• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Chapter 10
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • through the crash
  • index
    • #A-E see!
    • F–K, wha’ th’
    • L-P 33 1/3 rpm
    • Q-T pie
    • U-Z together forever
  • me
  • others
    • William Carlos Williams
  • poemics
  • poeviews
  • teaching matters
  • wormholes

mlewisredford

~ may the Supreme and Precious Jewel Bodhichitta take birth where it has not yet done so …

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: work

under the blue and blue sky

13 Tuesday Oct 2020

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

1930s, 2020, 6*, blue, city, dome, horizon, identity, interdependet origination, London, lost, Ludgate Circus, morning, passing, pavement, seeing, sky, space, St. Paul's, stopped, sun, thought, time, traffic, work

                I stopped short
                caught on the kerb-

                side, traffic past,
                crawling from the morning

                sun; there was space
                before me here, but a

                city all about as far
                as I could see uphill until

                the consoling dome
                of St. Paul’s, deep behind any

                horizon, confirmed,
                yes, yes, it has come to this

                that you are found
                dressed dark and sober for work

                and lost
                under the blue and blue sky

 

 

who is it, who is it: that noticed or wrote or snapped or talked or stopped or dressed or read …?

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

blue & horizon wormhole: meanwhile
city wormhole: The Atlantic City Convention: 1. THE WAITRESS by William Carlos Williams
identity & time wormhole: sweet chestnut
London & sky wormhole: ‘she shook the sweets …’
morning wormhole: riders of the night
passing wormhole: YOUNG WOMAN AT A WINDOW by William Carlos Williams
seeing wormhole: ‘not sure …’
space wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – I took my camera into the fields
sun wormhole: silence
thought wormhole: poessay XI – piquant love
work wormhole: slight sneer

 

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slight sneer

15 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2019, 4*, black, clouds, dust, head, horizon, Lanzarote, life, passing, portrait, salt, sea, step, terrace, work

                slight sneer

                the weight of working life
                that steps heavy on the heel
                past the terrace

                slight-flicks the head away
                from the dust and building
                netting, but not

                as far as the black-jelly fruit
                sea with salt crystals tinkling
                the horizon under

                curtained cloud

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

black & clouds & life wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Sky
horizon wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – I took my camera into the fields
passing wormhole: 10/30 by William Carlos Williams
sea wormhole: Valentine’s Day 2019
work wormhole: my uncomfortable life

 

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my uncomfortable life

29 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, reflectionary

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2019, 6*, abandonment, activity, anger, Bodhisattvacharyavatara, breakdown, broken, career, closed, compromise, contentment, context, Dad, disappointment, expectation, experience, eyes, feeling sorry for myself, frustration, greed, hope, injustice, laziness, life, management, no voice, people, politicians, powerlessness, Principal, requirement, resentment, self-cherishing, self-confidence, self-doubt, self-esteem, slogans, society, spin, teaching, thought, Tony Blair, turmoil, waiting, words, work

                I did not know contentment
                at work, what was required,
                what I thought, I never wholly
                got my teaching … sorted

                turmoil, and even when not
                outwardly angry, I was
                closed off and unapproachable,
                carrying anger and resentment

                like a thorny bush tied
                to my back since Dad left
                and people were ‘phony’ and
                society was stupid and words

                were insincere and all activity
                was a compromise and my equals cheated
                and laziness was always greedy
                and hope was rude and the politicians

                were tricksters and Tony Bliar
                and managers slogan-shifted like there was no tomorrow
                and the Principals
                wouldn’t know what to do with good practice if it writhed around suggestively on their desk in front of them and made them delicious promises of future dangerous liaison                      

                and by default I am
                at least disappointed, usually frustrated
                and often impotent-angry with them
                when they invariably reference me

                (and they always reference me)
                or when I am actually wronged,
                and then I’ll blow, beyond all immediate context
                because I have already been smouldering,

                waiting for the wrong to happen,
                expecting the wrong to happen,
                experiencing the wrong happening
                even before it has manifested;

                and I am right, it is wrong
                and compromised and greedy and unprincipled
                what they have done, even
                when they haven’t

                given expression to it, in fact
                especially when they haven’t
                given full expression to it
                and are sloganising and spinning

                that what is happening
                is entirely something else;
                and the powerlessness of
                not being able to have a voice

                no appeal to a universal
                right and wrong … built me up
                with no recourse and, I get broken;
                look at my tired eyes – my uncomfortable life

 

Bodhisattvacharyavatara VI, 3: A mind which walks with, which harbours, which is in the grip of, which is poisoned with anger and hate can neither establish nor enjoy any state of calm or peace, any sense of well-being or equipoise, any contentment, any resolution, neither can it feel any joy or delight, any sense of kindliness or love, nor can it sleep or rest, when the shard of aversion and hate is stuck and buried deep in one’s heart; but … I have retired now, I, am coming through

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

abandonment wormhole: south horizon
breakdown wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
career wormhole: it’s / not what you do or what you say / if it ain’t got that swing
compromise wormhole: raised brow
Dad wormhole: the reach turned to love
eyes wormhole: The Atlantic City Convention: 1. THE WAITRESS by William Carlos Williams
life & society wormhole: the old man;
management wormhole: how to teach
people wormhole: Puerto del Carmen
teaching wormhole: and … // … sound
thought wormhole: so, how long is, a piece of string?
waiting wormhole: all // are // none
words wormhole: SPRING AND ALL VI by William Carlos Williams
work wormhole: Vue de Pontoise, 1873

 

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Vue de Pontoise, 1873

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

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1873, 2018, 6*, church, clatter, evening, hill, life, morning, passing, people, Pissarro, Pontoise, rooftops, silence, silhouette, sound, sun, talking, town, trees, work

                the chatter of rooftops
                scattered under low sun
                about the hill

                the single sustained note
                of the church – the
                passing clatter of

                silhouetting trees
                can’t hear all that is said
                while weary people

                approach the town
                and quit the town
                evening and morning

                silent under sometimes
                bright head-ware

 


approaching and leaving Vue de Pontoise, 1873 by Camille Pissarro

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

church wormhole: Hastings: neither all or nothing
evening & life wormhole: Entry to the Village of Voisins, Yvelines, 1872
morning wormhole: early // Minoan & Mycenaean Exhibitions in the British Museum – diptych
passing & sound wormhole: Batman: Oddysey
people wormhole: {reading right to left}
rooftops wormhole: Dulwich College, London, 1871
silence wormhole: there will be ovations
silhouette wormhole: ‘streetsigns …’
sun wormhole: horizon
talking wormhole: travelling / back
trees wormhole: The Diligence at Louveciennes, 1870
work wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Making Hay

 

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The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Making Hay

10 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in announcements

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1967, blackbird, branches, breeze, chaffinches, clouds, cuckoo, echo, fields, grass, green, hay, June, land, lark, linnets, Michael J Redford, scythe, silence, smell, soil, sun, talking, the Boats of Vallisneria, thrushes, tits, trees, wagtail, weather, work

Making Hay

“You’ll have a nice cut o’ hay here,” said George.   The wizened little old man, long since retired from the land, stood beside me in the gateway of Garden Field.   He has come to remove the debris that had fallen from the trees to prevent damage to the mower.   Like most retired land-workers he is unable to keep the soil of the fields from his boots, and one can find him in every village throughout the British Isles hedging, ditching, clearing odd corners of scrub with scythe and sickle and caring for the vicar’s garden.   To these men, there is an attraction so binding to the land, that to continue working thereon has become essential to their very existence.   It seems they draw the very essence of life direct from the soil, just as the unborn infant draws its life direct from its mother, and if this contact, this life-line is broken, so also is his life.   One has merely to talk with these old men for an hour to sense their affinity with and philosophy of the land, and I am convinced that it would quite literally kill many of them if they were to be taken from it.   An acquaintance once questioned the economics of employing these old ‘jobbers’ and suggested that it was merely a charitable act that enables the old men to feel useful, and I thought of old George ambling around the perimeter of Garden Field picking up dead branches and stones.   In the first instance the old man had given me half an hour of time to attend to other more pressing matters.   Secondly, his action of clearing the land of obstructions was quite possibly instrumental in preventing a broken mower knife or con-rod, and when taking into account the precarious weather conditions under which hay is made in this country, any delay could mean the difference between a field of good hay and a field of bad or maybe even a complete loss, and with good hay sometimes fetching £15 per ton and more, this could result in a considerable saving.   So what price an old man’s labour?

There is a great satisfaction in using a clean cutting tool, be it a pen-knife or a scythe.   Now unfortunately, the less harmonious clatter of a power driven mower has long since dimmed the sweet song of a scythe and men in the hay meadows no longer sway to its rhythm.   Nevertheless, there manifests within me a great sense of well-being each time I see the graceful stems fall into neat swathes as the mower encircles the ever diminishing island of standing green.   The pollen lifts and the wagtail follows close behind feeding upon the moths and gnats that are started into flight upon a day sweet with a green aroma. Soon comes the last sweep of the mower in the centre of the field.   It is an act full of purpose and symbolism that makes me hesitate before felling those last few stems.   It is I think, that the finality of the last cut brings about a sense of completeness, a completeness that is magnified by the silence when the mower has ceased to clatter and the tractor engine is switched off, when the only sound to be heard is the song of a lark out of sight, high above the dust laden air.

The following day, when the June sun has lifted the dew from the fields, the grass can be shaken up to let in the drying breezes, and it is towards the end of a good drying day that the green harvest begins to ‘rustle’ and emanates that exhilarating aroma of ‘making’ hay.   There are many jobs to be done on the farm some of which are dull and monotonous, and I must confess to a tendency of leaving such tasks to the very last minute.   But hay-making is not one of these jobs.   Even at the end of a hot, dry day of turning, tedding and windrowing, I reap a great deal of pleasure from strolling alone between the dry, fluffy rows, inhaling the richness, listening to the linnets, tits and chaffinches close at hand, and the distant echo of the cuckoo in the woods.   Also in the woods the Blackcap, much mistaken for the nightingale, sings sweetly at this hour and is a welcomed guest upon my solitude.   There are many such enchanting moments tucked away at odd intervals throughout the year, sandwiched between the bustle, toil and noise that nowadays fills most of our lives, and too often they pass unnoticed and without appreciation.   The baler is the transgressor that ends these few hours of peace at hay-making.   It is a great red monster that crashes into the calm, scaring the blackbirds and thrushes and littering the fields with bales of green, just as the child litters the nursery floor with his building blocks.

If there is one task on the farm nowadays that demands sweat and aching limbs, it is the pitching, carting and stacking of bales of hay.   No time can be wasted in bringing them home for should the weather change, the feeding value could be washed right out and hay made fit for only bedding.   Under a blazing July sun the throat becomes parched and the palms of the hands become calloused and shiny from gripping the pitch-fork.   Hasty swigs from a brown bottle concealed in the cool shade of a hedge ooze forth seconds later as sweat.   Hay particles stick to the body and gnats and flies buzz and bite. At times (if, for example, in a race against approaching storm clouds), the pace becomes so hectic that the sweat runs and blinds the eyes.   Seeds and pieces of hay fall into the shirt and make their way down to the trouser belt where they stick and prick and scratch each time the body is bent to life another bale.

This work, weather permitting, continues day after day, and to those involved it seems like eternity, but sooner or later the very last bale is heaved upon the trailer, and the last, slow journey home is made with swaying load and creaking ropes.

Last year, Garden Field was put aside for the cows and old George was helping me move the electric fence.   It was almost dinner time when we finished and we sat upon the headland whiling away the minutes in idle conversation.   He had removed his jacket and was picking out the fluff from the corners of a pocket.

“It used to be my brother’s,” he said of the jacket, “he lived in Shropshire but passed on a few weeks back, and as I’m the only one of the family left, I had all his bits and pieces sent here.”   He studied the jacket ruefully.   “Didn’t find no pound notes in it though, just a bit o’ fluff and a few hay seeds,” he said flinging them into the wind.   Now, as I stand staring at the bales stacked under the dutch barn, I find myself wondering how many stems of Shropshire grass there are within, and if left to ripen, how many seeds they would have produced.   I often stand and stare, much to the annoyance of those around me, and think my little thoughts, for little thoughts quite often lead to bigger ones.   This is, in fact, just how this essay came to be written.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

blackbird wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
branches & green wormhole: Sheffield Park Gardens
breeze wormhole: 1964
clouds wormhole: and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call
echo wormhole: with all love released
silence wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Working
smell wormhole: travelling // arrival
sun wormhole: tremule
talking wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
trees wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – reaping
work wormhole: next unexpected step

 

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next unexpected step

23 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2016, 5*, child, decision, freedom, life, publishing, realisation, searching, shopping, step, talking to myself, water, work

                                am I free?

                don’t need to search in shops like I’m lost
                don’t need to publish every day like a child starved of attention

don’t need to keep at work like a grate holding water
don’t need to think of further examples like I haven’t yet got the realisation, yes

                                I am,

                now
                for the residue

                and the
                next unexpected step

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

child wormhole: snapshots about Totnes
life wormhole: and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call
publishing wormhole: landscape of cloud over London / with differing depths of grey
realisation wormhole: for / the first time
searching wormhole: is this it // all the time
talking to myself & water wormhole: Sheffield Park Gardens
work wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Working

 

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The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Working

07 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in announcements

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

1967, chimney, clouds, corn, cows, dusk, eggs, elm, farming, fence, fields, flood, food distribution, future, gale, gaze, green, grey, harvest, hay, hills, identity, leaf, letter, machines, meadow, meat production, Michael J Redford, milk, morning, oats, poetry, rain, sheep, silence, summer, sun, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, time, tractors, trees, valley, weather, wheat, wind, windows, work, writing

Chapter 4

Working

A Letter of Two Parts

Dear Pat and John

I thought it high time I dropped another letter from the country into the post.   Looking back over the past summer months seems more like looking back over a bleak and stormy winter.   The weather has of course played havoc with the haymaking and harvesting.   I hear that at one time, medium quality hay was fetching nearly £20 per ton, and taking into account the wide-spread flooding that has occurred, it seems there’ll not be enough oat straw to feed in place of it.   With this drastic shortage of hay and straw, the outlook is black indeed.

Even as I write, the rain is beating alarmingly against the window panes, borne upon a gale that roars like an express up the valley, each gust falling over the next in its haste to wreak havoc on the exposed hills.   As I gaze through the window pane distorted with rivulets and splashes, I perceive a hazy image of grey hills shouldering leaden clouds, and every few minutes the wind rattles the frame and comes sighing down the chimney.   The whole house shudders a little and a log in the hearth slips, sending up a shower of sparks to meet the confusion above.   The fields are in a sorry state.   Most of the corn has been lodged as if trampled by some strident giant, fences have been breached by falling trees and many sheep throughout the country have been drowned in the spreading waters.

There was a period two weeks ago when the tempest eased a little and allowed a little watery sun into our eyes, but this lasted for only seven days, after which the rain set in again and eased up only occasionally for an odd day here and there.   We have managed to stack about half the oats, but the remainder will probably have to be written off.   The wheat would have encountered a similar fate had it not been for the three hired combines.

Now here once again are the winds and the rains.   A dead leaf, too sodden to absorb any more water is whipped across the window and trembles for a brief second on the sill before joining the hosts that cling to the chicken coop wire.   Incidentally, I’d better put this letter to one side for a moment in order to collect the eggs before the half light fades completely.

                                * * * * * * * *

Dear Pat and John,

I’ve had to restart this letter.   Owing to this sudden bright spell we’ve been working like mad trying to catch up on the backlog of harvesting and general repairs.   I started this letter well over two weeks ago but I’m afraid I’ve not had time to finish it until now.   It is remarkable how the view has changed outside my window.   The country scene these past few days has been one of violent human and mechanical activity.

Implements of all shapes, sizes and colours have erupted from their unusual passiveness and are droning, roaring and rattling over the soil.   A combine harvester, like a metal monster from a Wells novel, trundles ponderously across the field, digesting the grain and vomiting the residue in its wake.   Tractors career madly through the lanes, heave with throbbing effort towering loads of sheaves and haul balers which follow on, nodding idiotically like inane sheep.   Men race fervently against time commanding machines, pitching sheaves, building stacks, their pitchforks leaping and flashing under the sun.   Farmers and farm workers alike are conscious of the urgency of the hour, but no clock watching for them, they are eager to see the culmination of a years’ hard work.   To these men, their work is not merely a means of earning a living, it is something far more than this, something far more personal and important to them as individuals.   These men work not so much for their employers but with them, and it is through this combined effort that the tempestuous vagaries of the past year have been overcome.

If a machine breaks down, there is a curse and several pairs of hands are immediately locating the trouble.   They may not be expert mechanics but farm workers are masters of improvisation and no machine is standing idle for long.   It is this knack of ‘making do’ that is the seed of many weird and wonderful machines that have appeared on the agricultural scene, and it would indeed be difficult to find any industry which has produced in such a short period of time a greater range of impossible machines to tackle such improbable tasks.   No doubt to the layman it would appear that with all these modern innovations, the life of the farm worker today is almost as idyllic as the sentimentalised conception of the pseudo-bucolic poets of the seventeenth century:-

                “O happy life, if that their good
                The husbandman but understood.
                Who all the day themselves do please …”

Whenever a new acquaintance asks the nature of my work they are, on being told, shocked into silent disbelief.   Apparently I neither look like a farm labourer nor do I sound like one (how does such a person look and sound), and henceforth I am re-introduced either as a farmer or, by those who are more sensitive towards the truth, as being ‘in farming’, thereby implying that I own vast acres and hunt every Tuesday and Saturday.   A wistful ‘back to the land’ look then enters the eye.   “I’ve always wanted to work on a farm” they sigh.   No doubt there have been insuperable obstacles in ambition’s path for many people, but surely not all, and I have yet to meet the person who doesn’t bemoan his lot in town and gaze longingly at the green hills.   And just as a point of interest, I have yet to meet the person who doesn’t have an uncle somewhere who owns a farm.

Their conception of farming today seems even more idyllic than that of their fathers’.   Machines, they say, have taken the hard work out of farming, all we have to do is sit on a tractor all day and press buttons.   Perhaps they would like to spend a day stacking bales of hay under a sizzling hot roof of a Dutch barn, or perhaps after a sixteen hour day during harvest, [perhaps] they would like to sit up all night with a cow who is having a difficult time calving and work another sixteen hours the following day, and the day after that.   Unless a farmer specialises in a line for which a particular machine or implement has been designed, then it is not economical to purchase that machine.   For example, a man with just one house cow would find it uneconomical to install a completely automatic milking unit, but even where this is justified, as in the case of larger herds, the farmer or herdsman still has to rise at five o’clock on a bitterly cold winter’s morning seven days a week.   The advent of the machine has not necessarily lessened the amount of hard work to be done, it has merely allowed us to do more work in a given amount of time.   In fact, it is because of the machine that the herdsman’s lot today is becoming an increasingly intolerable one.

An old friend of mine once milked twenty five cows night and morning with two machines.   He know his cows and his cows knew him.   Although he did not rush things, he was efficient.   He would stand aside as the cows came into the shed and cast his eye over each one, and as he milked, he ran his hand over their coats and looked at their droppings.   Old Charlie could tell immediately if one of the animals was off colour.   Then his employer retired and a young, progressive farmer moved in.   Fortunately he ask Charlie to stay on as cowman.   Now, Charlie milks sixty cows night and morning with four machines in a well-parlour.   On being asked how he liked the new system, the old cowman sighed.

“Well I dunno.   We gets the milk, that’s fer sure, but ‘tis like working in a factory.   There’s pipes, tubes, valves, taps an’ switches everywhere.   The animals go through the parlour like a dose o’ salts – you’ve ‘ardly got time to wash their bags.   All you can see of ‘em is one side, their guts might be ‘anging out the other fer all I know.”   His addendum, I think, summed up his real grievance.

                “Trouble is – I ‘ent got enough time to get to know me animals.”

What could once be classified as a pleasurable occupation was now, through the advent of the machine, become a tiresome chore, and as mechanisation infiltrates more and more, so true herdsmanship is disappearing.   The reticent paragon of tolerance, that slow, amiable patient being that was once the cowmen, is now being pushed aside to make way for the impatient, ulcer-ridden milker of high speed conveyer-type milk production of today, so much so in fact, that on some larger farms, milkers are already working a shift system to break the seven day a week monotony.

I can foresee in the not so distant future, a herd of a thousand or more cows, zero grazed, moving almost continuously through a system of yards and parlours twice every twenty four hours.   In the parlours, shift work will be in progress with round the clock milking.   The milk will be pumped through to the distribution.   The organisation will manufacture its own concentrates, will employ its own veterinary surgeon, accountant and secretary and will have a resident Ministry Inspector equipped with his own laboratory.   And of course the whole concern will be owned by the big industrialists of the day.   This is not such an improbability as may at first appear for this has already happened to a great degree to some of our poultry farms.   There are now vast empires where eggs are fed into one end of a building and emerge twelve weeks later at the other as pre-packed chickens with their giblets frozen into little polythene bags inside them.   Then there is the abomination of the sweat box and battery systems of meat production.   Agricultural evolution has reached a point where farming, as we know it, is slowly but surely plunging into self-annihilation and dragging down with it the responsibility of moral thought into a morass of turpitude.   We are entering an age of hydroponic systems where an agricultural technocracy permits controlled environment and mass production of living creatures to an extent unparalleled in human history.   It is as if we have forgotten that we are dealing with life itself and not inanimate lumps of putty waiting to be moulded into any shape by the current market.   Yet if the farmers of today do not keep abreast of [the] latest scientific developments, they would find it almost impossible to feed themselves let alone provide food for others.   Even so, despite the fact that agricultural efficiency and production have increased beyond the wildest dreams of great pioneers such as John Lawes and Sir Humphry Davy, people are still dying in their thousands for want of food.   Despite the fact that there is enough food produced throughout the world in any one year to supply mankind with the essentials of life for the next twenty, the bloated belly of the beggar is still a common sight in the greater part of the world.   It is not, therefore, research into agricultural production methods which is urgently needed, but research into the distribution of those products.   It is in this sphere that the great fields of ignorance lay.

But let me rein back awhile for I have digressed too far.   This letter to you was intended to be a portrait of the countryside as I have seen it during the last two months, so now let me gaze upon the pastoral scene beyond my window.   The cows have finished grazing and are lying in the meadow cudding methodically.   The sun falls upon their backs like a warm blanket and a faint breeze fans their faces.

It was nine o’clock last night that the last load was brought home.   Engines were switched off one by one across the fields and, as the evening star faded, Pegasus shimmered the in the warmth of dusk and gazed upon the southern elms.   As the last sheaf was laid upon the stack, the year ended, our year, that is.   George stood, hands on hips.   Harry leaned upon his pitchfork.   Alf and Arthur sat upon the trailer and Jim stood with one foot upon the wheel hub.   In silence they gazed at the stack, each man with his own thoughts, each man reaping his own spiritual harvest.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

chimney wormhole: the missing chord // the now-silent seagull
clouds & identity & time & wind wormhole: travelling // arrival
green wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
grey wormhole: for / the first time
hills & valley wormhole: volcanic rock
morning wormhole: forgotten anything
poetry wormhole: Pilot 125 … // … being excursion in the interludes
rain wormhole: when the rain has settled / the dust
silence wormhole: without any buffet at all
sun wormhole: is this it // all the time
thought & writing wormhole: Christmas 2015
trees wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
windows wormhole: river
work wormhole: I am not yet ready

 

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I am not yet ready

03 Saturday Feb 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2016, 5*, career, confession, eyes, faces, fracture, indentity, Luton, mouth, passing, people, Refuge, responsibility, university, work

                in the university reception
                I cannot Take Refuge while
                fractured from those around

                and those who pass, their
                faces about their work and
                identity, already persed

                beside their mouth my eyes
                trying to make the devastating
                confession for which I suspect

                I am not yet ready

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

career wormhole: after all
eyes & people & work wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
faces wormhole: ‘God, who am I …?’
identity wormhole: lack of center
mouth & passing wormhole: two profiles
university wormhole: reading // unstirred

 

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green and / luminant / to behold

02 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

2012, 5*, balance, being, breakdown, coffee, communication, diagram, distance, ears, eyes, father, fingers, fracture, gardening, gathering, glass, green, holiday, home, listening, looking, luminous, people, school, service station, society, suit, summer, table, talking, terrace, thinking, thumb, woman, work

                                first day summer
                                holiday service station
                                100 miles away from
                                home thinking I
                                don’t fit in with the
                                way things
                                are played

                always looking
                                fractured
                                cracked
                                                from in at the side

                                green and
                                luminant
                                to behold

                                on the terrace
                                two businessmen sit
                                with ledgers coffees
                                the woman listening

                to one
                                                to the other

                                agreeing
                                the diagram
                                on the table

                                the elder sits back
                                dark suit large ear
                                plump throat tanned
                                skin upturned hand
                                emphasising gently
                                beside the diagram
                                thumb to fingers

                slightly gathering
                                like a father
                                                like a gardener

                                occasionally
                                talking with
                                still young
                                green eyes

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

balance wormhole: ‘still …’
breakdown & society wormhole: after all
coffee & woman & work wormhole: Pilot 125 … // … being excursion in the interludes
communication wormhole: Infantino KO
eyes wormhole: two profiles
father wormhole: looking ahead
glass & people wormhole: the silent night of the Batman
green & looking & thinking wormhole: Batgirl –
holiday wormhole: when the rain has settled / the dust
listening wormhole: buttercups
school wormhole: step
table wormhole: immeasurable love
talking wormhole: and // do your ears burn red?

 

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Pilot 125 … // … being excursion in the interludes

21 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

2015, 6*, adjustment, apricot, closed, coffee, contact, dancing, David Lynch, death, Donna, eyes, face, feeling, fir, girder, happiness, home, life, looking, poetry, relationship, release, shift, story, Twin Peaks, woman, work

Animation: Korey Daunhauer

                Pilot 125 …

                circular saws twist
                and sink to their jagged work

                tattered thighs stagger
                between girders – eyes closed over constant face

                … there was
                a death but the Douglass Firs shifted

                behind counters and
                coffee and Donna just felt … happy

                as all sorts of turns
                adjusted; death is the release of looking

                that is held too long –
                always the Douglass Firs need to shift – looking

                too far ahead
                is the death of contact and relationship –

                the fan revolves
                in the empty stairwell; looking back into the lens

                for existence is everlasting
                and beautiful death; sweat on the plough is

                far bigger than cabin
                and home where only the women have poetry

                plumes rise
                like cold apricot flesh

                cascades spread
                in chapters while everyone learns to dance the Moose Horn

                … being excursion in the interludes

 

… of intial episodes of the first season of Twin Peaks: this reading will require experience of being seen

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

apricot wormhole: faintly apricot air?
coffee & death wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
dancing wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Precious Moment
eyes wormhole: immeasurable love
fir wormhole: fine droplets / across the glass
life wormhole: amid
looking wormhole: Bexhill 140215
poetry wormhole: over-pink cagoule
woman wormhole: the evening
work wormhole: breathing through hypnagogia

 

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… Mark; remember …

"... the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe to find ashes." ~ Annie Dillard

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