Magpie Tales#113

Tess at Willow Manor gives us Marc Chagall's 1954 picture "Red Roofs" to work from this week.

Beginnings.

   I was just about the last in my class to start.  Who would forget the date - St.Valentine's Day - in my fourteenth year, 3 days after my birthday?  I joke about that now. That first morning it didn't seem all that funny. I knew what was happening through a waking dream and the blood spots in my pyjamas and on the undersheet. Was I supposed to be overwhelmed? Surprised? Had I thought I'd somehow been excused the woman's ritual? I explored between my legs. Bloody fingertips for verification. But there was none of the discomfort my classmates complained of.  I got out of bed and stuffed a handtowel into my pyjama pants - don't ask me why - and shuffled to my bedroom window. Some girls moaned on about headaches, gripey pains, and some got uber-bitchy with everybody. So far I felt O.K., till I realized I was crying.

   There had been more snow, but it had stopped now and was thawing. On the roof of the outhouse below my bedroom window patches of red were spreading, replacing the downy snow, showing the rough, hard tiles.  

   I could hear Mum downstairs and sounds of the kitchen table being laid for breakfast and because of the state I was in I didn't want to go down, so I went to the top of the stairs and called out "Mum!  Mum?" and when she called up, "What is it  Lucy love? There's a clean blouse down here if you can't find one," I leaned on the bannister rail, not knowing what words I would use to her, knowing only that now, on this special day for lovers, my childhood was truly over.

.

Magpie Tales#105

The picture prompt from Tess reminded me of a cycling story my Dad used to tell.

It Takes Allsorts . . .

Beryl Burton (1937 - 1996) should never have straddled a bike if her doctors were to be believed. She suffered a serious attack of rheumatic fever as a young girl and was advised to avoid strenuous activity - like cycle racing. She went on to hold British records for cycle time-trials  at 10, 25, 50 and 100 miles and the 12 and 24 hour distance trials. She won World Championships on the road  and track on bikes that look quite old fashioned compared with today's aerodynamic machines costing up to £80,000!

Dad was a keen cyclist himself and would sometimes go the extra mile to see the "greats" of the era at work.  His "Beryl the Peril" story concerns the British 12 hour endurance trial of 1967, in which Beryl set a new record of 277.25 miles . . a doddle at an average speed of over 23 miles per hour. (On yer bikes, ladies and gents, and try it for one hour or even one mile!)   Near the end of the 12 hours Beryl caught and passed the leading male rider , Mike McNamara, who turned in a new mens' record of just over 276 miles in the same event. Beryl held this all-comers record for nearly two years, and today 40 years on, it is still the womens' record.

Endurance competitors would fuel themselves with dried fruit and sweets and such high energy snacks and as Beryl stormed past the flagging Mike she handed him a liquorice allsort which he acknowledged with a wave and munched as Beryl disappeared into the distance.  Dad would get quite misty-eyed telling this tale, pointing out how it exemplified the sportsmanship and cameraderie enjoyed by cycle racers in those days, adding "Of course, our Beryl was a Yorkshire lass," as if this explained everything.

The incident was commemorated in a little ceremony shown below when the Rockingham Forest Wheelers presented Beryl (by now retired) with a giant liquorice allsort.

Her story ends sadly when the Docs' advice caught up with her. She died of a heart attack, on her beloved bike, while out delivering invitations to her upcoming birthday party.

Poetry of the Senses

Hosting Poetry Jam this week, Dani asks for poems on our senses.  Here's one about a significant loss of one of them.   (I posted this poem on January 15th. last year in response to Tess Kincaid's Magpie#48)

Affliction

"Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf."

They heard the windswept tremolos in awe,

their ebb and flo, as waves crash on the strand,

an undertow to anger, loss, to pain, 

his jagged figures challenging despair.

"Speak louder, shout, for I am. Deaf."

They asked “What does your new sonata mean?”

Can you imagine the withering look this brought?

How he might snort and shake his untidy locks?

“Go to your Shakespeare! Read ‘Tempest’” he scoffed.

"Speak louder, shout, for I. Am. Deaf."

‘Tempest’ The nickname stuck!  At least it’s more

appropriate than “Moonlight”  No moonbeams

light the rage of that finale, never mind

triplets that lap the shore of Lake Lucerne.

Go to “The Tempest”, then. So. Does he mean

his new work is 'rough magic'? Or perhaps

the lilting rondo is Miranda’s dance

at her wedding to noble Ferdinand?

For sure in the wintry gales we hear

a ship grind on the reef, splinter in shards

and sink to the deeps on bass arpeggios

I prefer “Our revels now are ended.”

Here he admits the best of life is over.

From now on all that seems sublime, heroic,

wild, will play out only in his unkempt head,

where still he hears what his ear no longer can,

with courage that proves the artist and the man.

"Speak louder. Shout, for I am DEAF."

Beethoven composed the D minor piano sonata, Op.31 No.2 (sometimes referred to as “The Tempest Sonata”) in 1801/02 at the age of 32, the same year that he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament in which he admits his almost total deafness. 

Much more about Beethoven on John Suchet's website  "Mad About Beethoven"

Magpie#101

A Haiku Lament

Now what shall I do?

Amazon's Gift Wrap service

knocked off half way through.

Posted in response to Tess Kincaid's recent Magpie prompt from Willow Manor.

What Makes You Really, Really Angry?

I wrote this little poem in response to a request for poems about Thanksgiving from Kerry O'Connor at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. So here's a picture of a Real Toad, sadly not an imaginary one, indulging in one of those quaint traditions that makes America the Greatest Nation on Earth.

It meets the 55 word allowance for G-Man's Friday Flash Fiction, so let's electrocute or otherwise terminate with extreme prejudice, two birds with one stone. 

Pardon

If you're full-breasted, feathered, tender, lucky
Mister President may save you from the pot
and you'll give thanks for this Thanksgiving -

but if you're poor, uneducated, black,
and some thumbs-in-gunbelt sheriff, real hot-shot
and white cops and judge and jury all say "It's HIM!"
and point you to Death Row -

he certainly will not.

Magpie Tales#89

Tess Kincaid's picture prompt this week is from a bygone age -

     It's Halloween.
   Zack is working late most nights, finishing his doctorate thesis on African tribal masks. He works in the room we call the lounge, hunched over his PC, and if the bedroom door is open I can hear the keyboard pattering, but mostly I hear Zack cursing - Windows, the printer, the memory stick he left in the Department, or himself for leaving it, or "How the hell do you spell 'tautological' anyway?"   He's onto the section "Death Masks." He reckons he'll finish a draft to show his supervisor by mid-November.  It's been slow going; one reason is he has to be careful to avoid taboos. Someone might read it. Unlikely, but you never know.

  "Go to bed, Pumpkin," he says. "I won't be long."  He makes us both malted milk and sits on the edge of the bed to chat for a bit, then decamps to his desk . . big old cupboard door on two saw-horses, we haven't much money, just each other. He leaves the door ajar.

* * * * 

   I woke suddenly and my first thought was, it was raining. Then I clocked that Zack had come to bed, that he had left the desk light on where he'd been working and that it wasn't rain on the window I could hear. Too regular. Too mechanical. Too loud.  I sat up and shook him. He stirred. He sleeps like a hippopotamus, I mean he wallows in sleep and the duvet.

    "Zack!  I can hear a typewriter." I shivered.

    "Billy" he said, coming to. "I mean don't be silly, Luce."

    "No, Zack. Listen." It's not a sound you can easily mistake. 

    "That's an electric," he said, listening now, sitting up alongside.

   "Zack, there's no typewriter in the flat, electric, clockwork, whatever. We have never had - "

    We heard a carriage return. Then the keystrokes sounded again, with pauses, the way you pause when you're thinking what to put next.  Then I knew he was scared and he knew I was scared and we hunched closer to each other.  "I don't like this."

    It got scarier. We heard chairlegs scrape, and the light coming through the part open door dimmed as if someone walked in front of it - once, twice before the typing started over. Only this time just five keystrokes, pause, five keystrokes, pause. And again, always five, typed slowly, as with one finger.

    He swung his legs from under the duvet, pulled on boxers. "Must sort this," he said, but I could feel him trembling.

  "Zack, I'm frightened."  In a whisper.  He patted my shoulder as if seeking as well as giving reassurance.  "Some pillock undergraduate got in scare the crap out of us. Trick or treat us."

    "What," I said, still sotto voce, "Bring your own typewriter?"

    But as he went to the door the light went out and the lounge was as quiet as it should be at . . . one minute past midnight, our little clock showed.  I clicked the bedside light on and said "Be careful, love."

    More light as he switched on the lounge overhead. He was back in only a few seconds, holding a single sheet of A4, shaking his head. He said, "Where do you begin when there's nowhere to begin from?  There's no one there. And no typewriter. Did we really think there would be? But look at this."  He gave me the A4 paper.  In a column of centered text, about 24 point Helvetica, bigger than any typewriter could print it read:

Wrong  Write  Books  Masks  Blood  Bones  Warns  Death

  "The computer's still switched on" he said, as if that explained everything, anything. "And there was this. Left beside it." He dropped something in my palm.
   Slender, white, hard. A finger bone.
   We looked at each other a long time.

Fearless Challenge

Kellie Elmore at "Magic in the Backyard" exhorts writers to be less fearful, to tackle 'taboo' subjects head on . . 


Breathe On Me

Soft as the nightfall, Love, breathe me to this -

Your lips, your fingertips be my awaking.

Breathe on my waiting eyes and take your kiss

to the twinned roses where my need is aching.

Breathe where beneath your breath my self is yearning,

where flesh engorges. Breath till your breath like fire

blown into flame, set by the wind's breath burning

fans into life my embers of desire.

Breathe on my limbs, my slopes, my globes, my curves 

Breathe on my secret sheaves, my readied portal -

Now, now, now, now the last shreds of reserve

are cast away, and this joy makes us mortal.

Soft as the nightfall, Love, breathe me to sleep.
Let lips, let fingertips be lullabies

sung as the slow moon past our window creeps,

let the spent dregs of passion close our eyes.