Glasson dock steeped in sunshine, the echo of the empty space that was the Babagee. Barges and boats and banter of family gatherings shimmers across the water beyond the broken hulls. The old stones of the lockgate still holds the memory of your footsteps.
Alison Jean Hankinson
This is for the Quadrille with d’Verse hosted by Grace tonight, Still is the prompt and it is on there somewhere. The image is from Wikimedia and is of the derelict Babagee before it was demolished.
The transition to seaside life has been a total joy. However dark and difficult the long days of winter were with their obstacles barriers and uncertainties and the fears that we would somehow fail. There was always a small smattering of hope that things would eventually work out for the better. We have been able to rekindle our love for our own culture and connections, track back through pathways and places that were already part of our story and re-establish the significance of our own place in this wonderful landscape.
The move in springtime to Heysham has been a wonderful and welcome move into what promises to be a pleasant phase of our lives. The sea and scenery are endless sources of peace, calm and serenity. The joy to be able to walk and witness this place in all its beauty and glory for just a small part of each day is genuine food for the soul. There is a song by Groove Armada it is such a seaside song, it talks of sand-dunes and salty air and it is just the sentiment of this place, a seaside town resting on its laurels and trying to reinvent itself as the coastal jewel in the crown resting at the foothills of the Lake District. Mountains on the horizon, resplendent in a salmon sunset, windmills stretching out to sea as far as the eye can see, ancient history carved into the headland and wilderness, wind and wavespray.
Mid tide Glasson Dock
In sprightly spring-time sunshine
Fear and dark thoughts ebb
Alison Jean Hankinson
This is my late offering for Haibun Monday and is about fear receding.
oops just missed the link by 35 minutes…
I remember the soft snowflakes
Delicate as lace
Framed by the cold frigid moonlight
Falling gently to the ground.
Shrouding the world in a pure white blanket
Which sought to cleanse another winter
But pure white turned to grey
And the peaceful night became another dirty day.
Alison Jean Hankinson
This is my contribution for d’Verse open night.
The image is from pixabay,
Virtue her’s is beauty
She hesitates then pounces
And in a flounce of majesty
A reverie of gracefulness
Swoops to savage the delicacies of a dew-sodden dawn
Reap the rewards of a cold rancid morn.
Narcotic silence
Renders love unto my soul
Removes the talons from my heart
Her beauty numbs the pain of death.
Alison Jean Hankinson
This is for the open link night at d’verse.
The image is Common Kestrel in flight from wikimedia.
A house is not a home if it isn’t in your heart.
A house is not a home if it isn’t the place that lifts your dreams
And makes you smile and puts the gladness in your eyes
When the sun sinks in the west and the summer lingers on.
Our Mount Tiger home was filled with love and kindness
They all belonged, the children laughing, the turbid teens,
The thieving possums, lonely pheasants and quirky quails,
The irritating huhu bugs, mesmerising puriri moths and startled skinks.
Our house was small but wore a warm place in our hearts
Our lives were kneaded and fashioned and left to prove in the sun.
Going home at the end of the day was like a long slow sigh
As the work was left behind and we were back where we belonged.
Alison Jean Hankinson
The challenge for poetics was to write about a building and we were really supposed to create it. This was our home on Mount Tiger, a small rectangular box atop a hill with a steep acre of bush, and we were the visitors the custodians of the land, we shared our home and landscape with all who had come before us and thrived around us. We had lavender for the bees, wildflowers for the butterflies, cabbages for the caterpillars, and I think the birds and rabbits lived off my vegetable garden. It was a beautiful home for my family to grow up in. We didn’t build it but we did grow it.
I am the face of hope,
In the fast fading light.
I am the distant dream
Driving forwards, when the day draws to a close,
The Star-bright shining in a suburban sultry night.
I am the laughter and the tears, the fear and guilt and pain,
Felt by all the mothers before me, the broken and the humbled, the joyous and loving,
I am the seed, the seedling, the roots, trunk and branches.
I bear the fruit. I am the womb of time.
I am me, fifty and finally come of age, woman.
Alison Jean Hankinson
It is open link night #190 at d’Verse and so we are encouraged to submit anything we choose, this was part of something I wrote a while back, and I guess it is what I need to believe at the moment. Returning and coming home has been nothing short of gruelling, nothing has been simple at all. It has been a little like hurling yourself from a small cliff into a ferocious and stormy ocean. I have to know deep down that it will come right and that the storm will pass. To do this I have to peel back the layers and remind myself of what I believe I am and then slowly start to pick myself up again.
The image is Ellen and the tree- the second version…and my children are very much a symbol of what I am.
It has been a complex business. I had thought that coming home would have some kind of natural simplicity implicit in its processes. After all we weren’t trying to migrate to new pastures we were simply returning home after an extended spell overseas…11 years in NZ. I hadn’t expected it to be smooth, there were going to be hurdles and obstacles but I had expected it to have some kind of “this is your home” ring to it. I think the shifting sands of Morecambe best sums it up. Things were the same but somehow different. Faces were familiar but somehow not recognisable. In our absence, the shifting sands had changed the landscape.
In spite of this there was an absolute joy in recognising and reconnecting with familiar buildings and walking in the ghostly footsteps left from our previous wanderings and the feeling of warmth and belonging were rekindled by the crisp winter evening air, the ghostly morning mists and the memory of plants and flowers long forgotten in childhood.
Pussy willow tree
In February drizzle
Catkins caress spring
Today for Haibun Monday we were asked to reflect on the best things of life being for free and the catkins this Sunday did it for me. Long forgotten childhood treasure.
October gold rolled down across the valley
Set fire to the moorland putrefied the summer roses
Cut the Lifeline.
I somnambulist walked the moors, saw the hues
Tasted the mists, breathed the rancid air- embraced it in my lungs
I welcomed the ritual of the seasons, I had no fear of death
Death is nothing to be afraid of my friend, see it not as the end, merely as the beginning.
Strange voices whispering through the boughs of an ash-dead spruce
Had October gold severed my lifeline.
Yea though I walk- first it was a voice whistled on the wind
And the valley of death come unto me
the voice strengthened until it became a choir of heavenly angels
Fear not thy destiny-lay down the misted shroud that marks the path to the golden sepulchre.
Stop the voices I cried in terror
Stop the voices! Stop the Voices
I am too young to die
I have no staff to guide me through this cavern of darkness.
I shall not succumb to my fate- Give back to me
The light of life.
The hands that first betrayed me-
The human hands that cut the cord at birth
The hands reached out to embrace me.
I clung to the naked flesh and was received.
The breeze softened for a moment
The hypnotic trance was broken
October passed swiftly over the valley
And my destiny was fulfilled.
Alison Jean Hankinson
Image from Wikimedia- Title: Moorland above Attadale With Lochcarron across the loch, left. By Toby Speight
http://www.geograph.org.uk/profile/608
For d’Verse (d’Verse expressionism ) meeting the bar an attempt at expressionism? Bjorn stated “The simplest and most effective way to define expressionism is that you present the world in a totally subjective perspective. Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.”
So I have revisited something I wrote many years ago and attempted to do this.
Ethereal moonlight
Bathes the window casement
Teases me with her chaste beams.
Opulent flowers
Reminiscent of those blood-red roses
Shed their petals on a dusty mantelpiece.
Beautiful memories
Reverberate off these stone bare walls
Rekindle flames in these sad eyes.
Love is a sham
Clandestine mausoleum to those pretty days
So I force a smile to suppress my saddened heart.
Alison Jean Hankinson
This is for tonight where we are asked to have a heart by Lillian.
Image from Flickr….entitled-Valentine’s Day jewelry and roses by State Farm.
Original can be viewed here: Roses
(If it was the Whales- we’d save them)
When Shep died and we were still young
We cried for our loss- not Shep’s
Now we have grown up and walked forward
But to our shame our souls have slipped backwards.
Rape, pillage and plunder, massacre and torture
Genocide, legalised murder and organised crime.
We can turn a blind eye if it’s not on our doorstep
There’s always a scapegoat, someone to blame.
If it’s not in our country then it’s not our problem
We can share in their loss without suffering the shame
Of committing the crime.
Voyeurism isn’t a crime.
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone
Are any of us without sin
When we are the ones allowing it to happen?
Alison Jean Hankinson.
This poem is for d’Verse open link night. #189 Open link #189
The image is from Flickr and is of Syrian refugees. This is the link:
Hues of Hankinson 