small talk

 

So we have published my poetry book - Small Talk - a collection of over hundred poems almost all written over a lifetime but not quite. 

The poems are sometimes like very short stories written to understand the vagaries of the world or inspired by headlines in the newspapers. On the whole I write about nature, dogs, spiders, dust and death.

Available on amazon.

My thanks go to my daughter Chloe who designed the cover and the drawings inside apart from encouraging me to do it and sorting it all out.

Dear Jackdaw is still with us in spite of the encounter with the buzzard in the last post. He still likes sitting on my shoulder and landing on my head which if I'm not wearing a hat is like one of those wired head massage gadgets as his claws slip on my hair. It's rather nice but not so nice if he lands on my nose.

So the flock of ducks still potter around and I hope when Spring comes the dynamics don't change too much. There are four males to three females which is not ideal. Male ducks can be most insistent when the mating season is around. However in the meantime one of the females has been laying the odd egg.

Here they are in one of my hand thrown bowls. This bowl is an improvement on the ones that turn out to be ashtrays. Although I still wish I had a horse in my stable a potter's wheel is possibly the next best thing.

So Ghost Pocket likes to snuggle up with Rocket once in a while and you can see how uncomfortable this makes Rocket. Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way Ghost Pocket says purring in his ear. You hanging out with Kafka? I ask Yes and he was widely regarded as a major figure in twentieth century literature, his work fusing elements of realism and fantastique.

You must be very busy and learned up there mingling with all these famous people I tell him. Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance. He replies. Ah Confucius I say is he your new pal but the Ghost Pocket has disappeared back through the wall.

I always forget how quickly the paperwhites bloom - as usual too late for Christmas but they do bring early festive cheer. Waiting in the wings are hyacinths which are not at all quick to bloom and maybe in flower for the following Christmas. But sweet pea seeds are hiding in the propagator about to push their heads up to flower sometime next year. Forward thinking!

So as this is a December post dear Readers I wish you all a very Happy Christmas and I hope unlike Ghost Pocket you are not visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past. This year Mrs/MrMagpie will not be delivering the holly as hopefully he is too busy bringing up the kids.

                                            

                                             meanwhile ......

Suppose God came  back from wherever it is he's been and asked us smilingly if we'd figured it out yet. Suppose, he wanted to know, if it had finally occurred to us to ask the whale. And then he sort of looked around and he said "By the way - where are the whales?" this is a piece by Cormac Mc Carthy and it seemed appropriate to choose my poem Ambition from the poetry book to follow.

Ambition

As I float in the Caribbean Trash Vortex

caught in the reams of carnage,

thirty carrier bags, two stretches of hose pipe

five flower pots, a flip flop-

 in all fifty nine different 

pieces of plastic - lodged in my gut

I dream of breaching out to sea

whacking my vast tail on the surface tension

of the blue ocean

leaping out of the waves and crashing back

scattering spray on the way

which catches and glistens

in the early morning rays of sunlight

under the wide sky.

Being a host to a myriad of smaller 

organisms who as devoted followers

nibble and clean and scurry and hurry by my side.

That would be my ambition

as my airways clog with polystyrene beads

like mermaid's tears

and I can no longer move with

my necklace of plastic detritus

tethering me to the sea bed.

A small ambition for one

so very large.

Linda Coggin

from Small Talk.