poetry – Page 108 – don't confuse the narrator

progress

Hemmed in by mountains,
they built church spires –
antennas to speak to God. Now,
high-rise office blocks and flats
impede the signal.

(The village in the photo has grown enormously since I first visited seven or eight years ago. The pine on the left of the picture kindly obscures the crane perched up on the heights in the north, while the one on the right obscures the modern apartment blocks that remain unfinished to the south east, victims, apparently, of the crisis in the Spanish construction industry.)

more home thoughts

tree with hanging roots, Alicante — putting down roots?

The topics of home and place cropped up several times during my brief trip south.

As I said yesterday, for me – and for several other writers there – “Where is home?” isn’t an easy question to answer.

In the discussion, someone rephrased it as, “Where would you want to be when you die?”. But, apart from the obvious suggestion of “somewhere else”, I can’t really see that it matters.

This is not meant to be a blog about me, so it seems slightly strange to be talking about personal information; I’m including it, though, because ‘place’ is very important to a lot of my writing, and the phrase poetry of place is one that crops up a lot on writing workshop and course listings.
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poems not bombs

I wrote recently about the automatic responses from WordPress when you publish a blog post, and how one of my posts was greeted with:

In the comments to that post, it was suggested that perhaps this was intended as an imperative, but I assure you I am not responsible for the story that prompted this blog post.

The original headline that is referred to comes from hoy.es and reads: Una poesía provoca una alerta por bomba – ‘poem causes bomb alert’ – a news story from Badajoz earlier this week. If your Spanish is up to it, please go and read the post on quadernodenotas, if not, you’ll have to make do with my hurried – and somewhat ‘creative’ – summary.
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night noises

The last few posts have been fairly rural – which is reasonable given where I am at the moment. But to carry on from yesterday’s insomnia, I’ve dug out this older, rather more urban piece:

night shades

Sounds rise through plaster, wood and dust; they twist
between the ceiling joists, and round ceramic tiles to twine
with moonlight, drifting, woven in dreams, until
they filter into consciousness. Then,

there are no more dreams:

the sounds contract
to words as hard
and tight as fists that punch
into the sobbing night.

I hear the darkness
catch its breath
and a banshee wail
drags the dawn
closer.

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insomnia

In A Far Cry from Kensington, Muriel Spark wrote:

the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of.

I don’t suffer from insomnia. Ever. I do have a few sleepless nights. And when I do, I tend to try and write poems in my head. The repetition is often just as effective as counting sheep.
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