Apolgies for being off air – apparently my server was down and I have also been on holiday for a week, see below!
I have just had a lovely a week with my family in Andalucia in Spain, in a beautiful villa in the hills above Nerja. The villa was perched high up among the eagles and we watched them daily, coasting overhead on the thermals. To my great delight there were bee eaters too, performing their high wire act, just as in France, their wings turning to copper in the sun.
The wall of the villa that led out onto the terrace was comprised of glass doors which slid back and opened the house to the world. On the terrace you could stand and look back on the theatre of your family life. From the interior comfort of the big yellow sofa you could see the mountains and the sea.
The night sky was awesome (a word my son David often uses and which I rarely think appropriate but seems in this instance to fit) – Venus in front of us, the miasma of the milky way stretching overhead. There wasn’t a single evening when we didn’t see a shooting star fall in the west. We talked of galaxies and dark matter, listened to Mark’s guitar, while Jan drew portraits- (I definitely hope to post some soon) and Katie painted delicate studies in pale ink. In this creative soup I was longing to write poetry but somehow it eluded me. Maybe it was a question of tension – the idea that poetry is born out of a tension or disturbance, as expressed by Lavinia Greenlaw
‘The impulse towards a poem can usually be felt as a form of tension – absence, connection, interruption, something that heightens your interest and tugs at your focus, that you can’t quite see, make sense of, resolve or escape’
There was no ‘tug.’ Maybe I was just too relaxed. Maybe I had finally come to embrace my new life after twenty five years in prison.
I am tempted to call this my bee eater summer. Why? because I first saw bee eaters one morning long ago in Tricomlee when I was travelling and freer than I’d ever been before. Now once again they have surfaced first in France and now Spain – a symbol of a new found freedom. It is now a year exactly since I left HMP Low Newton.
So, no poem, but what did emerge was a cosmic song! I have never written a song before, but the music, and the scent of celebration, of fun and fiesta that hung in the air (more of that later) must have crept in unseen.
With apologies to Joni Mitchell- I called it Big Yellow Sofa – here are the first four verses (music a la Bob Dylan, at a later date with the help of Mark )
Big yellow sofa, see the sea from here, through the looking glass, into spiral, out on the arm of the universe
Fly yellow sofa, step across a mountain sky, slipway to the faded sea, star shadows fall, footprints of the galaxy
Feet up on the yellow sofa, see Africa from here (on a clear day), through the jazz riff of guitar plays, out on the eagle wind
Balcon d’ Europa sofa, back-up to ink black hill, see the marbled sunlit gene pool, spirogyra soup, that spilled the milky way…
AUGUST
