I had a fabulous day in London yesterday, offering pre-event support to my friend, Crysse Morrison who gave a wonderful hour of poetry from the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square from 4.00 to 5.00 pm. She has her own regular blog, so click here for her own account of the event.(Scroll down to Sunday, July 19th 09)

Now it’s Sunday again, and while I was browsing through my file of fairly recent work, wondering which poem to post as my Poem of the Week, I came across this one, which was set in a hotel not very far from where I was yesterday:

In the Garden of the Goring Hotel

Thickets of laurel and rhododendron cushion the wall
lulling the background of car horns and engines
almost to silence, until a sudden hiss of exhalation –
a bus, maybe, pulling away from the grimy kerb
dropping young travellers from Poland or Estonia
to pan for gold. In the shrubbery, a five-year old
plays among the twigs and beetle tracks. The scent
of box-leaves hasn’t altered, all these years; dark-red
pansies, yellow ones and indigo, display the same face.
Moss has homed in on the cracks in the crazy paving
that leads to the dark fence and the tall pines.
On the edge of this echo of forest, a running girl
almost breaks free from the dappled shade.
The bronze sole of her bronze foot holds her still.

I wrote the first of several versions of this poem in May 08, after staying in this friendly and luxurious hotel for a couple of days, thanks to the generosity of Clarissa, my best friend from school days (scroll down to the 2nd paragraph of this post)for the story of how we met.

Being unaccustomed to staying in any hotel, let alone an upmarket one in central London, a mere stone’s throw from Victoria Station, I was fascinated by the contrasts, not only between the oasis of calm in the beautiful, enclosed garden, and my occasional awareness of the noisy streets beyond the high walls, but also between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ of this city.

The strongest memory that I took from that visit, was the image of the beautiful bronze girl, held in perpetual motion under the trees.

As usual, I tried to cram too many details of thoughts, sights and sounds into the poem. When I was on a poetry writing course in Crete in June 08, run by Mimi Khalvati she unerringly focussed on what was, in fact, the real heart of the poem.

This final version has now been reduced from 20-something to 14 lines which seem to have shaped themselves into a sonnet and I’m much happier with it as a result. (Thank you, Mimi!)

Sunday is now my day for posting one of my poems. As I said last week, I might not feel the same about some of my poems as I did when I wrote them, but they’re part of my writing history.

Here’s this week’s offering - a poem from 2002: (I’ll explain below a little about what inspired it, and what I think about it now.)

AT ATHENS AIRPORT

White has a different meaning
underground. More so in that hollow time
before thin hours swell to daybreak.
If this mile-long corridor held stores of words
blank walls would be awash with abstracts -
detachment, dislocation, distance.
Single travellers seem to cast no shadow -
landing, they’ll brace themselves,
not against the jolt of wheels on tarmac,
but the delicate reintegration of self to self.
******
A wall of plate-glass holds the heat at bay.
Light waves stream through, skid to a halt
on marble tiles. The floor’s a lake, the way
it draws down smudged blue lines from strip-lights
and dark Aegean blue of check-in counters,
sky-blue monitors floating below them.

I’m trying to label blue I’ve left behind.
Shutters opening on white walls are easy
but sea defeats me – flash of kingfisher,
a peacock’s eye, can’t catch that shade between
taste of spearmint and smell of eucalyptus.
Blue fades so fast. How will I keep it?
******
Voices. Man and wife, an awkward wall
around their son. Squat wheels skew out
under luggage. In the marble lake
a creature stirs. The boy treads ice,
hand on his father’s arm until bare calves
make contact with my bench.
Eyeballs swivel like a startled horse.
See nothing. The mother’s words
like fingers on his face, We won’t be long.
You sure you’ll be all right?

Does he know there’s someone beside him?
He’s fumbling a remembered blanket
rocking his body like a metronome. My hands
lie clammy on my lap, veins like blue worms.
The usual offering won’t help me now, the smile,
the nod, that gives me haven in eyes of strangers.

Blue’s just a name for certain waves of light.

*********************************

It’s a strange experience to re-read some of my own poems that were written several years ago. A bit like suddenly coming across a photo of my younger self, and realising that I’ve moved on since then - that not only do I look different, but that I think about, and understand, the world from a different vantage point.

Reading this poem again just now, has reminded me more about the struggle that I had when writing it, than the thoughts and emotions that inspired it, and that I was attempting to convey.

And now I can see that that’s what’s wrong with it! The effort is too apparent - I was trying too hard to pin down with absolute precision my feelings about everything I was experiencing - every sight and sound had to be described in detail, and this, I now realise, has dissipated the emotion in too much ‘thinking’, too many words.

I’m still pleased with several parts of each section, but that’s not enough – by focussing too much on individual ‘trees’ I’ve (at least partly) lost sight of the wood in its entirety.

I’m somtimes asked if I find it difficult to switch from writing a novel to writing poetry, and although at the time I wasn’t aware of it, it could be that I was in ‘novel-writing’ mode when I wrote this poem.

(It wouldn’t be surprising, because I was also spending a lot of my time on The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society)

I don’t really need to give any more background to the poem itself, apart from saying that it came from my experience of spending the night at Athens Airport. I was on my way back from another wonderful writing course at Kithera, in June 2002, this time led by Crysse Morrison – an inspiring tutor, poet, performer and author of two enthralling novels.