Thoughts on Dreaminess

Dear Diary,


They only sell you what you buy
Gary Jules



Chris Isaak is with me, just what I need on a Sunday morning.

Now there’s a dreamy song if ever there was one, the classic which is ‘Wicked Game’. You will notice I have the unplugged version on here too. All are magical, the song, his voice and fantastic guitar playing.

Some folk are calling my blogs ‘dreamy’. I am suitably flattered but I wonder if the writings have those kind of energies as I often write them during my ‘waking’ state, in that limbo-land between dreaming and properly waking. In the first moments of coming-to I feel paralysed; then I can see and hear but I can’t speak or move. Then comes the slow return to normality (or in my case near-normality maybe!) and then that lovely dreaminess takes over. Insights, ideas, mullings they arrive then and I reach for the pen.

(Somewhere over the Rainbow - IZ)

I love this online music player, I can flit from song to song, pick whatever takes my fancy and you can do the same!

Raglan Road - dear Patrick Kavanagh.

There were no poems in the last blog entry, it feels undressed again and I am bereft as I read no poetry yesterday and it seems I haven’t written any for ages.

So there may have to be a double dose today.

Yesterday was a bit of a wasted day as I had a headache which lasted all day. In hindsight, I was foolish. As it wasn’t an unbearable head pain I stupidly tried to get rid of it without resorting to taking some super-dooper Co-codamols.(Isn’t hindsight a wonderful virtue, I wish we used more of its cousin foresight, wouldn‘t our lives be less complicated?) It was also a bad hair day, a-no-clothes-to-wear-day (they are all in the Ironing Mountain). So I felt irritable all the day long. I used to get a lot of migraines but thankfully am free of them now but often at the end of a working week. or at the start of a holiday, a headache will descend upon me at the beginning of a day and will last all day. It’s a ‘step off the treadmill’ thing I guess. I know other people who suffer in the same way.

So no writing was done yesterday, not much of anything was done. No chores, so the place is a tip, no shopping so the fridge is well nigh bare, no walks, no gardening, no blogging, no commenting. By the evening I told myself I was well enough to do a distance Tarot reading for someone and miraculously the pain lifted as soon as I started working with the cards.

I felt the presence of the angels.


*

I did manage a bit of reading yesterday, in between napping. I am reading ‘Plotting for Beginners’. If, like me, you are shall we say, ‘of a certain age’ and you write you may well find it funny.

Blessings?

The camera. The digital camera especially. I can just about handle that, I just frame the scene, point and click.

My new 2Gb memory stick, bought very cheaply on 7day which should hold the entire contents of the family‘s computer. (Wish I could buy one of those for my brain‘s memory!). All I’ve got to do is learn how to save it all. I know how you stick it in the USB port but that’s as far as I go. I am sure a kind soul out there in the ether may be able to help me?

Binoculars. I’ve gone a bit ‘techy’ in these blessings. Quite unlike me, I am the most un-techy person around.

My pack of Tarot cards. Old but still faithful and proving to be amazing in their accuracy.

Good health. Why is this the last today? To my mind it is the Number One of all Blessings, without which nothing else can be fully appreciated.

But as it’s Sunday I will slip in one or two more.

Rest and the freedom and the ability to do so.

The pure, fresh Welsh air which is wafting through the open bedroom window, caressing my face.

And so a poem, yes it’s well known, but it’s one I love and an English one.


Leisure

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—
No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.


W. H. Davies


And now two Irish poems about County Kerry. The first is about Cromane, the place on the western coast of Ireland where my dear mother was born (God rest her soul).

I stumbled across these poems on the Internet by accident, but then there is no such thing as an accident they say………..



Cromane
 



I push through withered sedge, past upturned boats
wildfowlers have long abandoned to the rain,
and at the water’s edge begin to scan
grey mud, grey lough, the marching sky’s grey soak
for winter flocks of plover the murk still cloaks
in driving squalls. I hear them first, that run
of fluted calls. Then, before they can turn,
take off, they’re there – and gone, like whisps of smoke.
I’ve lost them – and this incompleteness hurts.
Until far out over the empty lough
they wheel back into view. Like feathered sighs,
their fluent strokes relate swift air to earth,
wild sea to stone-walled fields, smooth to rough,
the trace of winter to a winter sky.
Cromane, Kerry, western Ireland





Sea Cave


Out where it first fists Europe,
Atlantic has hammered, salt-scooped
this sea crypt, cliff cellar,
from a fingered Irish headland. Today,
as I row in under a black wall of rock,
the cave’s waters are lulled,
a bright lens on depths
of blue-white sea anemones,
red wrack, translucent parachutes
of jellyfish sinking faintly
through the membranes
of the deeper past.
My great-aunt rowed here, eighty years ago,
throughout the Great War,
to townet her indifferent specimens –
tiny medusas, budding hydra;
squeezing in like me, oars shipped,
past the pillared Altar Rock,
up to where the cave narrows
to the strange canals
smoothed deep under the headland,
pink sponged, amniotic,
sucking salt breaths in
and out; in and out,
dissolving history.
Looking back, she would have seen
her green island framed for a moment
in rock, and flashing sea, and sun;
northwards, glimpsed Dingle across waters
that heaved Roger Casement
from his German submarine.
Easter 1916; and the night
the British hanged him as a traitor,
he wrote his mother
how he’d landed back in Ireland –
wading out of the sea
onto a dawn strand
fringed with primroses, violets.
Tremors in those quiet waters,
rumour of storm,
a distant quiver off the land
of tiny black seeds of poppy,
generations stirring themselves slowly,
redly, along the valleys: Laune,
Liffey, Lagan, Somme.
Where Europe ends, this sea cave
is still cathedral cool,
its hushed waters embracing
all we have committed to the deep,
and to the softness of corruption and
the mighty workings of its salt-stained resurrections.
What lives on here swims
small and beautiful.
And as I back my boat out again,
past the Altar Rock,
warm sun strikes as a blessing
lazy sea, tiered cliffs, the immensities
of the oceanic West; and celebrates
each springing tide, each high,
each ebb.


Mick Delap’s poems on openDemocracy are from his collection River Turning Tidal (Belfast, Lagan Press, 2003 / Lagan-press@e-books.org.uk)




I’m going to sign off now and get that ‘Plotting’ novel finished.

And then see where the flow takes me,

Bye for now,
Caitx



PS
A joke just for the children

Q: What is an ig?
A: It's an Eskimo's home without a loo



And here's one just for the adults

HONEYMOON IN A LOG CABIN

A newlywed couple were spending their honeymoon in a remote log cabin resort way up the mountains. They had registered on Saturday and they had not been seen for 5 days. An elderly couple ran the resort, and they were getting concerned about the welfare of these newlyweds.

The old man decided to go and see if they were all right. He knocked on the door of the cabin and a weak voice from inside answered. The old man asked if they were OK.
"Yes, we're fine. We're living on the fruits of love".

The old man replied, "I thought so...would you mind not throwing the peelings out the window...they're choking my ducks!"