Ye Gods

Down into the belly of the ship. Ye gods! Where must the burial chamber be? Dig, dig, dig. A pyramid, tiny and gold (a piece of jewellery?) with very intricate clorisonné work. Ye gods. Grave goods. Gold and more gold, everything gold.

A sceptre! Ye gods. The grave – or memorial – of a king.

See The Dig by John Preston.

From journal, written July 2022. 

Picture credit: View of the excavation of the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, England. c.1930's, British Museum.

I Am A Story

NEVILLE: Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story.

All of the Waveses are: a story in themselves. Distinguishable from each other; and yet I sometimes forget whom is speaking. They are all waves of the same sea, flowing and curving. I am Jinny; I am Susan; I am Rhoda. I am in my school uniform, the rich green, the dark blue; I see the various mirrors I have looked into: where in the room they were placed, what they showed, what they cut off; I am absorbed in a day-dream as scenes of life flash past car windows.

JINNY: There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe.

Time flows forwards, backwards; memories rise, fall.

BERNARD: There is a wandering thread lightly joining one thing to another.

I am Jinny; I am Susan; I am Rhoda.

I am now Bernard: too complex; I float, unattached. Now Neville, with some fatal hesitancy in my make-up. Now Louis; even Percival. I am all.

See The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

Picture credit: Receding Waves, 1883, Claude Monet (source: WikiArt)

Written June 2022.

Sparrows

Sparrows dart round these chambers, never knowing what they will do: where will they fly or perch? The nostrils prick at odours, the mouth tastes flavours. Memory singed long ago. How boring other people's sparrows seem when they're not your own, when magnified – as they usually are – to a stature they may not deserve. It's the same with thoughts, with loves. Never in the same room, always someplace else. Recalling; thinking; questioning: what would van Gogh have made of the sunflowers in Italy? Of Italy itself – the Italian countryside?

Read and write...wonder...sparrows perch, fly.

Picture credit: Sparrows and Camellias in the Snow, 1838, Hiroshige (source: WikiArt).

Attributed to reading White Egrets by Derek Walcott.

Written June 2022.