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Showing posts with label Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Life. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Hard slog works

Poems in Holy Week

With the third poem written, I think that I can claim that there is a sequence growing along this particular theme.  I like the discipline of having to produce a poem a day I further like the self-imposed necessity of trying to develop a sense of questioning that I think the Week itself demands.
            The latest poem called Life (there’s a title as a hostage to fortune!) can be found at http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es and I welcome comments on the poem itself and on the developing theme – if there is one!
            Thanks to Ceri for his comments via email: I found them challenging, encouraging and stimulating.  Who can ask for more?  Me.
            I both dread and welcome tomorrow, as I am duty bound to write another poem.  At this moment I have no idea about what I might write – which is exactly the state of worried anticipation that I like!

Sun

I was able to lie out in the sun for a few short minutes.  It was probably longer than that, but the greed with which I view the sun also means that I worry about each ‘wasted’ minute that I am not out in it.  I am always trying to gain minutes to hold in reserve against those ‘brightly dull’ days that I find so antagonizing.
            It cannot be gainsaid that we are moving towards summer.  This is an article of faith for me and I echo the fatal words at the end of Ibsen’s Ghosts, ‘Mother, give me the sun!’ though I hasten to add that I say them in an altogether happier state of mind than the unfortunate young man in Scandinavia!
            I am, at present, a sickly pale colour (for me) and I look forward with glee to increasing my supply of vitamin D!

Logic

This is a week of holiday.  I know that not everyone, or even the majority of the population is able to down tools and enjoy, but it is an official holiday period.  People, as it were, go on holiday.  They visit cities, world famous cities, like, for example Barcelona.
            Then, why is it that the rate for a room just off the Ramblas in the centre of the city of Barcelona costs less than it has done for the last six months?  Where, pray, is the logic in that price?
            When, as far as I could tell, little or nothing was going on to bring people to the city, the price of the room that I usually have for the opera suddenly shot up to over sixty euros!  Now, it is twenty-five – including breakfast!
            In a similar way, when I cycled back from my swim (see Poems in Holy Week above) I had to thread my way through a system of cones which blocked roads to the beach because today, during a week of holidays when people might thing about coming to the beach, the powers that be decided to refresh the paint on the road markings.  Today?  Why today and not last week, when there were no, for example, holidays to complicate traffic flow?
            And finally and most crushingly, why do people vote for PP in Spain when it has been shown that they are demonstrably corrupt and criminal and inept?
            Perhaps the answers to these conundrums are to be found in the fact that mere logic is not enough and that we need poets to explain the world to the world!

Food, reasonably priced food!

At long last we have tried the menu del dia in my local swimming pool restaurant.  I am not sure that Toni has added it to his blog yet, but it will be there in the next few days.  Visit http://catalunyaplacetoeat.blogspot.com.es as Toni is constantly updating his blog and making it more and more exhaustive.  We still have a long, long was to go before we eat our way through the restaurants of Castelldefels, but we are enjoying doing the fieldwork.
            We are also looking forward to the ruta de tapa, when 40 or more restaurants compete to produce the best tapa in the city.  For a cost of about €3 you get the tapa and a drink of your choice.  We will have to plan this eatathon with military precision if we are to visit all the establishments.

Barcelona


Tomorrow another horrible bus ride to the city to make the meeting with my fellow members of the Barcelona Poetry Group all the more pleasant.  I must remember to take my computer with me if I am to keep up my poem-a-day approach to this week.