On Joy and Sorrow

I heard this poem today at a funeral I was attending today, and it struck a chord with me.

On Joy and Sorrow
Kahlil Gibran

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

 

I hadn’t thought of it before, but when we feel sorrow it is because we have loved. We cannot experience love and not expect to feel sorrow, and what is life without love?

Please drop me a line in the comments and let me know what you think of this poem.

(PS – more about my four-funerals-in-two-days tomorrow!)

 

 

Chain of Events

I have been tinkering with some material for my upcoming TMA for my OU module, and I have come up with this poem. It is a villanelle, which is a stylised form of poetry that conforms to certain rules. It’s a bit complicated when you first look at them, but having worked on this for a couple of hours I can say with some confidence that I ‘get’ it. Here is the dictionary definition:

A villanelle  is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.

The prompt we were given was “There is a current moving to the shore” and I had a few ideas about what kind of current, what kind of shore etc as I began, but as I wrote, my hand seemed to lead me in a direction of its own and this is what happened. I have edited and polished it a little, but it probably does need more work yet. I don’t think I’ll be using this for any submissions in the future so it’s OK for me to publish it here. I’d appreciate some feedback if any of you have a minute to let me know what you think.

 

Chain of Events

There is a current moving to the shore
Bringing a slew of rot and decay.
Captain Molasses has done this before.

Sugar, tobacco, exotic animals and more,
Thousands of miles by night and day.
There is a current moving to the shore.

Packed to the gunwales, right up to the door,
First stop Jamaica, Trinidad…to stay.
Captain Molasses has done this before.

Decks with their cargo hold packed ceiling to floor.
No spaces to move. Or breathe, eat or pray.
There is a current moving to shore.

Cash for people – three hundred thousand, four!
Work them to death, their protests won’t sway.
Captain Molasses has done this before.

To see all those people, my brothers, so sore,
Just leave them alone to live, work and play.
There is a current moving to shore,
Captain Molasses has done this before.

You can probably pick out the pattern in this but to be a true villanelle I need to play around with it a bit more, so that the ‘refrain’ lines can be read differently depending on the sense of the stanza, or I could play around with run-on lines etc to make it more prose like. I am not a poet by any stretch of the imagination and I am fully aware that my language is not clever or colourful enough to make it into ‘proper’ poetry, but nevertheless I enjoyed writing this and it fired up a couple of things which I can work on another time. I got me thinking too, which is never a bad thing is it?

 

PamCam – Today’s Office

The things we do for our kids eh? This is the PamCam of the day, in my “office” while I’m waiting for my son at the Music Centre. I submitted my poetry assignment yesterday but there’s not much resting for me at the minute and it’s onwards ever onwards when it comes to studying.

The text book you can see shows the next section in my work – Life Writing. I’m not exactly sure what that’s all about yet but no doubt it will all become clearer very soon.

And don’t let the dashboard display fool you. It may say it’s 6 degrees out there but by cracky, I think it is missing its minus sign!

Brrr I think I should have brought a blanket tonight. He shouldn’t be too much longer then I’m heading home to do some more work at my proper desk. Where it’s warm and I can have a nice brew.

Happy Mondays!!

Words, Words And Yet More Words

I begin with an apology my friends. I had a little hiccup in my blogging output at the start of this week when things simply got too much and I didn’t have the energy to string together two words to form a sentence for you, so I had a little rest and began again yesterday.

The reason for my loss of energy is largely because I have fallen behind with my studies and I have two deadlines looming. I have also got some other work to do collating comments on a survey which is taking large chunks of time, so time and energy for my blog was severely limited.

I also had a very busy couple of weeks with church which has been BRILLIANT. In the last two weeks I have preached and led the service at both churches (St Peter’s have a service at 9.30am and my home church of St Paul’s have ours at 11am) and preparing for them has been great fun, but taxing too. I hope you can understand why my blog had to take a back seat!

And it has all been WORDS. Words for my preaching, words for the liturgy last week, words for prayers, words for poetry, words in my music notes, words for the survey work I’ve been doing, words on emails and application forms…..Usually I am a wordaholic but earlier this week I had hit my limit.

However, it’s not over yet and there’s more to come. My biggest worry at the minute is that I have a deadline coming up on Monday where I have to hand in my assignment for my creative writing course. It’s poetry this time, and I can honestly say that I don’t think I’m cut out to be a poet. At all. I have been struggling with so many aspects of it – line length, rhyme, rhythm, theme etc – and I have almost given up on the whole thing so many times it’s getting to be laughable now.

The task is to produce 40 lines of poetry in any form and to write a reflective commentary on the process and pitfalls I faced whilst producing it.  So far, the commentary is going to be the easy bit! “I can’t find my voice, I have drafted and redrafted dozens of couplets and stanzas trying to cobble something together, I have had feedback from the student forum (helpful) and from my husband (not so helpful – “it doesn’t even rhyme!”) and have realised that my creative talents lie in other directions” etc.

Until this evening.

We had a meeting at St Peter’s church tonight, and I took the chance to have a look round the building afterwards. It isn’t an unknown building to me, but I was desperately looking for inspiration from somewhere, and it being a 150 year old building I thought I might be able to pick up something.

And I’m glad to say I did! I can’t publish it here yet because of anti-plagiarism software the tutors use to check submitted work. I can fail the assignment if they see that it is online already, even though it is entirely my own work. How you can plagiarise yourself I don’t know, but them’s the rules I’m afraid.

I do feel better tonight about my workload now. Apart from cracking the back of the poetry assignment, I have managed to catch up quite a lot of my music coursework too in the last few days and I have even managed to make a start on the blanket I have taken an order for a couple of weeks ago. If only I didn’t distract myself so many times through the day I’m sure I would have been able to do even more, but hey ho, I’m only human and I can only do what I can do!

So there you have it. All these things going on in the past couple of weeks reached a bottleneck over the weekend and things are a little better now. Just in time for the next weekend!

 

My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose

In honour of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, who is celebrated on the 25th January on “Burns Night”, here is a video I have produced of a musical setting to the verse “A Red Red Rose”. The poem was written in 1794 and the music was composed by Gordon Langford for brass band around 200 years later. This performance is by the Middleton Band and the cornet soloist is yours truly – yep, that’s me in the days when I could still play my cornet! The photographs are also mine, taken about five years ago when I was playing around with some flowers and my cornet one day. I hope you enjoy the finished product.

 

Touchstones Gallery

I went to the Touchstones Gallery in Rochdale today as part of a trip with 33 Year 10s from my school. I wasn’t sure what to expect really – first of all I’ve never been in a TA role before (Teaching Assistant) and second of all I have never been involved with secondary school art education in any way shape or form before. Ever.

Thirdly, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the gallery itself. Was it going to be one of those pretentious “Emperor’s New Clothes” type of place, or was it going to be somewhere that I could understand and connect with the works on display?

As it turned out, it was a little bit of both. One of the rooms we visited had an exhibit of works that reflected the changing seasons – “Four Seasons In One Day” – which was the type of art that I instantly understand and can appreciate the talent and skill of the artist, and was really good in my opinion. But the other two rooms we visited were as I’d feared they would be… We had gone to the gallery because the students have been studying the work of local artist who makes models out of bits of scrap and who draws inspiration from quirky and unusual buildings she sees on her travels. She met us at the gallery to do a talk with the students and to explain the background to another artist’s installation, “Sanctuary” by Rosa Nguyen.

Rosa’s installation was one of those “I can’t really see what I’m seeing” type of things – it just looked like a load of old twigs and branches on the floor interspersed with some handmade pots to me, but the more I looked at it the more I found myself responding to it, and I began to see a little of what the artist was intending.

This picture will show you a little of it:

 

Another view shows you a little more:

 

 

And this is where things got interesting and I found myself being inspired. The students were encouraged to make sketches and drawings of the things they could see to use in projects in the future, but as you may have gathered, my inspiration usually manifests itself as words and not drawings, so I found myself doing a pen portrait instead. It’s one of the disciplines we are encouraged to do as part of the Creative Writing course with the OU that I’m doing, and I was really surprised at how easily it came to me today.

I made some notes, and out of those notes I found the germ of (another) Haiku being formed.

My notes ran along the lines of:

Twigs in pots; leaves on deck; gaps, space, where do I fit? etc

But then it struck me that the painted walls looked a bit like a horizon – sea, sky, distance, gaps etc – and then it struck me that the “twigs in pots” actually looked like submerged masts.

This is the haiku I came up with:

Far in the distance

Boats below the waterline

Sunk by exhaustion

For saying I’m not a fan of these here haiku thingies, I’m getting into the groove of them now! Gobsmacked that a school trip of all things could prompt a burst of creativity within me, and not only that but I actually “got” an art installation without feeling that it was all a bit silly and that the artist was having us on.

Woohoo!! I’m either getting there or losing the plot altogether. You tell me!!

Autumnal Haiku

I was doing a writing exercise for my OU course yesterday and whilst playing about words and images of the horrendous weather we were experiencing, my thoughts and pen took their own little walk and I began to draw parallels between the destructive, turbulent force of nature and the destructive force of man.

I came up with this haiku, which I hope draws all that together:

Haikus are not a form that come naturally to me, and the rhythm doesn’t sit easily with me either, but as a way of distilling ideas and words quickly and efficiently they are a good discipline to get to grips with and the sense of achievement at completing a successful one is something I can get used to quite easily!

 

Rob’s God by Gerard Kelly

I was introduced to this poem this evening and I wanted to share it with you today. It is written by Gerard Kelly in memoriam of Rob Lacey, an author who wrote a version of the Bible called “The Street Bible”. 

I want to follow Rob’s God;
God the goal of my soul’s education.

Rob’s God is approachable, articulate and artful,
A glowing God, of graceful inclination.

Rob’s God snowboards cloudscapes
And paints daisies on his toes,
While watching Chaplin re-runs
On his i-Pod.
He smiles at cats and children,
Jumps in puddles with his shoes on,
A ‘where’s-the-fun -in-fundamentalism?’ God.

Rob’s God doesn’t shoot
His own wounded,
Or blame the poor for failing
At prosperity.
He doesn’t beat the broken
With bruised reeds from their garden,
Or tell the sick that healing’s their responsibility.

Rob’s God is a poet,
Painting people as his poems;
A sculptor shaping symphonies from stone
A maker of mosaics
Curator of collages
Woven from the wounds and wonders
We have known.

A furnace of forgiveness;
Rob’s God radiates reunion
Pouring oil on every fight
We’ve ever started
A living lover
Loving laughter
Lending light
To the helpless and the harmed and heavy-hearted

Other Gods may claim more crowded churches
Higher profiles
Better ratings
Fuller phone-ins
But in the contest for commitment
In the battle for belief
In the war to woo my worship;
Rob’s God wins
In the fight for my faith’s fervour:
In the struggle for my soul;
In the race for my respect
Rob’s God wins.
Absolutely.

Gerard Kelly May 11th 2006

A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. (Isaiah 42:3)

I love this. It challenges so many pre-conceptions about God that many people have and it offers a comforting and nurturing view of the God that I personally know.

My favourite part is “He doesn’t beat the broken/With bruised reeds from their garden,/Or tell the sick that healing’s their responsibility”. It speaks to me of compassion and love, and the total opposite of what our society – and especially our Government – expects from people who are ill, depressed, weak, sick and broken. It sounds to me like a rallying call from God to get out there and change that view.

Do You Haiku?

If you had asked me that question before today my answer would definitely be in the negative. Not just a “no”, but a “who me? Do those difficult poems? That clever people do??”

But I thought I’d give it a go.

Here’s my first attempt – please be gentle with your critique…

 

Rain slicing grey skies,

Night time falls with savage rage.

Daybreak brings new hope.

 

I enjoyed composing it, and thinking about every single word in it to convey exactly what I want it to whilst keeping within the restrictions of the form. Definitely something to do again!