Springing thoughts

Two days after the last snow left

I saw the tiny hint of life

in colour, purple, on the mud

which rain had flooded winter-long,

and thought of Spring.

Encouraged by the silent sun

the lack of wind, the sudden song

- a blackbird sitting on a pole -

in air so silent I could hear

the rush of wings above my head 

as pigeons - should I call them doves?

 - set off briskly over roofs 

and gardens, sodden mossy lawns

and foodless shrubs where dunnocks live

I stopped, for long enough to feel.

But what I felt was not the joy

that children feel when freedom calls

but rather that nostalgic pain

more keen with every passing year

that tells me each Spring takes us up

the path towards that distant peak

where only faith says flowers will bloom.

C.M.M 02/18

When the lights come on at four ...

Prevented from my customary roaming by a vile cough and an unaccustomed sense of responsibility, I find myself thinking about what happens as I get older. For let's face it, older I am - and it's over nine years since I retired from teaching and I frequently wonder at the person that did all that teaching and extra-curricular work as well as the things I still like to do.

It's not that I'm particularly decrepit, in the normal way of things, no matter how lousy I may feel right now. I can still hike in the mountains all day and survive to enjoy a bibulous meal in the evening - for that's what we do on these walking holidays we've become fond of. I can still enjoy singing in the various ensembles I'm involved in, and though I'm well aware of the need to keep my voice in good working order by proper production and by careful practice, in many ways I sing better than I ever did. My sight-reading hasn't faltered, either of music or of the written word (when I haven't prepared a reading in church, f'rinstance.) So what has changed?

The energy levels, that's sure. Not necessarily the energy that sustains the long hikes, but the energy that allows you to cope with keeping several balls in the air at once - or even to contemplate so doing.   And it's not as if I sit fretting about the things left undone - I often find myself saying ( a Psalmist moment coming on) Tush! I'll do it tomorrow ... Take today. I know I have the excuse of a bug, but I seem to have spent the afternoon until now dozing and doing two Sudokus on paper (I usually do them online. There's more scope for changing your mind). It was partly the wonder at this incredible waste of time that led to this post. But I know that the same person who did this was perfectly capable of letting, say, a free period in school slide past in trivia - chatting to a colleague, perhaps, or pottering on a page of the school magazine which the pupil editors could perfectly well have done without me. So in a way, this retired malarkey simply allows me to be the person I always was. Only thing is, I'm more aware now that the reckoning will come, not in the form of a line manager wondering when my marking is going to be done but in the shape of ... well, death, not to put too fine a point on it.

However, I've discovered that it's a mistake to try to line up meaningful activities to tick off as part of these apparently declining years. The mental energy just isn't there. Mental energy, note - not physical. That's less abundant too, of course, though normally, I'd have decent exercise in a day - usually a walk that most people would think long and strenuous. This takes hours out of my life. Is it time wasted? I take photos and share them online, enjoying the photos from friends and family and total strangers that are there when I do so. Time wasted? I spent an age making a card for a grandson with a photo of him in action, but I suspect society would approve of that bit. And they might think it was all right to get round to scanning some extraordinary photos I found in a drawer, of my grandparents at the beginning of last century. (I must do that ...)

But here's a thing. Is it significant that I'm choosing to write this as darkness falls? Ever since I was young, I've known this was a time of day for feeling melancholy in - not necessarily the hour, but the fading of light and the end of the day's possibilities. It comes second only to the grim hour before dawn when you waken and consider Last Things - take a look at Philip Larkin's Aubade for an example of this. There is no denying the fact that it's better to be busy or preoccupied than to moon over the horrors of ageing, though clearly Larkin in this poem feared death more. (He was pretty miserable about ageing as well - read The Old Fools.)

When I was a teenager, stressed under the burdens of homework and my hockey-bag, I used to sit on the bus and look with a degree of envy at some buddy who might have been the age I am now but who would have been dressed in a way I still consider elderly. I would be thinking of all the worries she didn't have - presumably she had a husband, a house, no homework, no exams, no monthly agonies from an erratic menstrual cycle, no tendency to have her gut heave the moment a plateful of food was placed in front of her.

I think I'm not going to comment on that. It's too obvious where the flaws lie. But talking about these moments on the 10 bus to Broomhill has brought these journeys home amazingly close. Life, as I've commented before, is at once timeless and brief, and I keep coming face to face with someone I used to be. I've always been aware of this, I think - these poems I've been referring to were a regular feature in my teaching, and these teenaged pupils loved studying them despite - or maybe because of - the gloom. But ahead of us all - who knows what lies there?

A question to end, brought on by the season of remembrance: Is it any easier to die in a sudden burst of shellfire than slowly, in bed? Among companions who may or may not survive, or alone? I suspect you're always alone inside your head at the end - but wonder.

Ah -  Give me your arm, old Toad; help me down Cemetery Road...

November - a poem for the season of remembrance

NOVEMBER

The month of remembering -

the lines of men in the stubble fields

the hideous scramble over a muddy

parapet, the cringing death in the

eye’s blink - this month recalls

wars past and wars still trailing

death and mutilation in their wake.

But not just that.

This month of remembering 

lines up before our wavering prayers

the souls of Saints, the souls

of our beloved dead, guttering

like candles in the fitful 

illumination of our faith.

The tears come, yes - 

but do we weep for them, or do we

shrink at the sudden blinding glimpse

of our too frail mortality?

We who live trudge on to where

our companion dead are waiting

among the red flowers at the years’ end

in that land to which we go.

©C.M.M. 11/14

This owes its conclusion to a fraction of an idea from R.S.Thomas, whose words tend to haunt my subconscious and of whom I will always be in awe.

Normandy Landing

From heroic effort to the pathos

of the broken dead, a child’s toy
abandoned in the road, is only
a single step into randomness.
Why this one, who leapt so fearless
in the surf, why was he
destroyed and swallowed in the 
red tide, he and not the next
who followed and prevailed?
These men at once machine and 
vulnerable flesh cut off
from life and love and being young
now lie in rows too numberless for thought -
no randomness allowed in this, the 
garden of the lost. No laughter now, 
no language to describe
the lives that made them friend or foe, 
but the differentiated dead
are still beneath the plaque or cross
of those who held and those who came
and we now walk these quiet parks
and think upon the unlived years.
I am the child you never had, 
my son, and weep a mother’s tears.


© C.M.M

I wrote this in the garden of the Chatêau de Molay after our visit to Omaha Beach. The hideous futility of training, travelling halfway across the world from some deep Western state of America to die the moment the landing craft dropped its ramp - all that made a deep impression, as did the serried ranks of graves on the cliffs above the shore.

Cut flowers - for Ruby

And when they laid that rough-cut board
across your grave and on it flowers,
flowers on flowers against the grass,
lilies, roses and unnumbered blooms,
their sweetness on the solemn air
was like your presence in a room
and that was when the knowledge grew
that we had lost that smile to God
and tears came, and the rueful look:
The Gardener of our souls had passed
that way, had found you on his path -
and we who wait remembered there
another blossom picked to make
the company of Heaven glad.

© C.M.M. 9/09/09

A dog's life?

I had a new experience yesterday. I went to the vet. No, I wasn't ailing and no, I haven't acquired an animal. I was meeting Mrs Heathbank who had been held up by a scarcity of vets and was lurking in the car park with her canine companions awaiting their turn. Because it was a mild, pleasant afternoon, other animals and their people were doing the same thing, and the car park was quite busy. Apparently an ailment called kennel cough is rampant in Dunoon and vaccinations were the order of the day for the Heathbank Kennel Club, whose members include one Hamish, yet another small spaniel.

However, this jolly family outing was put into perspective by the presence of another friend of mine whose 15-year-old dog was at the vet for the last time. If you know me at all, you'll know that dogs are not my thing, but I found it difficult to be detached as I stood with this quiet, dignified collie waiting to be called. When he left, my friend couldn't bear to go and her partner took the dog away. There was no fuss, and we went on talking. I was aware of trying to keep it light and mildly distracting - and then the partner returned carrying the lead. And that was that.

I hope I was of some use. But I wonder if everyone who gets a puppy or a kitten thinks on that day of the other end of the animal's life - because any pet-owner stands a good chance of outliving their pet and having to deal with their end. And many will have to make the decision when that end will be. I suppose they think it's worth it.

This post, by the way, is dedicated to Charlie, who thinks I write too much about church. Tomorrow I feel a post coming on about grammar ...

The dying business

I read this extract from Le Milieu Divin by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin last night. I thought it was an extraordinary take on the business of dying - or the contemplation of it anyway - and reproduce the extract in its entirety.

It was a joy to me, O God, in the midst of the struggle, to feel that in developing myself I was increasing the hold that you have upon me; it was a joy to me, too, under the inward thrust of life or amid the favourable play of events, to abandon myself to your providence. Now that I have found the joy of utilising all forms of growth to make you, or to let you, grow in me, grant that I may willingly consent to this last phase of communion in the course of which I shall possess you by diminishing in you.

After having perceived you as he who is ‘a greater myself’, grant, when my hour comes, that I may recognise you under the species of each alien or hostile force that seems bent upon destroying or uprooting me. When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you (provided only my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibres of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.

The more deeply and incurably the evil in encrusted in my flesh, the more it will be you that I am harbouring – you as a loving, active principle of purification and detachment. Vouchsafe, therefore, something more precious still than the grace for which all the faithful pray. It is not enough that I shall die while communicating. Teach me to treat my death as an act of communion.

Gosh.