The Falling Fruit, The Certain Spring

"Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion."
~ D. H. Lawrence ~
On 14 November, my Fortnightly post --"Daffodils of Autumn" featured two seasonal songs by Adrian Henri, both dedicated to his predecessor A. E. Houseman. Yet another of Henri's autumnal poems is dedicated to modernist poet and novelist D. H. Lawrence. Henri offers an "Epilogue" to Lawrence's long poem "The Ship of Death," a ten - part extended analogy, in which Lawrence writes bleakly of death as a choppy voyage into the unknown, rounded out with the faint promise of rebirth.

Henri responds to Lawrence's poem by personifying and embracing the Dark. He dispels the fear of a long dark late autumn night with an open invitation of hospitality and in-gathering:

Epilogue
(for D. H. L.)
Autumn
and leaves swirl at the roadside
splatter on windscreens
summer hopes gone
fears for the dark
the long night ahead
light ebbing to the slow horizon

"Autumn,
The falling fruit,
The long journey,"

Prepare for the dark
O bring it home with you
tuck it into bed
welcome him into your hearth
into your heart
the familiar stranger at the evening fireside

Wind howls in the trees
and toads curl into beds of leaves
night moves into day
moths into velvet
hedges brown with dying willow-herb

Open your door to the dark
the evening snow drift in unheeded
light dies from the sky
gather the stranger close on the pillow

seeds lie buried
safe under hedgerows
gather him to you
O gather him to you

Take the dark stranger
Cold under blankets
Gather O Gather
Alone in the darkness

Adrian Henri ~

click here to read the entire text of "The Ship of Death"
by D. H. Lawrence
and here for further analysis of the poem

and here to read my most recent essay
"The Falling Fruit, The Certain Spring"

on The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A Fortnightly [every 14th & 28th] Literary Blog of
Connection & Coincidence; Custom & Ceremony

Liverpool Daffodils

"Tonight at noon . . .
The first daffodils of autumn will appear
When the leaves fall upwards to the trees"
~ from "Tonight at Noon" ~

"Come close, my love, and tell me
April will never end
That daffodil like gorse-bush
Will last to the year's end"
~ from "Song in April" ~

To accompany the daffodil imagery of
Liverpool poet Adrian Henri,
these beautifully drawn daffodils
are from the Botany collection at the
World Museum, Liverpool.
To send as e-cards, click
HERE (L)
HERE (R)
















For more info: National Museums Liverpool
For more online museum activities: Multimedia
For more e-card selections: Museum E - Cards

For more poetry from Adrian Henri
see Daffodils of Autumn
on The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A Fortnightly [every 14th & 28th] Literary Blog of
Connection & Coincidence; Custom & Ceremony

See also my previous Adrian Henri posts:

Brush With Greatness

Holy Connection and Coincidence Batman!

Which Season: Summer or Fall?

Tonight at Noon, Equinox, Harvest Moon

Wartime Soldier, Wartime Child

Happy Batday

Wartime Soldier, Wartime Child

In observation of Veterans Day . . . # 1.
A hopeful thought from the past, hasten the day:

"Though I have been trained as a soldier,
and participated in many battles,
there never was a time when, in my opinion,
some way could not be found
to prevent the drawing of the sword.
I look forward to an epoch when a court,
recognized by all nations,
will settle international differences."
Ulysses S. Grant, 1822 - 1885
Commanding General of the United States Army, 1864 to 1865
18th President of the United States, 1869 - 1877
# 2.
I first came across the following poem just a few days after the 9 / 11 disaster, and it seemed almost uncannily appropriate in a backward - looking kind of way. It is the third section of a longer sequence entitled "Wartime Child" by Liverpool poet Adrian Henri, one of the more-quoted authors on this blog.

Blackout
It doesn't seem the same place after dark.
In the Park they've taken away the railings*
to make guns. As soon as the sun's gone down
the whole town seems changed: it's strange,
you can't tell where the pavement is.
Auntie Margaret fell over someone's bike
the other night. Only a pale blue light
from cars. Of course, you can see the stars.
We saw one once Dad said was Mars.
When there's a moon the barrage balloons
shine like silver. So that the Germans
won't know where they are, there's no names
on the stations. We can't tell, either.
It smells of steam and soldiers sleep
on kitbags. Sometimes the Yanks give us
chewing-gum. Mum says all the shops
used to be lit up, just like you see them
in America on the cinema.
It must be nice with all the lights.

*My mother-in-law Rosanne Bristow McCartney, raised in a small village outside of Liverpool, once explained to me that after all the gates and railings in the Liverpool neighborhoods had been confiscated by the army, it was discovered that they were the wrong metal to use for ammunition, so piles of beautiful old iron work were just scrapped. The homeowners never got their pieces back and just had to build up wooden replacements instead. More fruitless loss. More waste.

I hate waste!

# 3.
Last year on Armistice Day, I quoted Rhett Butler's assessment of the Civil War as it appears in Gone With The Wind. Allow me to repeat once again:

"I'm angry. Waste always makes me angry,
and that's what all this is, sheer waste."

Tonight at Noon, Equinox, Harvest Moon

Did you see it last night? The end of summer, the first of autumn, and the full moon all at once! How amazing is it for the full moon to rise in the sky directly opposite of the setting sun on the day of equinox? Well, it only happens every twenty years or so: the last "Super Harvest Moon" occurred in September 1991 and the next will be in September 2029.

However, if you missed it last night, tonight will not be too late!

Official time of Autumnal Equinox, 2010:
22 September, 11:09 pm
Eastern Daylight Time

Official time of Harvest Moon, 2010:
23 September, 5:17 am
Eastern Daylight Time

This fall, the Harvest Moon is accompanied through the night by Jupiter, sparkling vividly just to its right. Earlier in the evening, across the sky, in her usual position, you can find Venus, whom no one save Sun and Moon can ever outshine.

With the sky so near at hand, a little magic might not be unexpected!
Tonight at noon . . .
The first daffodils of autumn will appear
When the leaves fall upwards to the trees
~Adrian Henri~
Yellow Jonquils #3, by Georgia O'Keeffe

The Lawrence Tree, by Georgia O'Keeffe

Painted on a trip to the
D. H. Lawrence Ranch

Which Season: Summer or Fall?

"When the leaves fall upwards to the trees" *
Trees Cannot Name the Seasons
Trees cannot name the seasons
Nor flowers tell the time.
But when the sun shines
And they are charged with light,
They take a day-long breath.
What we call "night"
Is their soft exhalation.

And when joints creak yet again
And the dead skin of leaves falls,
Trees don't complain
Nor mourn the passing of hours.
What we call "winter"
Is simply hibernation.

And as continuation
comes to them as no surprise
They feel no need
To divide and itemize.
Nature has never needed reasons
For flowers to tell the time
Or trees put a name to the seasons.

~by Roger McGough

[This poem can be found in McGough's
book Melting into the Foreground, 1986]

***********************************

* [Photograph caption is a line borrowed
from the title poem of Adrian Henri's
book Tonight At Noon, 1969]

Holy Connection and Coincidence Batman!

"Flash your Batsign over Lime Street" ~Adrian Henri Elephants at Lime Street Station, Liverpool
"Holy Historical Circus Parade, Batman!"

This coming Friday (the 14th!)I will be putting up a new post on my Fortnightly blog, but before moving on, I have just a few more bat thoughts to share with you. Last month, the day after "Happy Batday," I was having lunch with a friend who takes a great interest in Animal Totems. She was telling me that, for several reasons, she feels that my personal totem must be the bat. I said, no, the cat; she said, no, the bat! Coincidence? At that point, I asked her if she had read my blog the day before. No she had not! Yet, coincidentally, she had identified the bat as right for me without even knowing about my interest in the batpoems.

Batman is just one step removed from an actual bat, and the batpoems are just one step removed from Batman. Two degrees of separation? I guess that's pretty close! Upon returning home from lunch that day, I opened my laptop, and the first thing I saw on my facebook was this picture, posted by my nephew Daniel, along with the caption: "Holy Bat Brush, Batman!"


Coincidence? I wrote to Dan right away to find out. No, he said, he had not yet seen the Bat Blog! As a helpful gesture, I sent him the link, and can you guess what word popped up in the security check box: "Robyn." No kidding!

Later that evening, while reading Elif Batuman's amazing memoir of her years as a graduate student in Russian Literature (The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and The People Who Read Them), I came across the following short poem in translation:

Was it my heart -- a bird -- that was caught in your
locks that unfortunate night,
Or was it bats of some kind?

~Alisher Navoi, 1441 - 1501
Poet, Statesman, and Founder of Uzbek Literature
At this point, I was beginning to hear the Call of the Wild and decided it was time to do a little batground* reading. I googled Animal Totems to see what more I could learn about the Bat. Some of the things I read spoke straight to my heart.Turns out that the bat, although a misunderstood and unnecessarily feared animal, is a great Totem to have on your side, a symbol of energy, vision, and social connectedness.
". . . someday,
we would feel the motion of our thought
beating as softly as the wings of a bat."
from the story
"O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing"
in The Kneeling Bus (p 100)
by Beverly Coyle
I like it that the Bat is a verbally oriented animal totem who encourages you to tell a new story about yourself and your life, to relinquish all the old fearful narratives that are no longer representative of your spiritual growth. The Bat is a totem of transition and rebirth, a truth - seeker with an unwavering agenda of self - exploration, including:

Dying to our ego
Loving our enemies as ourselves
Going within to touch our inner demons
Exploring the underworlds of reality (which can be scary)
Renewing our thoughts & beliefs on a moment-to-moment basis

Moment to moment?

Every, every minute . . .

The Bat it is.

Original Bat Blog: Happy Batday
on THE FORTNIGHTLY KITTI CARRIKER
my fortnightly literary blog
of connection and coincidence

P.S. *Batground* Thanks to Gerry for inspiring this new term!
P.S.S. Not to mention the spelling of Elif's Batuman's last name:

BAT - u - MAN!
Tennessee Bats

Brush With Greatness

Not quite sure

how I got on a

middle - name - basis

with the Liverpool Poets;

but nice to have a

small collection of

autographed copies,

nonetheless!



Click below to hear

a reading of

Henri's classic poem

"Tonight at Noon":

sad

hopeful

beautiful

hopeless


Tonight at Noon

Tonight at noon
Supermarkets will advertise 3p extra on everything
Tonight at noon
Children from happy families will be sent to live in a home
Elephants will tell each other human jokes
America will declare peace on Russia
World War I generals will sell poppies on the street on
November 11th
The first daffodils of autumn will appear
When the leaves fall upwards to the trees

Tonight at noon
Pigeons will hunt cats through city backyards
Hitler will tell us to fight on the beaches and on the landing fields
A tunnel full of water will be built under Liverpool
Pigs will be sighted flying in formation over Woolton
And Nelson will not only get his eye back but his arm as well
White Americans will demonstrate for equal rights
In front of the Black house
And the monster has just created Dr. Frankenstein

Girls in bikinis are moonbathing
Folksongs are being sung by real folk
Art galleries are closed to people over 21
Poets get their poems in the Top 20
There's jobs for everybody and nobody wants them
In back alleys everywhere teenage lovers are kissing
in broad daylight
In forgotten graveyards everywhere the dead will quietly
bury the living
and
You will tell me you love me
Tonight at noon

--Adrian Henri

For more on Liverpool Poets: Henri, McGough & Patten
see post for April 28, 2010

on my blog of literary connection and coincidence
THE FORTNIGHTLY KITTI CARRIKER