Postcard 6 from Marseillan: Passing Thoughts and Copper Pans.

Being on holiday, unwinding and getting back into mental shape leads to a kind of transient reflection that finds its way into my notebook with various thoughts and inspirations  scattered across various pages.

After making a drawing of some lovely copper pans D found at the bricolage, I gathered a few of these thoughts together last night and put them together in a series of short lines.

These make not-quite-a-poem just as my paintings make not-quite-a-picture.

Here goes:

How do I know that I am

more than my generation

more than my actions

more than my present self?

Under a gibbous* moon

I was thinking of Barbara –

how she would love this

soft wind from the south

how she would relish the sound

of the  sea as it surges up

from Africa and the far south

Of course she did not know these things, except

for the globe in the front room of

her terraced house, haunted

by debt and the urgency of existence.

A bright star follows

the north star of my imagination,

surviving in this sub-blue sky,

charting my affections above

the curling red roofs in this

village by the Mediterranean

The moon here shines

down on the shadow-play

of palm trees, tall pines and

rustling bamboo, all

filtered by the warm Siroccan wind.

Beyond all this I hear the bark of dogs,

the song of birds, the hungry cry of wolves

the clatter of armour clad feet, beneath

the insistent shimmer of the North Star,

pointing the way home.

* The word gibbous comes from a root word that means hump-backed. You can see the hump-backed shape of the waxing gibbous moon.