A place where ...

A community space, in the gallery of the Richard Jefferies Museum, where art will be zoomed into YouTube with Babycham, cheese and pineapple, psychedelia, You (as in Tube) and Hilda in one form or another. Sit and read poetry, talk about poetry, write poetry, and perform in front of your friends to the background music of Leo Sayer. Or sit and draw, read anything you like to a selection of 70s hits or the Sound of Silence. This is a project of Poetry Swindon and the Richard Jefferies Museum Trust.

Sunday 14 February 2016

"Their ears have mice and mice have holes."

"Their ears have mice and mice have holes." Charles Simic.

70s lounges should always include a visit from a Bagpus mouse belonging to poet Elinor Brooks. Janie mouse is as old as the lounge and fitted in a Babycham glass perfectly. 


"When will the lounge be open to the public?" asks Elinor.

    "Mice have holes," I replied. "And so does this lounge." 

(?)

    Imagine the above is a mouse hole. I will need to solve this. 

    When am I free to open up the lounge? I am never free, but always open. None of this answers Elinor's question but here's some photos of Janie just to distract her for a few days while I think about the request. 

Janie in Babycham glass
Janie on the couch by disco ball
Janie on the Teasmade hoping for 'Tea Now'
Janie sat by Insurgent Art and David Bowie.'If only those glasses would fit and I could move those bottles .... heave, heave ..."



    If you would like to read the full poem, 'Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites' by Charles Simic, please go to the Poetry Foundation website here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171691 

"It’s that hum in your left ear, 
A sigh coming from deep within you"






1 comment:

  1. This is probably one of the most relevant poems to our present (very thin slice)of history. "Because the stones haven’t said their last word". Precisely. And I was just reading about "All that bloody meat traveling under the saddles of nomads ...". We know about this first through Rabbi Judah the Pious Bar Samuel, in turn reporting first-hand accounts of Rabbi Petachia of Ratisbon, who crossed the River Dnieper some time in the twelfth century into the land of Kedar. There he found people who ate no bread, "but rice and millet boiled in milk, as well as mikk and cheese. They also put pieces of flesh under the saddle of a horse, which they ride, and, urging on the animal, cause it to sweat. The flesh getting warm, they eat it.". (Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages: 19 Firsthand Accounts, ed. Elkan Nathan Adler, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1987, p. 65. Petachia's own witness says that "They only travel in the land of Kedar under escort". They live in tents and "teach their daughters lamentation". "The dogs also whine and bark at their voice". Worth taking note of, I think.

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