TUESDAY POEM | Antarctica by Katherine Glenday

                                      

Sounding bells | 80 feet below the ice - Explorers Cove, New Harbor, Antarctica 2008

Katherine Glenday (with a little help from her friends!) Photograph by Shawn Harper

                                      ANTARCTICA

                                                  Our thoughts form us

                                                  And like the forams

                                                  And the caddis creatures

                                                  We live in our

                                                  Patterned habits

                                                  I can run with this

                                                  And do

                                                  Away from text and fact

                                                  And the common herded wayfare

                                                  Of thought and learned behaviour

                                                  It is too dense for me

                                                  I am overwhelmed already

                                                  And the truth of it

                                                  Scampers off somewhere

                                                  And snarls in the brambles

                                                  Beneath the woods

                                                  Of a forest of trees

                                                  I would rather drop my sounding bells

                                                  Below a frozen sea

                                                  And watch with my long distance heart

                                                  As my friends swim them down

                                                 To sing an angelus

                                                 On the ocean bed

                                                 Here all things are weighed

                                                 In the company of creatures

                                                 Who build their hearts on the sleeves

                                                 Of their houses.

                                                 Katherine Glenday

Katherine and I met at the age of eighteen as we embarked on a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Our lives have been woven together in ways mundane, mysterious and magical ever since. During our 2008 season in Explorers Cove, Antarctica, scientist Sam Bowser and I traveled with a series of porcelain forms created by ceramic artists Christina Bryer and Katherine. (You can see some of these on my new, very-much-still-under-construction, website here - scroll down to the bottom of the Antarctica page).

Katherine lives in Kalk Bay, a quaint fishing village in Cape Town (SA). Last weekend she opened the doors of her home and studio to the public for an extensive retrospective - 30 years of her exquisite porcelain work. The words 'numinous' and 'luminous' come immediately to mind. She is an artist in light, her work at once grounded in the natural world and occupying a space that's 'beyond' form. Weightless. Metaphysical. It needs to be seen to be believed --- please visit Katherine's website, prepared to be moved, awed and - yes - altered.

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Janis Freegard

with Tuatara by Nola Borrell

Please click on the quill. 

Banana Heart

 

What do you see? 

When the heart

The Curly Pyjama Letters - Michael Leunig

from A Confession - by Michael Leunig

"Once upon a time I used to be a political cartoonist. I worked for a Melbourne newspaper called Newsday but I had trouble making witty, incisive jokes.

One Saturday morning in 1969, struggling towards a deadline and trying to draw a cartoon about the Vietname war, a strange thing happened to me. In an act of merry insolence; as a small rebellion against deadlines, punchlines and politics I sidestepped my obligations and the grave topic in hand and drew what I thought was an absurd, irresponsible triviality. Tempting fate, I presented it to the editor for publication.

It showed a man riding towards the sunset on a large duck. On his head he wore a teapot. Not a 'proper' cartoon by conventional standards, quite loopy in fact, but a joyous image nevertheless.

The editor told me he didn't know what it meant but laughed, shook his head and published it. I suspect that deep down, to my good fortune, he understood.

Many years later I was able to interpret the meaning of this drawing with certitude.

The man was most definitely me and the teapot, worn like a fool's cap, symbolized warmth, nourishment and domestic familiarity. The duck represented feelings of primal freedom and playfulness; qualities sadly lacking, I thought, from the world of political commentary and critical awareness.

Innocently I had drawn my impending departure from political cartooning, my flight to freedom. In a moment of perversity and release I had drawn my liberating image.

In the wake of this drawing I at once began to express my most personal self with less embarrassment; to play with my ideas more freely; to bring warmth into my work; to focus on modest, everyday situations and nature as sources of imagery and to see my work as nourishing rather than mocking or hurtful.

I experimented my way onward with feelings of mischief and fertility and as I found my feet I began to find my symbols and characters. A small, wide-eyed creature with a huge nose evolved off the end of my nib; a naked angel; wingless, ageless, genderless; an innocent messenger-fool presenting no possible threat and therefore permitted to state any case or express any feeling shamelessly.

Years passed and Mr Curly arrived on a bicycle, a large perky curl rising frond-like from his head; drawn that way because it felt right and looked funny. But the curl turned out to be the tender, unfurling motion of nature's growth; the unfolding consciousness; the way in which the heart reaches out into the world.

And sailing over the horizon in a battered armchair came Vasco Pyjama, the brave searcher who left all that was understood and safe to circumnavigate his own world.

The job of these arrivals however was matched by the pain of sudden, unexpected departures, depressions and loss of confidence when the hand and the heart could not draw or refused to draw: errors, failures, and humiliations when everything seemed to collapse into foolishness and squalor.

And in the gloom of these interminable periods friends and comrades leaned close to whisper prayers of encouragement and comfort. Others came from behind to steal and wound and confound. It's traditional. The best drawing ink is bitter and sweet and salty.

Yet my moon always hung faithfully in the sky: constant companion, luminous and remote, gentle symbol of mystery, femininity and noctural wisdom. . . "

If you haven't yet discovered Michael Leunig and his generous blend of creative and philosophical wisdom, I am sure you will want to. . .  Continue the journey on his website - www.leunig.com.au

*

When the heart
Is cut or cracked or broken
Do not clutch it
Let the wound lie open

Let the wind
From the good old sea blow in
To bathe the wound with salt
And let it sing.

Let  a stray dog lick it
Let a bird lean in the hole and sing
A simple song like a tiny bell
And let it ring


MICHAEL LEUNIG
from The Prayer Tree, HarperCollinsPublishers 1990 

Ode to the artichoke - Pablo Neruda

I'm relieved to report that all is well with Dad. I've just this minute spoken to him in his room at London Bridge Hospital. He had a Double Chamber Pacemaker fitted this afternoon, was hungry as a herd of bulls (having had to fast pre-surgery, of course) and has been told he should be fine to go home to Kent by train (?!) on Sunday. What a remarkable world we live in... in days gone by, pacemakers didn't exist; neither did telephones or the internet with Skype and email and all the opportunities such technologies offer us for connecting up and being alongside those we love who live on the other side of the world.

One of Dad's favourite vegetables is the globe artichoke. If I could hop over to England right this minute, I'd take him a platter of steaming artichokes, a finger bowl of warm water with floating-boat wedges of bright yellow lemon and a starched white linen napkin to tuck under his chin.

Do you know this poem?

Ode To The Artichoke

The artichoke

With a tender heart

Dressed up like a warrior,

Standing at attention, it built

A small helmet

Under its scales

It remained

Unshakeable,

By its side

The crazy vegetables

Uncurled

Their tendrills and leaf-crowns,

Throbbing bulbs,

In the sub-soil

The carrot

With its red mustaches

Was sleeping,

The grapevine

Hung out to dry its branches

Through which the wine will rise,

The cabbage

Dedicated itself

To trying on skirts,

The oregano

To perfuming the world,

And the sweet

Artichoke

There in the garden,

Dressed like a warrior,

Burnished

Like a proud

Pomegrante.

And one day

Side by side

In big wicker baskets

Walking through the market

To realize their dream

The artichoke army

In formation.

Never was it so military

Like on parade.

The men

In their white shirts

Among the vegetables

Were

The Marshals

Of the artichokes

Lines in close order

Command voices,

And the bang

Of a falling box.

But

Then

Maria

Comes

With her basket

She chooses

An artichoke,

She's not afraid of it.

She examines it, she observes it

Up against the light like it was an egg,

She buys it,

She mixes it up

In her handbag

With a pair of shoes

With a cabbage head and a

Bottle

Of vinegar

Until

She enters the kitchen

And submerges it in a pot.

Thus ends

In peace

This career

Of the armed vegetable

Which is called an artichoke,

Then

Scale by scale,

We strip off

The delicacy

And eat

The peaceful mush

Of its green heart.

PABLO NERUDA

Artichoke hearts - Ink & Chinagraph pencil - CB

I've just spoken to Mum who's about to take herself off to bed (it's late in the UK and what a huge week she's had); my sister Pip's also just emailed from Cambridge to give far-flung family an update. At the end of her letter, she wrote... "PS. Jonny lost his first tooth and had a visit from the 'toosth mows' last night. He wrote the most precious letter to explain that he had swallowed the toosth my mistayk and was soree it wasn’t there for the mows’s castle. xoxox"

Thank you for your candlelight and concern - M & D said to say so, too. xxx

Heart

Boulders-based science writer Jennifer Frazer opens doors to wonder at The Artful Amoeba.

I mentioned Jennifer and her site a week or so ago, but want to do so again because something in me wakes up and reconfigures every time I visit her blog. I so admire her work and the way she makes the glories (and sometimes the absurdities or terrors) of the natural world accessible to us; it seems to me that her care and regard for the earth is an expression of love of the highest order; no surprise then to find the word heart embedded in her blog title?

Jennifer introduces her site thus "... This is a blog about biodiversity and natural history, although I dislike that first term. I think it turns people off to the subject. It's too often used for boring platitudes about species richness that tell you nothing about what's actually out there. I'm here to work on fixing that with a healthy dose of wit, humor, and obscure sci-fi references. Think of this as MST3K version of biodiversity..."

The Artful Amoeba was recently selected as the second-best biodiversity blog by the Pimm Group.

Jennifer's most recent post features Glaucus atlanticus - 'magical bird slugs' - in an article titled A Sea Slug of fractal Beauty (Rebecca L, you will find these creatures astonishing!)...

Glaucus atlanticus - Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic - © Taro Taylor

*

It seems to me that, no matter how we look at it, everything in this remarkable life of ours comes down - or rises up - to matters of listening and of the heart. . . It can be no coincidence that the word heart carries within it hear, ear and art?

*

May I ask you to please light a candle for my dear Dad who is in London Bridge hospital this week and possibly next; his heart's being monitored/listened to. . . ? Thank you. And one for Mum, always at his side. . . xo