White galleons...
a stand-off with fox and whiskey in the small hours...
Hello to all you lovely readers, old-comers and new, its always good to know you’re here.
January carried a palette of every shade of grey imaginable—just to let us know there would be no gentle goodbyes—liberally painted brushstrokes over every scrap of blue sky and most of the landscape too, but, here I am wandering the weekend holding within it the first days of February brazenly flaunting a full palette of colour, both up and down, side to side, It is a strange and beautiful feeling, a long, contented breath out…
Due to a dump of suffocating grey meaning few photographs and an untimely visit by my old friend insomnia, this week my letter is short. Immeasurable exhaustion left me lying low and hollow, I walked very little—I couldn’t! Also, because I am attempting to write something entirely different, a tale of love—I think, or maybe a fairytale—to post in my almost forgotten Obscura section, I have been distracted from my usual journal notes and to my horror find a whole week empty of prompts. So words have come slowly from sleep deprived memories, they are few, they arrange themselves in their places on the page in the very vague hope of captivating you for long enough to reach the end.
Thank you for trying…
Monday night a slither of new moon just visible, slips silently behind racing clouds and is gone. I am wide awake, eye’s staring into blackness, mind unable to reconcile the hour with blissful oblivion. My beloved, already sat at the kitchen table, whiskey bottle open, glass in hand, offers me a glass of the amber fire—good Irish apparently although my unaccustomed palette tastes only the burning peaty flavour, whether it is good or bad escapes me—saying, “It will help you sleep”. This, too, escapes me. We talk into hours that shouldn't be known, a dialogue of exhausted disbelief and concern, alcohol fuelled, increasingly slurred. I don’t know at what point he leaves me there, I know only that I stayed, then the moon slipped out of hiding.
The Moon and Me.
Silver-paint clouds drift over sky.
We are fine, the moon and I.
We are not listening; we do sing,
forgetting veils of gossamer light,
the crowds they carried,
gagging on the cotton-ball lies
spat from podiums of melting ice.
They speak of change, they travel far,
but I tell you now:
we will travel further.
In these small, cold hours, I hear more.
We touch skin—
me curled to comfort in moonbeams,
in the dark (is it night?).
“How did it feel?” you ask. “Did it tell of hope?”
“It made a promise—
to the fallen trees,
to the rivers choked with silence,
to the land stolen by breezes.”
But I didn’t listen well,
distracted by promises.
The words? A song without music.
Cold shackles, old cackles
on a hill beneath a star.
Do you see the scar it leaves as it passes?
You think you are free.
You’re not—you’re beholden.
We won’t join you there,
in fake pools of light.
Diaphanous, we drift in our trance,
no eyes, blind vision,
through false shadows.
The sky is painted in silver-white,
and the moon keeps watch,
(she has for millennia),
on a world that forgets to look up.
In the darkling hours of predawn light, the fox and I become more acquainted. Neither he or I are smiling now. Though a barbed hedge of blackthorn and briar separates us, each with cautious eyes, knows the other is there. I, on guard by the chicken coop door in quiet warning, he, crouched in his best winter coat in quiet waiting. He no longer mocks me. One way or another this stand-off will end in tears and I know, either way, they will be mine.
On days when I turn on the radio, I have to wait for half an hour for the next news bulletin to be aired to give any credence at all to the words I hear, surely I have misunderstood? Alas, I hear clearly the first time, a court jester wants to buy an island that’s not for sale. Is everything ridiculous justified by the hypocrisy of power and utter greed? I turn it immediately off. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I think of the heron I startled last week escaping in flight through criss-crossed branches of trees, of his sureness in elegant, honest, faith of his movements, no trickery, no lies, he judges, with absolute accuracy, the time to be perfect, he leaves. I wish I were he.
Also, through the blurriness of lack of sleep, I watch seven magpies chattering along the fence to the sheep field, they look like black and white minstrels preparing for an early morning matinee. I could have been mistaken though… there may only have been six.
In the Tilieul lime I hang out three blue scarves on the eve of Imbolc for St Brighid to bless, We continue the tradition to set out a blue cloth at the beginning of the festival of Imbolc, season of rebirth, in hope of her passing this far south to breathe her healing breath on our offerings for the year ahead. A ritual we learnt at the foot of Uisneach and have carried to the foot of Le Paradis.
For two consecutive days I agree to take two classes to help fill the gaps of two missing staff. It is not my job and I am numbed by the constant cacophony of noise by the end.
I bow, to all primary teachers, in total reverence of their stamina.
Friday night early; snow is forecast and still, I want to be where snowflakes fall. In hope of seeing soft, luminous-white flutterings I leave the shutters wide open in wait with a book, read for too few moments—wishing there were more—but fatigue, at last, overwhelms me.
A moment was a medieval unit of time, 40 moments were equal to what was known as a solar hour, making each moment last around 90 seconds.
When I wake, every distant hill is white capped, yet not one flake falls on mine.
In the twenty years I have lived here, climate has become a frighteningly obvious quickening of change. I wonder, fearfully and sadly, what will become of us…
Yours, in hope for a future, with love
Susie X
Something I have loved and laughed out loud over this week;
never fails to make me smile but in his ‘A Deconstruction Of Ladybird’s ‘Well-Loved’ Tales, 1964-74 he has outdone himself! Do read this chuckle a minute post if you remember these books.
Dear Susie, considering sleep deprivation, the resulting exhaustion, and your introductory caveat to the reader, your slow words still fall from the text between blurry beauties captured by your camera delicate as snow flakes, elegant like the heron taking flight, watchful as the fox on the other side of the hedge, hopeful as the blue scarves hung out for St. Brigid...
... all escaping the amber fire...
And, as if that was not enough, 'The Moon and Me' pops out, an enchanting poem, from behind silver clouds of insomnia ~ plus a scrupulous measure of time for a moment!
A touching and elevating piece 🙏 🤍 (+ may the blue cloth call in a good night's sleep soon)
Diaphanous, lovely, a scrim across the heart in words, Susie