Thursday, December 6, 2012

Published

Back in January I wrote this post:

http://jumpingoffbooks.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/i-am-no-ones-wife.html

When I saw an alumni of my University was looking for submissions for a poetry book, I sent in some of my haiku, and this:



I am no one’s wife.  I am me.

I am someone’s wife.  But that is not who I am.

I am someone’s mother.  But that is not who I am.

I am someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend.

Even taken all together that is not who I am.

I am me.

When you meet me, please remember this.


It has just been published in the poetry anthology "The Poetic Bond II" as "When You Meet Me".

I received a copy of the book a couple of weeks ago - it may not look flashy but there is some wonderful work in it.  A really great, honest anthology of thoughtful, skillful work and I'm really proud to have been included in it.

***
The un-netted tree
Rotting peaches fall
Into sunset


***

i could trust
the silent mountain -
you?


(c) Naomi Madelin

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Autumn Poems

For ten years I missed Autumn.  My favourite season.  Even the damp English days bring me some kind of nonspecific peace.  Something to do with the freedom of nature. Being out in chill air.  The honest smell of mulching leaves. Memories of chilly walks to school when I was small, innocent and unencumbered.

To be honest there are a few too many of these damp days for my liking! Returning to England I realise how much I have become accustomed to the warmer climate of northern New Zealand this past decade.  But in that largely evergreen place I missed the leaves turning, the colours that warm you even when the air is near freezing, the comforting sound of the leaves underfoot and the sheer joy of kicking through them in wellies and warm socks.

I thought I'd gather together a Autumn few poems that resonate with me and share them.  There is one that I found years ago and had taped inside my filofax (that's some pre-iPhone tech!) for a few years, but I can't find it.  I think the poet's name was Mark something... Clues anyone? I'll keep hunting and post it when I find it.

Being a lover of haiku, I had to include Matsuo Basho's delicious little nut at the end.

Enjoy.



Autumn Valentine 

In May my heart was breaking-
Oh, wide the wound, and deep!
And bitter it beat at waking,
And sore it split in sleep.

And when it came November,
I sought my heart, and sighed,
"Poor thing, do you remember?"
"What heart was that?" it cried. 


Dorothy Parker 




Song of an Autumn Night

Under the crescent moon a light autumn dew

Has chilled the robe she will not change --
And she touches a silver lute all night,
Afraid to go back to her empty room. 


Wang Wei







Autumn


Laden Autumn here I stand
Worn of heart, and weak of hand:
Nought but rest seems good to me,
Speak the word that sets me free.


William Morris 



 Autumn
 
October's bellowing anger breaks and cleaves
The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood
In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves
For battle’s fruitless harvest, and the feud
Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves
Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown
Along the westering furnace flaring red.
O martyred youth and manhood overthrown, 

The burden of your wrongs is on my head. 

                                                           Siegfried Sassoon



Autumn moonlight

Autumn moonlight -

a worm digs silently
into the chestnut



Matsuo Basho




post by Naomi Madelin

Monday, November 12, 2012

Ring up my plea - Guilty As Charged

Something my husband said the other morning, I forget what, annoyed me just a wee bit - which broke a dream I'd been having just before waking.

He'd bought me an engagement ring.

WOW!  We got engaged in 2005 and married a few months later. I didn't have a ring. We were married with cheap 'greenstone' rings partly due to budget, partly timing. The idea was to get wedding rings when we worked out exactly what we wanted - at some relevant time like our wedding anniversary. Time went on....

Anyway, in this dream, he gave me a ring.

I hated it!

In fact, thinking about it, it was pretty cool. But it was diamond and sapphires and I have no especial love for sapphires.

This was like a ring of smooth polished diamond with circles of different coloured sapphires kind of piled onto it.  Very modern. Very architectural. But it was glued with Uhu or something and it all fell to bits. Which left me with just this asymmetrical smooth carved diamond ring, that didn't glitter.

WHAT?

I felt awful.  Here he was giving me this ring, finally, that he'd had carefully made (only not carefully - he was muttering something about it being just a test one...), but I just couldn't like it. I knew I should love it, whatever it was, but in my dream I was saying "I just don't like it. Why would you get me sapphires?  I kind of get that it's cool, but, I dunno, I just.... I kind of think why bother having diamonds if they're not sparkly."  And I felt really mean and ungrateful, but also invisible. How could this man think I would like sapphires and unsparkly diamonds?  Now I'm not a 'crazy about diamonds' kind of woman. When we got married I wasn't into them at all and was quite happy to have a single ring. We talked about having one beautiful ring each, with some kind of design to them. Rings we each liked, that were individual but somehow similar.  We talked about it for a while, then the subject got dropped.  Right around the time the word Love disappeared from our house.
Better or worse?!

Maybe that was why,  as time went on, I thought perhaps a single ring but something with some little diamonds in it, for a bit of sparkly bling.  And then more time passed, and stuff happened, and I started to think "Sod it, I'll have a big fat sparkly not-blood diamond thank you. Well, a smallish one anyway."  And why not make it an engagement ring all by its self, after all!  So I showed him the odd pic, dropped the odd hint...  Things turned in a different direction and well, I haven't bought him a wedding ring (though in my defence I did get him a rather gorgeous greenstone pendant as a wedding present.  He got me... erm... let me think... erm... I'll get back to you on that one...)

Anyway, here was my 'dream' husband presenting me with this engagement ring that was nothing like anything I'd shown him, or talked about. It was like a ring he thought his wife should like, the wife he imagined he had, or maybe wished he had, but not one made with the actual me in mind at all. So it almost felt like an insult rather than a gift. So in my dream I felt rejected and sad.

Now, if I had a ring like that made out of glass, I sure as hell would wear it, for fun, to dinner, to a party. But as an engagement ring? I don't see an engagement ring as a gimmick, as something to show off how 'different' you can be. Of all the jewellery I ever wear I guess I kind of think of wedding and engagement rings as being something more understated, private, personal, discreet.

Funny, I never thought about it before.

Hint

But the main thing I'll take from that dream is to make damned sure that next time I buy something for my husband I make sure it's the thing HE wants, not the thing I think he ought to have...

Thinking of past gifts, I'm guilty as charged.

(c) Naomi Madelin 2012


Thanks to http://boards.weddingbee.com/topic/ugly-engagement-rings-post-em


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Sunday, September 2, 2012

Apart From The Weather

Apart from the weather, everything is fine.

We moved to a new city. It seems nice. It's pretty amazing actually, so far.

When I first drove here I was on my own with the kids, so I just drove in the direction of the city centre and as soon as the suburbs started looking more central-like and kind of okay, I pulled over and dropped into a real estate agents'.  Seemed like the way to go. It was fine.  Nice enough area, nice enough people.

I didn't get us a house there in the end, as the school I wanted to get my eldest into was further away and they have this thing called 'catchment area', which, as I see it, basically means you need to live in a flying castle right over the top of the school to have a hope in hell of getting in.  Well, that's how it seemed when I read about London, anyway.  I didn't move to London.

The place I found in the smaller city I did choose to move to, is a twelve minute walk to the school, which apparently was just fine cos they rang a few days after we all kissed the application form and posted it, to tell me that there was a place at the school for my girl.  Hooray.

Other places we can walk to are: A huge 'Downs' area where there will shortly be a glut of blackberries, that is fabulous for walking dogs, children and old people, flying kites, and suffering from hay fever:  The zoo.  Which is currently also home to about a dozen animatronic dinosaurs - the first of which threw my dino-loving four-year-old into screams of utter terror, for about fifteen minutes, non-stop:  A cool suspension bridge that we've been over once in the car, by accident (once you're on the approach road there's no going back): A gazzillion cafés all serving mediocre coffee and no cheese scones. Bring back the cheese scone.  When did England get such a sweet tooth? And such a crisp fetish (that's chips to much of the planet). I guess it was always like this… But we are enjoying the challenge of finding the best mediocre coffee - good excuse to go out for coffee!

A week after I found the flat there was a Harbour Festival in my new city all weekend.  It was cool. The husband hadn't arrived from our prior home in New Zealand yet, so I went with my girls and my parents.  I loved the harbour area - very cool.  The festival seemed amazing.  All sorts of arts, dance, food, circus, boaty stuff, music etc.  The weather, in a weird glitch, turned summery, and we ate dribbling ice creams and felt the need to stay in the shade.

The rain and cold (for supposed summer) soon returned, but the new city still shines.

I took a train the other day.  Wow.  Last time I took a train was in Auckland, New Zealand.  A friend and I took the train with our children, just to show them what a train was like.  It wasn't going anywhere we needed to be - we just went for a ride.  When I did need to be somewhere, there was generally no train.  Actually in a decade of living there I didn't once take a train as a transport choice.  The one time I tried to, it was laid off and I was redirected to a bus.  When I was still quite new to New Zealand I thought it would be romantic to take the train from Auckland to the capital city of Wellington for a weekend.  Leave on Friday, come back Sunday night sort of thing.  Turns out they don't run that train every day, and when they do, it takes twelve hours to get there.  TWELVE HOURS!!!!  To go under 400 miles!!! Intercity, anyone?! (It's about an 8-hour drive)

So we took the train from near our new flat to near my parents house.  Dead easy. And it passed through a inner suburban station that was covered, and I mean COVERED, in awesome graffiti art.  Bloody brilliant. Next time I am going to take the train just to there and get off to look at it.  There's graffiti art everywhere in this city. Anything dull and boring that needs a big of jazzing up is painted. I love it.

Shame about the weather.  But there you go.

I'd quite like a comfy chair to sit on.  Something that squashes down when you sit on it, with cushions.  That's the trouble with moving to the other side of the world.  You either sell everything, then buy everything, or you pack it all up, put it on a ship and wait.  Meanwhile you go to Ikea and the Sofa Workshop and think you need to buy all sorts of things that you already own. So you don't. And you sit on the floor and borrow a couple of plates here, a knife and fork there, and an air bed, and wait for your ship to come in.

And while this is happening, and your tv is on a boat on the ocean somewhere, and you're new to this city and have yet to find a babysitter or three, the Olympics is on and you're missing most of it, right when you'd told your four-year-old all about it and how much she was going to love seeing all these interesting sports.  Which is frustrating.

I know what you're thinking, you're thinking 'Internet you ninny.' Well, send me the phone engineer who's not over-booked due to…. "The Olympics" and I'll give you a fiver.  We didn't get our land line or broadband until the Olympics round one was well and truly done. But we're up and running for the Paralympics - Hoorah!

Apart from the weather, everything is fine.

And aside from an initial glitch, the man and I seem to be getting on ok. It would be nice to find a babysitter and go on a date, but I'm onto that one now, so who knows.

Perhaps even the weather might rally. I bought one of those round-and-round umbrella-style washing lines. The husband said "There's no point, you'll never use it, it only rains here," or something very much like that.  I said "I have lived in this country before, you know, it doesn't rain ALL the time."  It a week and a half ago. I put it up today because I suddenly realised that not only was it not raining, but it felt warm out and I couldn't see many dark clouds.  It's out there now, with washing on it. In the absence of a mallet I found a small lump of wood and a garden spade and banged the spike for the washing line into the lawn with that, and felt most capable and just a little bit Kiwi.

So right now - just this minute, I'd have to say simply, everything is fine.


(c) Naomi Madelin

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