Illustration Friday: Spooky (and some poetry, also spooky but in a different way)

A late night, too many complicated ideas and a desire to keep my hand in at vector drawing in Inkscape leads to another mock book cover.

In other news I’ve been reading Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled, which won’t make you a good poet but will make you an extremely happy one. I have been sitting in cafes composing roundelays and sestinas on my lunch breaks, with such immortal lines as:

I met a straggler in an antique van
Who said, a vast and wheel-less wreck lies prone…

and:

Cry Crivens! and unleash the snails of war!

and:

This is not
cleanly, your mind is stuffed
full
of bugs and germs.

(the exercises are brilliant) and:

Human invention gives, blind nature takes
Umbrage and rages down a rant of rain -
The bloody umbrella always goes and breaks.

Here is the last verse of today’s effort:

Edward Street Triolet

Ocker-accented bright crows,
Coffee cups and glittering street -
I’d show you where the jasmine grows
And ocker-accented bright crows
Heckle, and ibises eat
From rubbish bins. All would be sweet:
The ocker-accented bright crows,
And coffee cups, and glittering street.

 

 

 

Vanuatu: To the Volcano – Part 2

John Gillespie Magee, Jr.’s sonnet “High Flight” begins “Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth…”.

I’ve known the poem for years, but never really understood the first line until we took off from Port Vila in the De Havilland Twin Otter, reputed to be very reliable, but the smallest plane I have ever paid to be in (I went up in a Cessna once, and saw a rainbow come down in the centre of a paddock, but that was a long time ago).

The airport in Port Vila is a large industrial shed divided in two: the domestic and international terminals. That’s the domestic departure gate on the right in the picture above.

Through the gate and on the tarmac were two very small aircraft. When it was time to board, our little group of passengers (laden with assorted luggage – bags and woven mats and cooking oil and bundles of fresh peanuts with their stalks tied together) walked out between the two. One had the reassuring words ”In Emergency Cut Here” painted on the side near a dotted line. The pilots of the planes were leaning out talking to each other across the tarmac. A passenger ahead of me asked which flight was our flight number. The pilots looked blank and we milled around between the two planes until I called out, “Are you going to Tanna?” to one of the planes and the pilot laughed and said “Yes, that’s the right question!”. So we clambered up the stairs.

That’s the interior of the plane on the right. It seats 20. The stairs fold up into the plane (see the wriggly line about two thirds up the right side of that page? That’s the handrail of the stairs). There was no pressurisation. My elbow was pressed against an emergency exit door and cold air came in around the edges of the door. Cold air coming in around exit door pressed against elbow. From the back seat (where I was) we could see into cockpit. See the left-hand cockpit window? I’ve drawn the windscreen wiper there.

Twin Otters don’t need much of a run-up to take off. We leapt up and into the buffeting island winds. I could feel the plane strain and toss against the pull of the earth, and was very aware of the size of the plane and the wind whistling around the door. And then we pulled free and the engine didn’t seem to labour as loudly, and we were up above the island and the reefs and sandbanks, each circled by concentric rings of coloured sea.

“Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth…”. The words of ”High Flight” suddenly made sense, and kept going through my mind, together with these lines from Judith Wright’s poem “The Idler”:

The islands ran like emeralds through his fingers
(Oparo, Manahiki, Tubuai)
till he turned truant, cleared the heads at dawn
and half-forgot the seasons, under that sky…

 

(Part 1 here).

 

Moths and Lightning

It has been weather for moths and lightning. Oppressive spring days burn scarlet with bougainvillea, gold with silky-oak, and rise in a haze of blue and purple smoke as the jacarandas put out their pale, leafless canopies. The nights are still and humid, or restless with a wind that is warm as blood and carries no relief, only a note of rising panic. The house, a cage of wooden openwork, fills with moths – sober desert camouflage moths, moths like lace, like cigarette dust, horned gothic fantasies, dusky rose plush – fluttering and clinging and blowing across the floor.
Storms come swiftly and inevitably. First the heavy, slow, warm rain, then pure white lightening which lights the night pale blue, then the insistent hail.

MOTH

moth is consummate couturier
pays all attention to detail
such subtelty such understatement

moth makes an entrance effortless
is past punctuality travels by day
to arrive prompt as thought to evening

moth is civil no noise no sudden movement
panic itself is velvet edged
and if asked politely will move aside

moth is old fashioned brown printed corduroy
pink velour the sensibility of shag pile
muted hooked rugs and macrame owls

moth is self effacing yet glamorous
will gamble all on the glint of gold
leave at the last a trail of silver dust upon a sleeve

 

Five poems that make me cry

non-exhaustive list, and not to imply that they are my favourites of those authors, or that tears are the only worthwhile effect a poem can have – just in my case the most disfiguring:

1. ‘The Last Parade’ – Banjo Patterson
2. ‘Somewhere friendly’ – Bruce Dawe
3. ‘Old Gustav sings…’ – Judith Wright (that is the first line, not the name of the poem)
4. ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ – A.E.Housman
5. ‘Two chronometers…’ from ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’ – Kenneth Slessor

‘The Last Parade’ is the worst. I can’t read it out loud to the end without breaking down. It’s embarrassing.

 

Turn of the Key

Effective writing (which is not at all the same thing as good writing) is writing which is cut in such a way that its teeth fit into the hollows in a person and break that person open. It can be violent, like an axe, or efficient, like a key, or subtle, like water underground.

 

Not all words fit all people, or strike them in their tender parts. Some, by accident or design, fit only a certain sort of person, or only a rare handful in all the world. Somewhere there is a person who feels as if their chest has been unlocked and a hand clasped around their heart when they read a well-written contract (it certainly affects me, although not in that way).

 

Spoken language can do this – the apt word, the speech that resonates through history, a sentence spoken over radio waves. Written language magnifies that effect, broadcasts and preserves it. Poetry, if you are at all susceptible, being “the best possible words in the best possible order” manages it faster and better.

 

I should know by now not to read poetry on the bus, or before I need to be presentable. I can only read Banjo Patterson’s poems to my father in a strict order, if I want to get through them (‘The Last Parade’ is the end of the line). Last week (when I had run out of Le Fanu and had no unread books left in my room) Bruce Dawe made me laugh aloud on the bus, and then cry and I arrived at work puffy and thinking in blank verse.