A new poem on my poetry blog Coronets For Ghosts. Written the morning after.
The Storm Moves Out pale violet the storm moves out to sea I look for signs in the arranged debris montage of a divine hand the swamped streets bring the latest obsession my way string-of-beads prophecies in the forest of home glass wreckage embryo shards a priest blesses specimen jars sending kisses into sleep ©AndrewJamesMurray
A new poem from my poetry blog, inspired by a misheard announcement when traveling on a train across the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, from Leeds to Manchester.
Mytholmroyd The tin voice announced the place as we pulled into the station. I, soon to have my ears syringed, thought it said "Ladies and gentlemen: Marilyn Monroe." I halfexpected to see her sashaying down the aisle of the train, all shimmering platinum between plush, navy blue seats. Wouldn't that have been a sight for a Thursday morning? Not only a Hollywood star, but fifty-five years dead to boot. ©AndrewJamesMurray
I’ve decided to create a new blog which will contain nothing but poetry.
Fear not, City Jackdaw will go on as normal, featuring the usual mix of various subjects. (And there will still be poetry featured on Jackdaw, too, from time to time.)
But the new blog will be solely for my poems. New ones; old ones; complete ones and works in progress.
The title of the blog is Coronets For Ghosts, taken from a line in one of my poems. For those of you who want to check out my newborn babe, you will find her here:
https://coronetsforghosts.wordpress.com
I hope you will continue to fly with City Jackdaw, too.
Salted Maybe there are choices to be made the cawing crow doesn't seem conflicted undisturbed by harbingers of the future I will roll up the hill drift out to sea taste the salt on my tongue a seasoning to keep me for tomorrow ©AndrewJamesMurray #workinprogress
I spent the morning finishing The Innocents by Ian McEwan.
I felt a great sadness when reading a letter contained within it, suggestive of other lives and other alternatives.
Literature, art, has the power to do this.
I find myself more and more subsumed into the creative life.
I’m currently on the second draft of a novel. I’m not a very disciplined writer. I don’t put aside set times to write. I just decide to go over a chapter when I have a window in time. Although this may seem a quite casual approach, from crude, rudimentary beginnings the book is beginning to take shape.
And yet, amidst this deliberate foray into fiction, poetry is beginning to call to me again. I have long had an eye on a second collection. Not one to multitask, I intended to turn to this after the completion of my novel. But words are beginning to nudge their way in, filter through. Single words, combinations of words, predatory lines demanding attention.
Inspiration doesn’t pay respect to timeframes and schedules.
I have a few new poems written: Judas Kiss, Boathouse, My Father As Child, In Brigantia and others. I’ve not posted much poetry recently on City Jackdaw as I’m holding them back for a possible next collection.
At the moment I’m still deliberating the order of my creative endeavours. My procrastination was given a nudge recently when I received a letter in the post from a great writer and poet that I gave a name check to in the foreword of my debut collection Heading North. Now in his 81st year and still as creative as ever, he wished me luck on my own foray on this open and crafted path.
This path of conjured words, and alternative worlds, that exist long after the demise of their creator.
Seven Winds The seven winds. Are there seven? Stapling 'Missing' posters to telegraph poles sweaty black leather and the odorous stink of sex and B.O. A slip with a girl's number on it found in the pocket of an old coat ragged and threadbare could she still be out there? a fixed point in a perishing dream. Coffee. Caffeine doesn't keep you awake it's a myth it's the toilet trips that need to piss every goddamned hour slipping through the tincture of light that crawls from the horizon with a Kirlian glow. There are friends long gone who festered for a while couldn't take the hint but maybe I was their project grasping for words as the dying gasp for breath carving my affections instead into the flesh of trees. ©AndrewJamesMurray
Poetry is when
the language of the soul
escapes into
the common tongue.
©Andrew James Murray
