I’m pleased to have a poem inspired by this image by Katja Lang featured in the Ekphrastic Review, alongside a poem by Kerfe too. Mine is below, the others you can read here.
A sleep away
I know this place, it’s over the hill and over the hill and over the hill, a crow flight from here or sometimes less.
I remember it well in summer gold of wheat and poppy spangles, all over the hill, a king’s mantle,
and I know it in spring green, as green was ever in the beginning and after the end, beneath red-flame fall and burning stubble.
I know this place over the hill and over the hill, but it’s winter still and ever there, white etched black and grey.
I know it will be there, If I just follow the birds.
I haven’t looked at the Ekphrastic prompts in a while, but this Pissarro brought back too many memories not to join in.
Thank you to Lorette at Ekphrastic Review for selecting my piece of prose. You can read all of the chosen pieces here.
That was then
A rain of light, a jewel box, Paris nights on the grands boulevards were brilliant then. Roof slate, slick-glittered purple and midnight blue, and the hot gold of music poured from brasseries, peals of laughter, and the click-clack of hoofs, water-splashing. The echoes lingered long, so long I heard them before they faded. Les filles were the same, the paint, the pose, the clatter of plates, chink of glasses, and the brassy yellow light, smelling of choucroute and bright red lobster corpses. Waiters, white shirted, black tied and aproned, swooped like swallows, and in the dark all cars were Tractions. But the vibrant, multi-layered social architecture of the Impressionists, Piaf, Simenon, Jean Gabin and Zola was changing. In the streets behind the glitter, the girls waiting in dark doorways, cats at windows, washing hanging out to dry, music blaring, voices shouting in scènes de ménage, all were slowly being tidied away, pushed out beyond the périphérique into the soulless suburbs, so the rich of the world could have the playground of lights, the rain slicking off purple slate all to themselves. What was once a city of squalor and beauty, misery and merveilles, a noisy colourful cacophony of sounds and smells, of rain and refuse in streets where satin shoes and buttoned boots trod, where urchins followed red balloons, is now a cemetery inhabited by ghosts, as at home here as in Dubai, New York, London. They have it all now, squeezed of life and colour, cleansed of its ordinary people, workers, families, old folk with their chairs out on the pavements, babies in prams, dogs, street vendors and prostitutes. The argot of the titis parisiens has been replaced by sanitised interactions in the universal language of wealth, and the Paris of Maigret, Montand and Monet is dead.
A short piece of prose I wrote for the Ekphrastic prompt, a nineteenth century painting of Niagara Falls. You can read the successful entries here.
Games
In the clearing in front of the house, a child is playing. She sorts the leaves she has gathered in her pinafore, separates them by colours, red, orange, brown, yellow. She picks out the beetles and tosses them away. One falls into the trickle of the stream and with a pang, the leans over to fish it out, but the beetle has gone. The small tragedy clouds her play, and she abandons her leaves to blow and drift and scatter again in the gusts of wind. Her mother is busy dying the cloth she has just cut from the loom. Her father and elder brother are fishing among the islands of the inlet. Gudrun is scouring the forest eaves for kindling, and Solveig is picking sheep’s wool from the bushes. Gerth is out of sight, minding the pigs up in the oak spinney. The child pokes with a stick at the mud of the little rivulet, wondering about the beetle washed away. The stick makes a trench that fills with water, and she has an idea. She trots to the house and comes back with a wooden spoon, her very own spoon. Her father made it for her, with the rune of her name carved in the bowl. The beetle forgotten, she collects a few broad alder leaves for boats. She will scoop out a bay of calm water in the bank to sail them in. Her mother, the messy job of dying finished, dries her hands, and smiles at her youngest, crouched over the stream, intent on her play. The smile vanishes when she recognises what she is using to dig into the soft mud of the bank. ‘Hilda! Stop that! A spoon’s not a plaything. What would your father say if he could see you?’ She takes the child’s arm, yanking her to her feet, and clips the side of her head. The stream water swirls about and fills the scooped out hollow. The alder leaf boats bob, circle, then slowly join the current.
In another world, below, in-between, through the clouds, a small huddle of men and women watch as the god’s fist retreats, and the crack in the sky closes, seamed with lightning. With a deafening roar, river water, blocks of stone and uprooted trees tumble over the lip of the cliff, the scoop-shaped wound left by the angry blow from the sky. The avalanche pours, wreathed in a fog of boiling steam, and the men and women run in terror from the haunted place, stopping their ears. Above the furious pounding of the falls, filling the clouded sky, echo the maddening screams of a giant’s child.
I am very pleased that Ekphrastic decided to publish my short story. The subject is one I have grown a bit obsessive about. Thank you Lorette for bearing with this long offering. You can read all the chosen pieces here.
Hymenaios
Naxos, the limit of Cretan territory. Beyond, the world belongs to the Hellenes. Should Ariadne pass beyond this sacred boundary, she renounces her right to the throne of Knossos. Theseus knows this, though he pretends that he is taking her to Athens to be his wife. Theseus believes that a husband is owed his wife’s birthright, that thrones are for kings not queens, that women are for taking and abandoning.
The ship put in at Naxos to fill the water casks before facing the open sea. The crew made their noisy sacrifices to their gods, and now they are sleeping. Theseus thinks she has stayed ashore alone to look one last time at the stars of her home before giving her life and her stars to him. She tosses a myrtle branch into the little fire, takes deep breaths of the smoke. It hasn’t occurred to Theseus that she might be making magic, calling upon the Mistresses to turn her fate about and release her from the stupid pact she made with him.
The smoke curls and dances, becomes misty gauze, tresses of unbound hair, the abandon of women in a trance. Ariadne does not know them for Maenads. They are not part of her culture, but they have been sent by the Mistresses, to disentangle her from this story that is now half-Greek. They sing in husky, breathless voices until they are out of earshot of the ship, and then the song explodes with shrieks of laughter, and joy that tastes of blood.
They take her hands and she follows, through groves of olive and oak, bay and myrtle, to a clearing and a pool where a dark-haired man is waiting. The women fawn, licking his name with their tongues, Dionysus, stroking his face, their nails like the claws of wild beasts. He catches at their hands roughly and pulls them away. They throw flowers, their laughter rising to a frenzy. The man smiles at her, his eyes roving, his fingers itching to follow. Ariadne sees just another Greek, though this one claims he is a god. Can she not see?
The women laugh, leap, splash into the pool, pulling Dionysus after them. They all drink, their faces flushed red even in the moonlight. The women draw her into a dance—she is the labyrinth dancer after all—but she drinks little, watches for dawn. At first light, Dionysus stumbles to the shore where the sailors are already preparing the ship to leave.
Dionysus will send Theseus away, the women say. He will tell him you are his bride. No Greek would dare defy the desires of a god or deny his claim.
Ariadne watches him return, his gait unsteady. She smells the wine fumes even in the salt wind. He walks straight to her, and without a word, pulls her to him and kisses her on the mouth. The women shriek with laughter, as musicians appear from among the trees, shadowy and with a feral smell.
Dionysus claps his hands, a cup is placed in his fist, wine flows, sticky sweet, and through the gauze mist of the women, a youth appears, languid as a water lily, lying on the bank of the pool. He dips a toe in the water and blows a kiss to Dionysus. The women weave flowers in his hair, drape garlands about his neck. His tunic is awry, slipped over one shoulder. His skin is the colour of bronze, his lips too red and parted. Ariadne’s lip curls.
She watches Dionysus, the dance of the women. Musicians play dark, wild tunes, food appears, all wear flowers. Ariadne narrows her eyes. She wants neither Theseus nor his drunken god, but the Maenads are all around her, and she is drawn into the circle, a locked circle. At its centre, Dionysis, heavy with drink urges the boy to his sandaled feet. With a gesture of ennui, the boy reaches out a hand, and someone tosses him a lyre.
The women chant, Hymen, Hymenaios! The wedding song! Dionysus calls out, and Ariadne wonders who is the bride. Is it herself or the painted boy, or is it the wild army of Maenads? Sing, Hymen, and stir our blood.
The Maenads let their tunics fall to their waists, spread their arms and let gauze, limbs, hair mingle in their uncoordinated dancing. Dionysus touches Hymen’s face, raises his cup to the boy’s lips, laughs when the sweet sticky wine runs down his chin, trickles down his chest. Then he turns his attention to Ariadne. The cup is refilled, he holds it out. With his other hand he beckons to her.
The wedding cup. He grins and his teeth flash. I have sent Theseus on his way. He made no protest. Your lover is fickle, Ariadne.
‘My lover is a Greek,’ she replies, pushes the cup away, and begins her dance. None pick up the insult, none notice the thickening of the air, the Cretan air. Hymen strikes a chord on his lyre, and silence falls, all waiting to hear his voice, more lovely than the sweetest birdsong. When the first note falls to the ground, raw and rough, they imagine he is clearing his throat. None hear the growl of the Mistress’s lions.
Ariadne dances, and the feral smell grows stronger, but the musicians have slunk back among the trees. The wild women cry out as they merge with skeins of mist rising from the pool, and Dionysus grimaces, spits, and pours black blood from his cup. Ariadne dances the lion dance, sings the lion song, and Hymen, silenced, claps his hands to his mouth. Blood seeps between his fingers. Ariadne hears no more, lets the dance transport her, and when she comes to herself, evening is falling, the glade is empty, and so is the sea. For her, it will always be empty.
Both Kerfe and I have poems in this one. One after the other too. You can read them in this David Bowie inspired edition here.
Starman
I think of you often, in summer when the stars are warm, the skies are blue, (blue, electric) blue, and Mars sings out red and raunchy.
I watch the sky, looking for you, floating, not in a tin can, but on all the waves of all the seas and all the beams of light that stream, laughing with dolphins.
I think of you when my face is a mess, and planet earth is too, and wonder if we even have five years. Because you can’t say no to beauty, beast or black star.
My years are silver now, the golden ones wrapped in tissue paper with my red shoes, but not forgotten, as bright and tremendous as when we danced, because that was all we could do.
My poem, Night Phoenix appears in the selection for the latest Ekphrastic writing challenge. You can read all the chosen poems and see the image that inspired them here.
Night Phoenix
They have a name for girls like her, a name that sounds like some dead and rotting thing in the gutter.
The dead and rotting thing in the gutter once had wings, its feathers scattered by the wind.
The wind of passing limousines scattered her gaudy feathers, spattered her painted face with mud.
She caked the paint thick as mud to hide the dirt she felt the world must see, the dead eyes,
because the world sees only dead eyes in girls like her, never the wings torn from magazines to escape a prison.
If only wings of strass and gauze could change a world, beat high and bold, carry lost girls somewhere bright.
All hearts with beating feather-wings belong in the shining blue. They have a name for girls like her, Phoenix birds.
The Four Swans 