deal with poetry for a number of months. But since the end of that year it has become a progressively more difficult thing to do.
I continue to cite other people's poems on my blogs, but I can't tell you how hard it is. To read poems is nearly as rough as writing them. Expression in a poem is very different from expression in prose, and that is poetry's chief value, its mode of expression. I still turn to that value, but it has become an effort and an ordeal that it never was in the 46 years before the theft of my animals, when I read and wrote poetry nearly every day. When poetry was as regular a part of my life as eating meals.
I wrote one poem over this past November and December. Not because I forced myself to the job, but simply because the first few lines came to me, and I didn't want to just let them go. Over a month or so, more lines came, two or three at a time. Slowly, reluctantly.
And then today, something a bit bigger than a few lines appeared in the brain. Appeared when I was out walking at 6 a.m. in the two-degree air, walking the steps I used to walk in the early mornings with my dogs when we lived beside the river. I have no idea how many people reading blogs are fond of poetry, but today's lines that showed up in my cold-walking brain are part of my blog-life now, and have no title beyond today's date: fourth february.
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read poems... Scealta liatha... shadowpoems...
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Friday, February 4, 2011
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
spotty
Page Seventy-three
wednesday 10 november 2010 .... turners festers
~~} Bold yellow sun lights the land where you run,
~~} burns so bright all its shadows are black.
~~} You rest in the shade where the danger lies wait:
~~} how long will it let you come back?
He was yet another grandchild of Maman, that mother extraordinaire. I have no picture to show you, but he was a small cat, white with grey patches. Hence the name. And I must have named him in a period of great fatigue, because I usually came up with names slightly more original than Spot. That's as bad as Fido or Rover. But most of my animals had multiple nicknames, and for him these were: Spotty, Mr. Spock, Spocky boy.
Like everyone in his family, Spotty was a home boy. Even when free outdoors, these cats never strayed very far from home, unless something really out of the ordinary happened. And the family also tended toward smallnes, which in the case of Spotty's litter was smaller still. None of the six ever got to what you'd call a normal size for an adult cat, and I think this might have been because their parents were half-siblings.
Sixteen years after his death, I still sadden to say that his life was a short one. In the debate between indoor-cat and outdoor-cat, there are good points on both sides. And I have argued the question within myself thousands of times over the years. In most times and places, I opted for outdoor cats. And the indoor people can rant and say that I'm wrong, that I shortened my cats' lives by letting them go outdoors, and in the latter point they are correct. But I had reasons, reasons which I consider just as valid and well-considered as anything they can say, for deciding on outdoors. Not going to elucidate them here, as this is supposed to be Spotty's post, but maybe I'll go into them somewhere on my website, at some future time.
Two years and three months was the amount of time he lived. A short time, but a happy one. He was happy. The dark cloud in his life was the cat next door, a particularly aggressive tom called Skip, who would come to our porch and beat on Spotty, who was only half his size. I tried not to get TOO furious with Skip, because he belonged to people who didn't take very good care of him, and I think this contributed to his generally unhappy nature (he belonged to the same crowd that Rabbit did, and they didn't take much care of HER either). But I did get SOMEWHAT furious when I would hear snarls and shrieks from Skip and Spotty's very unique, loud hum of terror coming from the porch. We all know the expression "scared shitless." This is what happened to poor, timid Spot every time Skip came to the porch to assert dominance. I'd rescue him, of course. And as I've said, this was the only dark cloud in Spotty's otherwise happy life.
read... Shadowpoems... Extemporaneana...
~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
wednesday 10 november 2010 .... turners festers
~~} Bold yellow sun lights the land where you run,
~~} burns so bright all its shadows are black.
~~} You rest in the shade where the danger lies wait:
~~} how long will it let you come back?
He was yet another grandchild of Maman, that mother extraordinaire. I have no picture to show you, but he was a small cat, white with grey patches. Hence the name. And I must have named him in a period of great fatigue, because I usually came up with names slightly more original than Spot. That's as bad as Fido or Rover. But most of my animals had multiple nicknames, and for him these were: Spotty, Mr. Spock, Spocky boy.
Like everyone in his family, Spotty was a home boy. Even when free outdoors, these cats never strayed very far from home, unless something really out of the ordinary happened. And the family also tended toward smallnes, which in the case of Spotty's litter was smaller still. None of the six ever got to what you'd call a normal size for an adult cat, and I think this might have been because their parents were half-siblings.
Sixteen years after his death, I still sadden to say that his life was a short one. In the debate between indoor-cat and outdoor-cat, there are good points on both sides. And I have argued the question within myself thousands of times over the years. In most times and places, I opted for outdoor cats. And the indoor people can rant and say that I'm wrong, that I shortened my cats' lives by letting them go outdoors, and in the latter point they are correct. But I had reasons, reasons which I consider just as valid and well-considered as anything they can say, for deciding on outdoors. Not going to elucidate them here, as this is supposed to be Spotty's post, but maybe I'll go into them somewhere on my website, at some future time.
Two years and three months was the amount of time he lived. A short time, but a happy one. He was happy. The dark cloud in his life was the cat next door, a particularly aggressive tom called Skip, who would come to our porch and beat on Spotty, who was only half his size. I tried not to get TOO furious with Skip, because he belonged to people who didn't take very good care of him, and I think this contributed to his generally unhappy nature (he belonged to the same crowd that Rabbit did, and they didn't take much care of HER either). But I did get SOMEWHAT furious when I would hear snarls and shrieks from Skip and Spotty's very unique, loud hum of terror coming from the porch. We all know the expression "scared shitless." This is what happened to poor, timid Spot every time Skip came to the porch to assert dominance. I'd rescue him, of course. And as I've said, this was the only dark cloud in Spotty's otherwise happy life.
read... Shadowpoems... Extemporaneana...
~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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