A bunch of Christmas Thoughts 2020 Dec 5th

Always gallows humour in our family 

Lard-arses of the world unite

your Christmas puddings set alight

lift the spoon slowly to your chops

stay well clear of the Christmas shops

Hark the Herald angels sing

you have to die of some damned thing!

 

A bunch of Christmas Thoughts 2020 Dec 4th -- Window Dressing

 And still on the theme of shopping, it is upsetting to see so many stores going to the wall these days, some through the negligence of greedy owners though it will all be blamed on Covid 19 and they will undoubtedly move on with their money intact whilst thousands of their employees face a grim Christmas to come. In a truly robust economy, in a society that had the wellbeing of its people at the core instead of the wealth of just a few, Covid 19 would not have wrought the economic damage it has and still will. 

I can only echo Shelley's Masque of Anarchy from within my Covid mask.

But there is one store I always associated with childhood Christmases, toys, sweeties and more. It was always lit up and Christmas, shelves full of everything under the sun, dreaming of white and having a merry time. I remember the smell of the wooden floors and the pick&mix. Unfortunately it went bust about a decade ago and for similar reasons. We all loved it, we all needed it and I for one miss:

The Wonderful World of Woolworth

by Oonah V Joslin

We never went out without going in.
Aisles walked more religiously than church,
it was another place
to ‘not show mother up.’

Good girls got sweets.
Miss I Want, got a smack.
Once I got lost and cried.

Bobby socks for school,
pencils, colouring books,
a plastic ‘Chad Valley’ Bassett Hound that squeaked…

I bought one final thing there
just the other week
Prince Caspian. And now I can never go back.

We always got what we wanted there
a walk round Woolies
which in its day, was mammoth.

My second poem today was also published in The Pygmy Giant in 2009. This slide into economic oblivion has as you see been happening for a long time. Money remember is but a promisary note -- and when people at the top are liars, it's a false promise! 

Going with the Flow

I think you can bank on getting weird stuff

about banks going bankrupt and times getting rough

in the overall market, an underground stream

of nothing financial being quite what it seemed,

sluggishly flowing, grinding to a halt;

the little man suffers though it’s not his fault

and the rivers of mammon are all running dry

but still people follow without asking why,

dependent as sheep on a landslide they stand

with despair in the heart and a lie in their hand.

TPG 2008

A bunch of Christmas Thoughts 2020 Dec 3rd -- Making a List, Checking it Twice...

Of course there is some shopping we all have to do. Most of ours these days is done online and by delivery and I would just like to say that dairies, bakeries, butchers and grocers, the supermarket shoppers and delivery men have done us proud this year! Huge thank you to all who have come to our door bringing what we need with a cheery smile and a kind word.

To those of you who go to the supermarket in person, and especially at Christmas, my advice is that a shopping list is essential and I always make one -- although I don't always remember to take it with me and -- Well read all about it 😁 True story!

The Customer's Always Right 

Lists are my habit.

I go to the store

armed with a list

so I'm always sure

to get only the items

that I really need.

I stand in the aisle

checking my list

tick fruit, dairy, store-cupboard,

so far nothing missed;

drinks, frozen, household,

I push on with purpose

past the disarray

of others' – indecisions.

I observe them with dismay

and superior derision,

smug in my superiority of vision.

Who didn't bring a list today?

I arrive at miscellaneous,

a category I've devised

for those unaccustomed items

one occasionally buys.

I stop and stare

at the scrawl on my list.

What the hell does that say?

Am I mad?

Was I pissed?

Well – the paper is wrinkled and scruffy at this stage.

And my writing's becoming less legible with age.

And my eyesight is not what used to be.

If I put on my glasses I'll read it easily.

So I fumble my glasses onto my face and squint.

I had to need this

what-ever-it-is.

Could it be clothes prop?

or chocolate biscuits?

No the first word's too long and the second's too short

Selectable progs?

Delectable hogs?

Eclectic drops?

and I think and I squint

but I have to abort.

At the check-out the assistant asks politely

Did you get everything you wanted today?

All except for the electric frogs, I say.

Excuse me?

You don't seem to have any electric frogs!

I show her the item right there on my list.

Electric frogs, she reads. Do you know what it is?

Not a clue. I answer.

But I looked and looked and you don't have any

so I have a good mind to complain to the manager!

A bunch of Christmas Thoughts 2020 Dec 2nd -- Never the Same Old Christmas

 60 years ago, Christmas would never be the same again.

It was 1960. Our father had died in January of that year and so it was the first Christmas without him. I was 6. And I have to confess I don’t remember Christmas 1959 – so that as they say, is that.

But I do remember that Christmas, the woman next door, who never gave us presents before, came bearing gifts. Mine was a little hexagonal shaped pink plastic bottle containing rose scented bath crystals and I felt all grown up.

And I was all grown up! I had learned something very important during the course of that year and that is that no Christmas is ever the same, no year is ever the same, no day is ever the same. I’ve not always chosen to use this enlightenment wisely. At its best, it makes every day a gift. At its worst it makes life unbearably sad. In between there’s empathy. On the one hand, I don’t tend to take people for granted. On the other, I do have a tendency to keep people at a distance. Always I am thankful for the Now.

So before you rush out of lockdown to buy things you don’t really need, think about Covid and what that trip to the mall might actually cost. Stay safe. There will be other Christmases to come and I guarantee, none of them will ever be ‘the same’.

This Christmas will not be the same

as other Christmases have been;

accustomed dinner, same bright tree,

the usual drivel on TV

no extended family,

just thee and me,

glad to be here

as every year.

This temporary discontent

created by the media

rapacious grasping for more things

in case we think of birth or death.

So many people lost this year.

Carolling a waste of breath.

In silent night, I breathe a prayer

for the innocent.

No Christmas is the same

as other Christmases have been.

© Oonah V Joslin 2020

A bunch of Christmas Thoughts 2020 Dec 1st -- I Light a Candle

 We tend to eat by candlelight during December. Usually I buy one of those with the days marked off, to burn down each evening. It never really works all that well. Either the candle burns too quickly or too slowly. This year I didn't get a candle because I haven't been shopping as such. But I have a little glass Christmas Tree behind which I can place a tealight and I am using that on our table this year. 

It's strange how many useless traditions we observe regarding Christmas, as if it is more than one day, as if it's all about food, as if it is all about  (eherm) the economy! This is how we have been conditioned to think. There are so many gifts we can give that are worth so much more. Clothes we don't need to charities, food to the foodbanks, some time, a smile, a laugh, a poem. This year nearly all my gifts were masks to protect my friends and loved ones. The money will be helping a charity. And it's the nearest thing to a hug I can give them. They all know I don't like hugs anyway. 

I Light a Candle

I light a candle.

There’s no need

except a desire for flickering

warmth and dancing fire.

I light a candle;

watch the primal

space that is infra-red

with scientific detachment.

My candle is not tallow

spermaceti or beeswax

but a hydrocarbon

by-product of ocean-bed long dead;

not very romantic,

not very devotional.

I will mark off

feast days in candle hours

invest festive emotion

into each illumination;

invoke times past

and eke the darks days out

with thoughts of

loved ones gone

and loved ones far

and near. Year on year

I light a candle.

There’s no need

except the heart’s deep yearning

for some ancestral hearth.

November 2020 -- A whole Heap of Other Stuff -- No4 -- All Saints to Armistice

My 2018 editorial from 'The Sorrow'   which is a beautiful collectable issue of The Linnet's Wings and would make someone a lovely gift of words and images.

On “Everyone Sang”: Editorial by Oonah V Joslin

Everyone Sang

by Siegfried Sassoon

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away ... O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Has it ever happened to you? A spontaneous combustion of song? It has to me and I have never forgotten the wonder of that experience. We were a family of singers, and maybe that’s part of why love this poem. But as I became more familiar with it, I was struck more and more by an essence it embodies. I’ll call it ‘birdness’.

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, it was an accustomed thing that communal singing took place. The men in the trenches would have sung around a piano at home or in the pub, sung marching songs in training, and popular songs like Pack Up Your Troubles and of course hymns in church. Church attendance was high. Belief in God and Country walked hand in hand. It was only natural then, they should sing to lift their spirits and Siegfried Sassoon would have been familiar with this so:

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

probably really happened at some point. On the face of it, this is a simple statement of joy, and the poem reads almost as an armistice celebration taking place on the battlefield, but it is not that. “Everyone Sang” is dated 12/4/19.

On 13 July 1918, Sassoon was wounded by friendly fire near Arras. As a result, he spent the remainder of the war in England. The poem plays to an audience of people celebrating the end of the war and a return to normal life but there is something much rarer, more poignant, more telling in this poem.

Before the war he led a fairly privileged life. He left Cambridge without a degree. He had a small private income. He liked to write poetry. In A Mystic as Soldier he says:

I lived my days apart, 
Dreaming fair songs for God; 

not of God but for God, mind you. He believed in God and Country and took his beliefs as seriously as any other. The war changed all that. It made him question what happened to ‘love thine enemy’ (Matt 5).

Now God is in the strife,
And I must seek Him there, 
Where death outnumbers life, 
And fury smites the air. 

Men on all sides were fighting, killing each other for God and Country and that didn’t make sense. In Siegfried Sassoon’s Diaries 1915-1918 he asks:

“The agony of France! The agony of Austria-Hungary and Germany! Are not those equal before God?”

By now he’d served at The Somme, seen men mown down, witnessed the carnage on both sides, lost his brother and a best friend to this war. We see him sometimes tread a fine line between prayer and blasphemy in To Any Dead Officer and again in Attack:

O Christ when will it stop?

O, Jesus make it stop!

Siegfried Sassoon was a good soldier – rather reckless in fact. He was decorated for bravery. Yet Sassoon ended up questioning everything he had been brought up to believe in. This was slaughter on the grand scale, sanctioned by church and state, and he could not reconcile it, and it pained him. Being an officer he dared not speak of this. It would have demoralised the men and he cared deeply about the men. He expresses this frustration in the third stanza of Mystic as a Soldier:

I walk the secret way 
With anger in my brain.

That anger eventually burst forth when he published his very open protest in The Times newspaper July 1917 which was subsequently read out in parliament.

“I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.”

“I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insecurities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.”

Sassoon was aware of the consequences of an officer issuing this statement. True, he had been encouraged in this by Bertrand Russell and the Bloomsbury set but he was not a pacifist and he was no coward. At this point he felt he could no longer be silent and for this he might face court martial and pay the ultimate penalty. His friend and fellow poet, Robert Graves intervened to save his skin, persuading the authorities that Sassoon was suffering from shell shock, and so he was sent to Craiglockhart Castle near Edinburgh for ‘treatment’ in the hope that, after a period of reflection, he might be persuaded to retract. He was not suffering from shell shock. However in that place he was surrounded by many men who were. Many suffered from severe speech impediments or mutism due to the condition. These were men who, through extreme trauma, had lost the ability to communicate or voice their distress. They literally had been silenced by horror. Their fears had been rendered wordless. It was ironic that Sassoon faced the stark choice, in this setting, to stand by his statement and take the consequences, or to affirm that he was suffering from a mental condition, censor himself and his protest, and return to active service, seemingly cured. It was made clear to him by psychiatrist Dr Rivers, whom he admired, that neither of these courses would be of benefit to the troops on whose behalf he’d lodged the protest. Either way he would be silenced. This and the thought of skipping out of a battle, made him question his own motives.

It was ironic too that it was whilst at Craiglockhart he met Wilfred Owen and they became friends. Sassoon became his mentor and encouraged him in his poetry and in many ways gave us one of the greatest voices of all the war poets. Owen went back to active duty and so did he. Though he still thought it futile, he very much wished to acquit himself well in this war. When Owen was killed Sassoon tirelessly promoted his work.

Another irony is that it was only through Wilfred Owen that I for one, came to Siegfried Sassoon. How many other voices were silenced forever by that war? We’ll never know.

The final line of Mystic as Soldier says:

O music through my clay, 
When will you sound again?

‘through my clay’ has interesting sociological and religious connotations. For many war dead there would be no grave. They were lost in the field. How could they then ‘rise again’ according to Christian belief? After that war, attitudes towards cremation drastically changed. The logic could not be tolerated that men who fought for their country would be lost forever to God!

Sassoon answers his question at last, in Everyone Sang. He said that the poem ‘came to him’ and certainly Graves and others didn’t regard it as very good poetry, perhaps a little naive. But when a poem ‘comes’ to a poet, it doesn’t just appear out of a blank page and a blank mind. It comes from somewhere deep within and is informed by an evolved sensibility of expression. It is honed by experience. In this case the essence of birdness began in the innocence and birdsong of his Kent childhood (you can trace birds and music through many of his poems) and culminated post war, in this sudden chorus, a release of all the sorrow, joy and passionate anger brought on by such waste of life. It is a poem about making voices heard.

First of all the song lifts his spirits:

I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly

Here were men who longed to fly away, home to their loved ones, away from danger, sickening fear and the horrors of war. They were caught up in a situation they could not escape. Death was a release. The landscape of ‘white orchards’ like Eden and ‘dark fields’ Sassoon speaks of is reminiscent of his childhood Kent, but here it emblematic. Heaven was home and the battlefields were darker than Hell. In death this struggle between light and dark is left behind and so in the song, which lifts the spirits of the living and raises the dead. One can almost see a vast host of souls soaring together heavenward:

on - on - and out of sight

still singing.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

The military day ends with the bugle call, Sunset also known as Retreat. In the trenches there was little respite, or sleep even at night and Sassoon was known for his night raids. They all longed for rest and the final retreat. When Sassoon writes,

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away …

despite the punctuation here, as a page poem one sees tears; and horror on the same line and it echoes his 1917 statement: I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops. For no good reason, they had drifted into war and now seemingly drifted out of it.

Sassoon came from an anglo-catholic and Jewish background. He was familiar with the bird as sacrifice. And when he says:

O, but Everyone

Was a bird;

He truly means ‘Everyone’ which is why he uses a capital letter. Men on all sides had been sacrificed in, in his opinion, an ‘evil and unjust’ war and he asks:

“Did Christ not die for these as well?”

the living and the dead, Irish, Scots, Welsh and English, French, Indian, Belgian, Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, German...

and the song was wordless;

of course. Which language would represent them all? How could the dead speak? How could those who’d lost the ability to speak be heard? What language can describe the horrors of that war? Many who served never spoke of it to anyone. Language is wholly inadequate. The song must be wordless. But he says:

the singing will never be done.

I don’t think it’s just the heavenly choir, Sassoon refers to here though that is certainly there. To sing like a bird also means telling it like it is.

Sassoon had been effectively gagged by the war office in 1917 and now that the war was at an end, he thought the truth would out! History would examine the causes and outcomes of that war. The horror and suffering would be revealed and never be forgotten. He made sure Wilfred Owen was not forgotten. Of course Siegfried Sassoon was delighted that the war was over but he was also eager that Everyone should now be heard so he gave them all a voice in Everyone Sang. Out of the birdness, after all has been swept away, rises this poem, a symbol of peace, a beacon of freedom, a protest against futility. And yes, that war brought about sea-changes in society and in religion but 100 years on, I think there is still little criticism of the conduct of that war, the 'political errors' of which Sassoon wrote, nor acknowledgement of the pity of it. Four years ago a rash of programmes were aired about beginning of WW1 but since then they’ve all gone quiet. WW11 seems to have taken precedence. Best not to dwell on the futility and carnage, I suspect -- lest we remember. This was a politician's war and had nothing to do with the people who did the fighting and dying but the establishment always closes ranks to maintain power. One will always need people who are prepared to fight.

In November this year all the so called great and good will show up, sombrely attired, at the cenotaph but with no apology on their lips for those who died unnecessarily and brutally one hundred years ago in a cause that was not their own. No anti-war poems will be read. There will be no thought for those who, for the rest of their lives, saw before their waking eyes, the dismembered and dead. Who will bend an ear for the silenced voices? Will there be sorrow for the spinsters and widows made or the unborn of a generation of craftsmen, doctors, artists and poets unmade? No. It will be a celebration of patriotic duty. And

“The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori”

that Owen and Sassoon and many others so hated, will be perpetuated. The establishment is as it ever was, willing to sacrifice people to its own ends whilst we... we twitter, we tweet but do we sing? Siegfried Sassoon was fond of this poem that ‘came to him’ in April 1917. He read it out often. It came from a place inside him, deep as death. It sprang from a well of profound and long held melancholy and horror and it sang “through his clay”. How could it do otherwise? And if anyone reads it aloud this November, mistaking it for what it is not, it will be because Siegfried Sassoon was a clever man and a great poet and I will smile and say:

Siegfried, this one’s for you.

Oonah

I would like to thank James Graham for his helpful comments and input to this editorial.

I found “Siegfried Sassoon A BIOGRAPHY” Max Egremont (2005) Picador: ISBN 978-1-4472-4328-1 very useful in providing background information for this essay.

                                                      BUY THE SORROW

November 2020 -- A whole Heap of Other Stuff -- No3 -- All Saints to Armistice

Two poems for you: 'We will remember them.'

“No words of mine can soften the blow. There is one consolation for you - your daughter became unconscious immediately after she was hit, and she passed away perfectly peacefully.” - From the letter written by matron Minnie Wood to the parents of staff nurse Nellie Spindler, 1917.

Women of Passchendaele

For the Passchendaele nurse there was no drill,

no readiness for what she must confront

trying to keep her uniform pristine

negotiating boards from tent to tent

she saw the soldier, half his face blown off,

looked on him as might mother, sister, wife

she dragged him from a shell hole still alive

and gave him sips of water ‘til he died

one day she was a surgeon in the field

the next she scribed a diary for the dead

her knees would not stop trembling but her hand

wrote words of consolation to his kin

unconscious moments after the blast

she passed away peacefully at the last

First published in The Linnet's Wings THE SORROW  2018 WWI Centenary Issue 

Men of Passchendaele
 
See, the flood flows under a crazy moon
and warps the planks we laid across the mud.
Eyes loom perpetual, watery in the gloom
beneath the stars amid the smell of blood.

Tree stumps like empty signposts yield
nothing; but stand like sentries at hell's door.
Entrenched, abandoned in the field
our hopes that wars should be no more.

We trample the knowledge that death is unkind.
Life is the next cigarette and a hard won mile.
Impervious now to shellfire, eyes forever blind
meet ours that cannot weep and cannot smile.

First Published in Bewildering Stories Issue 741: 2018