5 October 2022
Spring (in the European/Roman calendar) is here. Indigenous seasonal edges are more nuanced, expanded to seasons beyond the embedded tradition of four markers.
Whatever the seasonal names, evidence of change is everywhere. The red cabbage has telescoped into bright yellow petals that are bringing bees to the garden. Nasturtiums, borage, kale, apple, cherry and bay are in flower. The hellebores – winter roses – are sending up serrated celadon leaves to accompany the sepals, dead-heads, thriving vestiges of prime moments during winter when purple and white clusters hung theatrical and monastic against hibernating hues. My hellebores are gleanings, from the Cascade Gardens, collected several years ago on morning walks. Each year, particularly in spring, I’m reminded of past thefts, accretions stolen from public gardens and suburban borders, transplanted and fertilised with optimism. The garden is almost unrecognisable to ten years ago when it was weed-infested with red hot pokers and grasses. Time and growth, and decay.
I’ve recently watched, once again, Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners. There’s a poignant moment in it when she shows us the back of her hand: evidence of time, aging, work, la main de l’artiste. It’s as if the shutters on Varda’s brilliance are removed and we join her in recognition of our own – and humanity’s – finite existence; we glean our own becoming. She is not hiding herself, or us, from the reality of being human. I found this revelation deeply moving, and as I type I’m aware of the backs of my hands: the deepening rifts between the bones, and veins like protruding confluences. No amount of hand cream can smooth the blotched skin or eradicate what the marks signify: lived experience of increasing age.
I’m writing haiku and tanka, short forms of Japanese poetry that compress experience into three or five lines. The Irish Writers’ Centre’s brilliant short course on writing the body (The Miracle Machine, with Angela Carr) has re-opened the page for my pen to again find form, to follow my yearning that is so often discounted and put aside or curtailed (strange word!). I experimented with stream-of-consciousness writing before I returned to haiku, and rediscovered the satisfaction of précis.
The hump of grey hills
past the birch screen.
A silver-eye tangos.
Huge grey cloud
like a floating balloon.
Ominous or pregnant.
Grass in guttering,
gathered celadon fronds weep.
They’ll be stalks in summer.
Silver birch now green,
winter bones bend to spring.
The glint of summer approaching.
Where am I, you ask
as the day raises its brow.
photinia red
near the roof of a street hedge.
The hills are becoming azure.
Your body will know
it’s all there, in your senses.
Slow everything down.
There are more than five
senses. Pulsate everything
as if a flying bird.
What would touch feel like
when I’m at home & alone?
Perhaps the feather of god?
Are you taking heart
when the fine line starts to blur?
Water the red rose.
Can you hear the birds
carolling across the creek?
The knock of morning.