We were in London last week. I was taking part in a poetry reading at Lauderdale House to celebrate the launch of the anthology Into The Further Reaches, edited by poet Jay Ramsay. It was lovely to see Anne Cluysenaar there – I think that she and I were the only two from Wales – and also Paul Matthews and Jay. The evening seemed to go very well and had been organised by Shanta Acharya, one of the other poets in the anthology.
In London, we seemed to be in almost perpetual motion: the train, the tube, buses, a taxi (once), and a lot of walking in between. We visited The National Gallery and felt overwhelmed. You need much more time there to really see the paintings. My head was spinning by the end of our visit, but I do feel that I at least had a meaningful encounter with several works and I came away feeling infused with the ultramarine blue used to depict the Virgin in so many of the early works we looked at. Paul Matthews told us that when he visits The National Gallery, he always goes to see a Dutch painting of a woman peeling a parsnip. I can imagine that. Like visiting an old friend. The following day, we went to The British Museum and felt similarly that sense of ‘overload’. So much stuff. But seeing the Roman Empire works – statues of discrete historical figures all seeming to promote the Triumph of Man and his power over the ‘other’ – and then going into the Asia exhibition and seeing all those Buddha, Hindu and Jain figures promoting the Fearless and Compassionate Path towards unity with ‘other’ (as an aspect of ’self’) just helped to further clarify a few things for me.
On the way home in the train, Gorwel and I passed the time by doing some collaborative writing. This is the best of the ‘diamond poems’:
plum
white blossom
falling like snow
onto upturned rock
tomorrow, it will be gone
and I will wait
all summer until
I slowly
ripen
Gorwel’s haiku were far better than mine. Here they are, to my ‘trigger titles’:
In the British Museum
There were many stairs
statues, bowls, tablets, coins, chairs -
I got quite tired.
Holy Happiness
It takes nerve to use
the word ‘holy’ in a long poem
let alone a short one
Making it Real
How will I know that
this is my authentic voice
unless I let go?
