loss – Page 3 – Hues of Hankinson

Smallerised….

Infinite capacity to bring love and cheer into lives

Wisdom and wonderment and desire to reach for the skies

Attributes favourable, work ethic good

Meets the job criteria and you know she should

Be the right person for the job, but you know that there are two or three

Much cheaper than she, meets your budget ties

You don’t have to look in her eyes

To see the hurt and disappointment of being smallerised.

©Alison Jean Hankinson

Smallerised is my invented word for the day, it is like pulverised but different, it is when you are made to be small because despite your value and worth it cannot be recognised in the current economic climate, so instead you are forced to be smaller and smaller and smallerer….until you are smallerised, nothing left.

How little can we live off?

Fragile strands of hope

Adrift at sea, lifeless, mere driftwood in the doldrums,

Dear God deliver us from this desperate dream

Have mercy-throw us a line.

Lift us up above the relentless rips that ride us roughshod across the sands.

How little can we live off?

Give us some crumb of comfort

Let us know that tomorrow will bring new hope on the horizon.

It is a wild place

No comfort for those who care.

We are foreigners in a flawed landscape

Fettered by our need to belong.

We have been through much this last year, and it seems like each day brings some new horror but we have no choice but to walk forward still. It is wild and a little unkempt and uncaring and I wonder if it can ever be any better, any less wild.

This is for d’Verse poetics.

The Last Winter recedes…

We walked to heal our hearts and minds. The wind cut through like glass but the sunset set the ripples alight on the water. It was spring and a time of birth and regeneration. New life blossoming all around. But we walked with heavy eyes.

We walk often, it gives us chance to talk, or not as the moment requires. We walk to fill our souls with the soothing spectacle of the distant mountains and listen to the gentle lap-lap and let it wash over us. We are losing a loved one who is between the autumn and winter of his life and the knowledge that he is slipping away is becoming more than a whisper on the wind.

Spring blossoms slowly

Sunset cuts through the anguish

Life melts like glacier.

©Alison Jean Hankinson

This is for d’Verse.

Death washes over us…..

The sun set slowly

reminded us of the glory days

When we had youth and fortitude.

We cannot all age well

Yet we all remember our youthful ways,

when we danced playfully at the murky edge of maturity.

This body frail as it is now

was a totem, an emblem of our love and lives together,

hallowed in the summers of our spiritual enlightenment before we had children of our own.

The sun sets slowly.

Death washes over us,

creeps through the open window in the dead of night.

©Alison Jean Hankinson.

napwrimo 18 Day 29 the penultimate.

This is for d’Verse open link night.

Liminality….

I miss lavender

It attracted the bees and reminded me of home

When home was half a world away and beyond the realms of reality.

I miss home still, not a place or sense of belonging

But the physical space that keeps us safe from the rest of the world

The place where it is okay to be nothing to nobody in a non-descript kind of way.

I miss being valued and making a contribution that is deemed worthwhile

Beyond the futile measures of a financially strapped world or work.

Where experience, age and wisdom lies currently forgotten alongside dandelion dreams on the kerbside of parsimony.

I miss the bright star of hope and the sense of celestial justice

That came from the certainty that there was some unwritten moral code

Whereby staunch steadfast endeavour would be rewarded with reciprocal remuneration.

I miss being able to do what I do best

Taking my place in the workforce

Having my tools at my desk to bring the world alive for the future generations.

©Alison Jean Hankinson

This is for Day 28 Napowrimo

Listing

Sometimes I just want to shout man overboard

I wonder if they notice me drowning in my sea of despair

The waves washing over me eroding my will to rise above the tide

of hopelessness.

Sometimes I just want to shout man overboard

It as if I have been listing too long

I can’t hold on anymore and I am driftwood at sea

Destined to become seaweed and seashells for beachcombers in the longshore drift.

©Alison Jean Hankinson

It was a man overboard kind of week. This is for Napowrimo18. Day 27. Fragile.

The plight of the displaced

She was small for her age and a little crooked

With a smileless slumber and a shock

of black curly hair swept across her furrowed forehead.

Her eyes were dark soul-less pools stagnating in the silent suffering

Of the child displaced by war.

Motherless and mutilated, futility replacing fear.

©Alison Jean Hankinson.

This is for day 26 Napowrimo

These are my salad days.

it seems so hard to get ahead no heart left

endless grind to outperform

win accolades work up a storm

prove our worth, lose our mirth

what was that you said….Austerity bites?

These things shall be a loftier race

we did our homework

bought our homes

met the deadlines

paid our loans.

What was that you said- stay out the red?

it seems so hard to get ahead

just turned 50- might as well be dead

no opportunity knocking at my door

self-esteem is on the floor

We shared our worth with all who cared

We gave our best and braved the world

We talked of global dreams we shared

We worked and toiled and laboured long

We advocated for the people wronged.

We danced to Live-aid in the summer of 85

Our generation thought it was great to be alive

Light of knowledge in our eyes

But in the nation’s mind we have grown old

And our wisdom, experience and compassion is no longer Gold.

this is for yesterday Day 25 Napowrimo. I am a little behind. The lyrics mentioned are from our BRGS School Hymn- These things shall be a loftier race, and Gold by Spandau Ballet.

napowrimo

Windchime

I hear your voice in the morning as you call me

Beckons me to follow you home.

Where your voice lingers.

I gather trinkets that are reminders of you,

A windchime, a plant pot, a word unspoken

A feather, a seashell, a stray thought.

This is for Day23 of napowrimo18

The first line is loosely taken from Country Roads, a song I hear in my head often that makes me think of my mum and dad. It will be 10 years this summer since mum passed but I still gather things that she would have liked, and I still don’t know if I gather them for her or for me. Love my family. XXXX

This is also for d’Verse quadrille and the challenge word/thought was gather.

The sinking of the Michael Griffith, Fleetwood 1953.

She set sail from Fleetwood with 13 hands on deck

The fishing trawler Michael Griffith, for Scotland her course was set.

Skipper Charles Singleton made the ship return to dock

A faulty pump valve changed their course and caused the trip to stop.

Repaired and ready to be on her way as Friday morning dawned

She put to sea in stormy winds so the journey was not prolonged.

The storm was brewing in the north and forced the tide to rise

The seas were rough, the night was long, and no-one heard her cries

The winds were wild the waves washed high up on the deck

And soon after midnight the mighty Michael Griffith floundered and became a wreck

The last message was received just eight miles south of Barra Head

Will some ship please come help us, full of water, no steam. Am helpless is what it said.

Lifeboats searched in heavy seas but no wreckage could be found

All lives were lost without a trace and in the storm they’d drowned.

This is for Day16 of Napowrimo and is in memory of the lives lost in the storm of 1953.

The image is of Fleetwood and is from Wikimedia under CCSA licence:

Dr Neil Clifton [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

The thirteen lives lost-

Skipper Charles Singleton, Mate Leonard Grundy, Bosun J T Wilson, Chief engineer Harry Anderson, Second Engineer Thomas Burns, Firemen W Hargreaves and R Bodden, Deckhands J Tucker, S J Johns, J Cryson, C Murdoch and G Palin. Cook A Bidle.