Ronald Binge's Magic

 

Zephyr is one of thse words I'd love to use in a poem, but I don't have the nerve. I'm getting it in sideways though. 

Ronald Binge is probably not the first name you'd shout out if you were asked to name a composer but the Derby-born Binge did  compose one of the most familiar tunes ever in these parts, 'The Elizabethan Serenade'. 

Reduced to poverty with the death of his father as a result of injuries in WW1, he never received formal musical training, but a local church choirmaster, seeing his potetial, taught him to play piano and organ. In the late  1930s he found himself employed as composer and arranger for the Mantovani Orchestra. If, like me, you remember their music, you'll know the wonderful lush cascading strings that were Mantovani's signature; I still love to hear that music.

But the zephyr; the zephyr is to be heard in 'Sailing By', familiar to many from the BBC's Shipping forecast; Binge's beautiful evocation of sailing on a fresh breeze, more than a zephyr I'd say, but there, I got to use the word........4 times now

Anyway, close your eyes, play this bit of music and be transported to the south seas. A sailing boat  a little way out on the water but with the palm trees still in plain view. The sun on your skin, time of no importance whatsoever and dreaming.

Did anyone ever compose a tune that could transprt you so successfully to another world. Here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFdas-kMF74

Which?

 

Which?

The film strip of my life:

the constant change, albeit slow:

was I all of those?

That youthful face, hardly;

neither lines nor traces,

none of my history there.

Or the newly married

with all his questions answered

before most arrived;

can he be my truest self

before he has questioned yourself?

And then, with the first signs of grey

and a modicum of success writing poetry;

was he the arrival; I suspect he thought so,

though the years were already picking up speed

and his dreams beginning to look ragged

in their flight.

Now this face, growing gaunt,

age seldom recognized in the mirror,

but seen with shock in the updating

of passport and license photographs.

Time sculpts beauty away, individuality too;

but stripped of self-importance, pride diminished,

there, at last, inside the scribble of age, is my bared self.

The Year Moving On

 

Nothing marks the year moving on so well as

the leaves in the park transported by November

gales. ‘In step, men’ or should I say ‘mice’; lifted,

brown and scuttling, their year’s work done, already

composting with nature’s relentless efficiency,

their sopping undersides rotting; already half way to

humus and chased underneath hedges for ferrying

to the underworld by worms to become, without

delay, the richness of another year coming.

Two Rainbows

 There's been a lot of frost recently, it is January after all. But seeing two rainbows on either end of the bay the other day brought an expected touch of frost.

Two Rainbows

Two rainbows, miles apart, glimmered

above the steel-coloured bay. I stood

watching them, straight sided stubs just,

equal in size but gauzy, one as faint as the other, 

both on the point of disappearing.

I waited for that moment, but, instead, they

grew by degrees, spectral pillars, curved

and high in the graphite heavens converged;

a Romanesque arch soaring, spanning

the length of Donegal Bay, magnificent;

in that moment a difference was erased.

All is still

 

All is still.

I have stopped to listen,

but there is only myself.

If you shout,

wherever it is you are,

I will hear you

because here, 

I am all;

I am the full of here.

If you shout,

your voice

will flood my ears;

if not your voice, you, 

you yourself

will fill me.

  

A Photograph Almost; 50 Years Ago.

 

My father at the kitchen table,

over the Sunday papers;

the sun coming and going

as lives do.

His pipe-smoke, DNA-like,

spiralling silvery upward,

joining the angels dancing 

in the Heaven above his head,

Happy 2025, let's hope it is less destructive than 2024.

Happy Christmas

Snow Hill by Andrew Wyatt

 

I come back to this image over and over; it's beautiful, strikes a chord in me, and keeps striking. It's Wyatt's subjects over the years, but reminds me too of  Yeat's review of himself in poetry in the poem 'The Circus Animals' Desertion'.

The image  suggests a poem to me that's buried inside somewhere; I come back again  to find it and suppose sometime I will.

This isn't exactly Christmas cheer, but does remind me of  the Christmas totting up of those departed  that the older generation engaged in when I was a child. 

Continuing a Christmas custom then; wishing you the very best over the coming days.

When the day comes

that I am reduced to the flicker

that is, in a moment, out

and they’re saying “I think he’s gone”,

“yes he’s gone”;

I will, hopefully, be dancing on Snow Hill

with all those I knew,

spinning around, kicking up their legs

in the fields that are home

as the pillows of childhood

and nothing but happiness spinning out

over the unsullied fields.

Israel Close Embassy in Ireland; they are unhappy with the Irish view of the Gazan war

 

December 2024. A study carried out by the Community Training Centre for Crisis Management in Gaza, backed by the Dutch Relief Alliance and the War Child Alliance, has found that 96% of children surveyed feel their death is imminent; 49% have expressed a desire to die. (see reliefweb, warchild.net, The Guardian)

November 8 (Reuters) - The U.N. Human Rights Office said on Friday nearly 70% of the fatalities it has verified in the Gaza war were women and children……………..Overall, those aged 18 or under represented 44% of the victims, with children aged 5 to 9 representing the single biggest age category, followed by those aged 10-14, and then those aged up to and including 4.

May 2024. From a statement issued by Josep Borell Fontelles, Vice-President of the European Commission and Janez Lenarcic, European Commissioner for Crisis Management:

"Since the start of the conflict in Gaza, following the brutal terrorist attacks by Hamas on 7 October, 31 out of 36 hospitals have been damaged or destroyed.………………..Since October 7, the WHO has recorded a total of 890 attacks on health facilities, with 443 occurring in Gaza and 447 in the West Bank………………………....……."

Unicef 8 Nov 2024 “In October alone, 64 attacks (on schools) were registered on the ground, mostly in the north; 95 per cent of all schools in the Gaza Strip have sustained damage over the past year………………...Meanwhile, at least 658,000 school-aged children in Gaza have been disconnected from all formal learning activities, casting a shadow of uncertainty on their future; their lives overwhelmed by mental health distress, as well as increased risk of child labour and child marriage."

30^th Jan 2024. (BBC) “satellite data analysis obtained by the BBC shows the true extent of the destruction. The analysis suggests between 144,000 and 175,000 buildings across the whole Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed. That's between 50% and 61% of Gaza's buildings......Mr Scher, one of the academics who worked on the Gaza damage assessment, said it stands out compared with other war zones he's analysed. "We've done work over Ukraine, we've also looked at Aleppo and other cities, but the extent and the pace of damage is remarkable. I've never seen this much damage appear so quickly..............”

These reports from the myriad, including use of huge bombs that cause wider, indiscriminate damage and loss of life, laying waste of farmland and crops in spite of impending famine, lack of warnings...... it's a long list.

Boned Trees

 A slightly amended version:

 

When they shake out the fields,

wring the cities,

we fall out, boned trees.

How our Summers passed

and fell;

seasons of desire.

Left us gaunt and brittle,

finger nails

still scraping the sun.

Today

 

Can you spin a cloud onto a stick;

collect sparklets of sunlight from a river;

walk the moon’s highway over the sea?

There are times when happiness might belong

in this list; I thought so today when you cried

and we were not there to put our arms around you.

Happiness seemed very remote just then;

you might as well have tried to fill a jar with blue sky

and I thought I heard a hollow clank from the universe.

What I Remember

 

A stream, somewhere in Connemara,

working its way through strewn boulders,

over a mosaic of rust-coloured stones.

The thousand sounds of water, finding

its races constantly blocked, celebrating

 boisterously its thousand victories.

The percussion of its falling into pools

isolated in hollows beneath the rocks;

a deeper tock under the spray’s sibilance.

The sprightliness of  mountain flow

through the gentle, soft greenery

of the fields beneath the slopes.

The exuberance of those waters rushing

through the channels of a young boy’s heart;

rushing still.

Leaving

 

Bronze, copper, gold:

the boats are on the sea,

sailing past,

sailing on the wind;

waved away by branches

almost bare now.

Ghosts man the boats;

passing silently

on currents of wind,

the year in their nets;

this one glorious moment

and then they have sailed.

A Life's Story

 

Unlikely now: the size of your fist;

hard, smooth, rounded; chiselled by weather, abraded

in the billions of quartz, sandstone and granite stones

constantly rolling in the tide on this cold Atlantic shore.

Limestone. I, unlike them, sprung from life;

carry my ancestors within me; crinoids, brachiopods

and bryozoa; their shells, hard parts crystallized now;

I am an assemblage that collected on the bed of another sea;

a tropical sea that teemed with life and its colours.

How far away that bright life was from the lithification that comes,

but time, all too soon, brings its darkness

and I have spent millions of years deep in the inanimate earth.

That I would see light again seemed unlikely

and yet, here I am, carrying the vestiges of a sea that once was home.

As you pass over me, you will not notice;

but my voice is there, in the tumult of the waves shifting the stones.

Look Down

 

It is winter;

the trees are standing

on the stones.

Tips unsteady,

their branches wavering

under the weight of their trunks;

terminal buds, chock-full

of next year’s growth,

constantly stirring,

searching for precarious balance

in the cloud-whitened

shallows.

Bare toros, stems

seem pedestals

standing on arteries,

arterioles.

floors

 

floors

we stand on

saw you

my love

on your ice floe

passing

waved but

you were gone

blades skimming

through desolate

heavens

ah lover

it was the flight

we fell for

passing

is what we are