Nostalgia for a new year
Well I ought to be ashamed to show my face here. Those advent poems were a vanishing mist and I shan't make anymore promises.
The time has passed for excuses for such a thing and since I have returned January has been searingly hot (41 degrees celsius today) and it is difficult to impel oneself onwards towards anything in my un-airconditioned home.
I am trying to persevere with a new year clean-out (I read Marie Kondo's book late in 2017, so I was ahead of the trend on that one!), but today that was limited to a box of old letters and cards. Oh my! It became overwhelming rummaging through it, and there is another suitcase yet to come, but I sorted out all the letters from particular people and a significant pile of them came from one dear old friend, who still writes me and always includes a poem or two.
It seemed fitting, both to that friend and to the task, to begin with this poem that she once wrote to me (I've posted it here before in 2012 I discover, but that also is in keeping with the subject of the poem), which describes my afternoon:
Nostalgia
Like a ship in the sand
The days have moved slowly
But one never leaves land.
Dreams gather in black books:
Coiled spaces, mixed up parables,
Out of which looks
The soul as it reads time.
I travel the whole world
With an uncomplicated rhyme.
I feast in dreams and fast in life;
It seems that dreams transfigure strife.
So I send messages to my future
Within a murky paradigm.
Out at sea there are many rocks
I encounter before they are due;
Sleep resolves them in paradox.
Only in the present are things true.
Not even the future will last.
Nostalgia’s a flower sent to the past.
Ben Okri
Happy 2019 to you all, and I may or may not be back :).