A PELICAN IS DANCING ON THE PATIO
This morning it is dark when I go outside. First light is slowly approaching, and when I inhale it brings cold air into in my nostrils which carries the tints of greenery.
Alt text says this week’s photo is a lined paper with gold writing on it. It is, and it reads ‘A Pelican on the Patio’.
This week found me giving titles to the blog entries I hadn’t titled. There were quite a few near the beginning that had Singing As The Darkness Lifts as their headings followed simply by a number. I saw that it had taken me a couple of months to think about my titling from a reader’s point of view when I started blogging, and thus to figure out that it would be much more interesting for readers to read a title before clicking on an entry.
So this was the week that I realised I had not invented titles from the start, and I noticed because I wanted to find the picture that accompanies this week’s blog. I knew I had referred to it somewhere in my blogging so a key word search brought it up for me and alerted me to my lack of titles way back then. My thinking this week has been about many things and it has included line breaks in poetry.
I love seeing where poets choose to break their lines and I so admire a great line break. It brings me great joy when I see it done well and I aim to improve my work in this area.
So this week I was editing some poems and thinking about how effectively I had broken the lines. After a while it was becoming laborious and not very productive, so I went for a walk to clear my head. As I was pacing out, I remembered the time I stole a ‘word break’ from a newspaper article about a discovery in the woods... I was lying in bed one morning completing my daily word puzzle and contemplating the things in my day. I happened then to skim the news just to check in on the world before my shower. After reading the main articles I came to one about a discovery in a wood. And it was with such delight that I saw the word broken over two lines so that it became ‘disco very’. My poet brain was alive and I recalled a dream where I had looked out of the window to see a pelican dancing on the patio. That was it. The two things had to go together. And later that day I wrote the poem.
I wrote it straight into a document on my computer even though I had prepped a page for it in my writer’s journal the morning after the dream. The poem was always going to be written, but it might not have had discovery as ‘disco very’ if I had written it sooner.
Brokenness was also a mini theme at the weekend when there was galloping and skipping at a yarn show. I made the discovery at the start of the weekend that my skipping ability seemed to be broken. With determination I fixed it, and then by the end of the show it seemed to be broken again! The only way for me to bring back my skipping ability was to take all the things out of my pockets so that I wasn’t weighed down and to imagine myself as a child again as I began the movement! This caused much hilarity to me and those around me so if you see me skipping along in the future you will know I am keeping my muscle memory and youthful memory active at the same time. It’s good to laugh and it’s great to gallop and skip at yarn shows. I have often been a galloper in a supermarket carpark so it was nice to be an indoor galloper, and even to gallop to cut the ribbon (gently tear the hazard tape) to welcome visitors to our section each morning.
My thanks to Ink, Sweat and Tears who gave this poem its first home and to Black Eyes Publishing UK who included it in Welcome to the Museum of a Life where it takes its place in The Gallery of Finality.
A PELICAN IS DANCING ON THE PATIO
And there is a disco
very deep in the woods.
The pelican is tapping out its rhythm
and no one can quite name the tune
even though it is right there
on the tip of tongues.
And the people that know about the disco
very deep in the woods
are glad they are not there
under the lights and rotor blades.
The pelican
is making quite some draught now
its wings high and flapping.
It turns in circles
ecstatic in its dance.
And the people that know about the disco
very deep in the woods are checking
on their loved ones
and they are desperately trying to name
what that bird is dancing to.
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