Rain? Eurovision. Poetry

 I think I heard rain on the skylight windows when I went to bed last night. Of course, I could have been hallucinating! There was no evidence of it when I got up. It was very cloudy, and quite cool, when I went out earlier this morning but by midday the sun was shining again and the sky was blue. 

As I hung washing on the line, I decided that the bushes at the end of the garden were beginning to impinge, taking up altogether two much width of the garden. I had meant to trim them back before they were in leaf as the new growth makes pruning much more difficult. But I never got round to it and, besides, one of them went into flower, which it always does before it’s fully in leaf, and it was altogether too pretty to start chopping bits off. So this morning I got the secateurs and removed some of the width, but not the height. That will have to wait until someone taller than I am comes along and volunteers his services. 

I also got rid of some long, trailing, very spiky rose briars - all spikes and no rosebuds - and some of the tall pampas-style grass which tries to take over the garden. We have a splendid crop of roses this year (now that they are not hidden by all the long grass. Maybe it’s a consequence of the radical pruning I did last year or maybe it’s the sunny weather. The lack of rain seems not to affect them. In fact, quite the opposite, as in former years we have reached the point of half-open roses and then the heavy rain has simply turned them to mush! 

Whatever the reason, this year’s roses are coming along nicely. 

Granddaughter Number One wishes everyone a Happy Eurovision Day. It’s a long time since I last sat down to watch Eurovision. It was something we did as a family, long before it became the rather camp extravaganza it is nowadays.  When I was studying O Level and then A Level modern foreign languages, I took delight in trying to understand songs in languages other than English. It all seemed quite serious, apolitical (no doubt there was something my teenage self missed) and with the occasional good song thrown into the mix. 

Here’s some poetry. Somebody on social media criticised Michael Rosen’s poetry, saying that splitting prose up into short lines does not make it poetry. Surely that’s part of the poetry, imposing pauses for thought and reflection part way through statements. It doesn’t all have to be rhyming couplets. Anyway, here is a Michael Rosen offering:

Progress

Forty years ago,

Live Aid concerts were watched by

1.9 billion viewers around the world

raising millions of pounds

to relieve famine in Ethiopia.

This year

billions of people around the world,

watch news programmes

which show how - 

with the help of the armaments 

and reconnaissance

supplied by the US and the UK -

famine

is being created in Gaza.

And here is something from Gaza Poets, a group that describes itself as the “First Spoken Word Community in Gaza:

I stood in line at the UNRWA office

updating the family records. My morning

drowns in the sun,

I sigh between people cutting the queue.

The schoolyard is a graveyard.

The classrooms small scentless buildingsa

with no memory.

Finally, my turn comes.

The clerk notices my forehead 

dripping with sweat. “How long have you 

been standing here?” “Since 1948”.

Haidar Alghazali

And here’s something about a poet called Phillis Wheatley:

“She was named Phillis, because that was the name of the ship that took her away, and Wheatley, after the merchant who bought her. She was born in Senegal. In Boston, slave traders put her up for sale:

"She is seven years old! She will make a good mare!"

She was groped, n@ked, by many hands.

At thirteen, she was already writing poetry in a language that was not her own. No one believed that she was the author. At twenty, Phillis was questioned by a tribunal of eighteen distinguished gentlemen in robes and wigs.

She had to recite texts from Virgil and Milton and some passages from the Bible, and she also had to swear that the poems she had written were not plagiarized. Sitting on a chair, she endured her long examination, until the tribunal accepted her: she was a woman, she was black, she was a slave, but she was a poet.

Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American writer to publish a book in the United States.”

Here’s a link to some of her poetry.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!