Persistence

 

Camouflage of weed,

For the gull, a tell-tale sign.

Flex loose the mussel.

Hold, rise, let fall ... Repeating

'Til shell cracks. Prizing open.

More:

This Tanka was prompted by watching gulls pecking at mussels on a tide-out shore at Cultra beach. The crafty gulls work the mussels free from the rocks then gripping them fly up a few metres and drop them onto hard surfaces below. They do this a few times until the shell gives way and they descend to feed upon the flesh. How have they learned to do this?  Instinct?  Certainly persistent.

Interesting piece from BBC Maestro explaining the Japanese Tanka verse form here.

Three Seascape Haiku

 6th April 2024   Newtownabbey

Warning has been sent.

Kathleen agitates the waves,

Whipping up a storm.

*

8th April 2024  Cultra beach

Taking up the strain,

Rocks piled against the sea wall

Grunting, "We've got this!"

*

11 April 2024  Newcastle

Coastal strategy:

Groynes contest the wave's advance,

Divide and conquer.

*

Indispensable

In 1967 when I had just turned 16, I got a summer job working in a fabric shop where my aunt was manager. It was a store selling dressmaking cottons and curtain material and my job was to brush and vacuum the floors. Before leaving to resume school I made it to the sales counter. After those first pay packets I thought I was "landed" - indispensable maybe?

The workers there took me under their wings and I fondly remember one old gentleman who must have had a theatrical bent as he would share lines of poetry and plays with me.

One day he declaimed the poem below. I can see him still, sure he was giving me a life lesson. I loved it and learning the words from him, I too committed it to memory.  Over the years since I have remembered its key moral message about indispensability. 

I had occasion to recall the words recently and typed them in to a search engine. The result flashed back instantaneously. And there was the the poem at the top of the search and importantly the name of its author - unknown to me for over 50 years.  Her name was Saxon White Kessinger and she wrote the poem in 1959.  

Like most of those workers the author too is now gone; she died back in 2010.  Odd that her work so vividly audible in my memory for her name to be unknown to me.  She clearly left an impression on my then senior colleague. And through him on me.  

Here's to the threads of memory that are woven into the fabric of our connections.

Here's to the lasting impressions people, now long gone, have left us.

Here's to the enduring and indispensable legacy of poetry.

Here's to the memory of Saxon White Kessinger and her 1959 poem:

The Indispensable Man

Sometime when you’re feeling important;
Sometime when your ego's in bloom;
Sometime when you take it for granted,
You’re the best qualified in the room:

Sometime when you feel that your going,
Would leave an unfillable hole,
Just follow these simple instructions,
And see how they humble your soul.

Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in it up to the wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that’s remaining,
Is a measure of how much you’ll be missed

You can splash all you wish when you enter,
You may stir up the water galore,
But stop, and you’ll find that in no time,
It looks quite the same as before.

The moral of this quaint example,
Is to do just the best that you can,
Be proud of yourself but remember
There’s no indispensable man.

Author: Saxon White Kessinger

More:

I aim to discover more about the poem's author and indeed to research other poems she may have written. Certainly Indispensable Man is widely available on the internet, a sharing medium not available those 50 plus years back when word-of-mouth oral tradition served to keep it in public awareness.  I'm pleased that at least some of the postings online note that the author had given permission for publication.  With her passing I cannot make the same statement but trust this acknowledgement of her authorship does not offend any posthumous rights obligations and if that were to be the case would strive to obtain permissions retrospectively.

Read Saxon White Kessinger (1921-2010) obituary notice here on Idaho Statesman

Bookshelf: Amongst Women - John McGAHERN

 

Title: Amongst Women

Author: John McGahern

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-571-22564-4

Paperback. Pre-owned

My rating: 4*

The back flap sets the scene: "Moran is an old republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerrilla fighter in the War of Independence. Now, in his old age, living out in the country, Moran is still fighting - with his family, his friends, even himself - in a poignant struggle to come to terms with the past."

This is a relatively short book at less than 200 pages and it soon becomes clear that the title Amongst Women not only refers to the farmhouse home at Great Meadow in which the action largely takes place but also to the phrase in the Hail Mary prayer recited in the family Rosary that recurs often in the story.

The writing is lovely and captures the mood as the story goes through various and sometimes repetitive phases. This seems to me intentional. There are no chapters but the text is broken into distinct phases - 10 of them - perhaps reflecting the repeating structure of the Rosary with its decades recounting scenes of various mysteries - joyful, sorrowful, glorious and luminous. I may be stretching a point but it's a thought.

Some of the situations and social conventions were familiar to me - redolent of growing up in the 50s. At times I felt these were uncomfortably familiar - the scenes in which Moran's new wife, Rose, stretches to keep the domestic peace would I think be recognised by many readers.  The patriarchal, old guard, regime has had its day, but its impulses live on. Right from the opening sentence we are set up for tension: "As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters" but "this once powerful man was so implanted in their lives that they had never really left Great Meadow..."

I thought a wedding scene at the marriage of Moran's daughter, Sheila and her husband Sean was poignantly drawn.  Growing up, Sean's mother had saved him from the tough life of the farm; she had doted on him and he was the "special one" whom she had imagined becoming a priest who in time would say mass for her soul.  Sean had not followed the plan and here he was getting married.  That religious connection again - that Wedding at Cana decade?

Recommendation?

I would suggest this book to anyone interested in the social milieu of 1950s Irish society - things have come a long way but the author pulls at the roots.  It would also appeal to those interested in literature with a sense of place and people in that place; those who, like me, are fascinated by family and social interactions and dysfunction will find plenty to absorb them.

I liked this book a lot. It certainly made me reflect.

More?

Check out information suppled by the publisher at this link.