44. three poems from 1982

I recently discovered my creative diary from 1982, when I was 23 years of age – I’m now closing in on 61. It was a very strange feeling, and a little disturbing,  to meet my younger brain. I had completely forgotten about the poems, short stories and a three-voiced play I wrote in this book, and was surprised to learn that my poetic style seems not to have changed much at all.

I present three poems from the diary. The first should be self explanatory, but a little background might be of interest. My mother had died some time before (my father had died some years earlier) and I hitchhiked and got the ferry over to Ireland, where my father’s mother and mother’s father were from, eventually landing in Dublin.

Sound file reading:

 

The next was written in St Stephen’s Green, Dublin:

 

Sound file reading:

 

The last is a little more obscure. Harr is a Scots word for a sea mist, which often skirts coastal areas and the minds of the inhabitants. My mind was playing with Joyce-isms, and I remember my mother’s singing. The last two stanzas were written on the ferry boat, where I closed my eyes while in the hull, with water all around me, and my mother came to mind again.

 

Sound file reading:

 

The diary ends with me listing the tracks of a classical-guitar album I borrowed from Dundee Central Library. It seems a new obsession had come into my life. I went on to study at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, eventually becoming a Lecturer in Lute and Guitar there for seven years or so, at which point I realised I was wasting my time, and left.

It was 37 years before I started writing poetry again, and I can’t help wondering what my life would have been like had I not borrowed that guitar album from the library.

We will never know.

These three poems were set to music by Gilbert Isbin. See blog post #34.

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Typing done with an Imperial Good Companion 5