Starvation and sunshine sit side by side

Poems that want to be written

Hello friends,

Apologies that this post didn’t come out on Sunday, as usual. I am playing a bit of catch up after school holidays.

I’m sure like many others, I am also struggling with how the beauty I’m so lucky to be experiencing in the world, sits alongside the heartbreak and horror.

I scrolled through Instagram yesterday and smiled at such happy photos of my friends on holiday, having fun with their families, before not ten seconds later finding myself in tears reading about the Freedom Flotilla Madleen and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The two things make my head and heart ache. How can such events be occurring at the same time on the same planet? How can my mind adjust to this reality?

The fact is it can’t and it shouldn’t. To accept this reality is the very last thing we should be doing. If your heart feels like it’s breaking right now, I’m with you, and I think it’s supposed to.

Which doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy times with our families, that we can’t still experience and share happy moments, and look after our mental health. That we can’t still do our work and make our art. The latter is so very important. Joy, wherever we are able to find it right now, is so very essential.

But in my head, I have a line between these things being true and these things being a comfort blanket for lack of action. You know? I have to keep this in check. It’s easy to look away when things become too hurtful or scary but that is such a privilege. Likewise, no one benefits when you become so overwhelmed that you have to shut down. Or decide not to write about anything at all, because everything seems so pointless and insignificant in the face of what is happening in the world. I think about this a lot; boundaries, self-awareness, privilege, being a useful ally, how beauty still seems to exist despite the very worst of the world.

(I almost deleted this whole post for fear that I might get it wrong in writing about privilege. The irony! The privilege involved in even being able to ‘worry’ that I might get it wrong in writing about privilege.)

I do not believe that we were made for this level of ongoing catastrophe, our nervous systems aren’t cut out for it, our bodies are too heart-led to be hardened. As creatives, we practise opening ourselves up even wider which is both a blessing and a curse. There’s a line in a poem I wrote a while back which reads, “like we weren’t designed to love.” I believe that we were 100% designed to love. Therefore, of course so many of us are are feeling devastated currently, in so many ways. And of course therefore we want to keep on creating, in just as many ways. Now more than ever. Because creating art is an act of love.

I have to believe more people are good than aren’t. That more people are taking action in their own ways, than aren’t. Honestly, when it comes to World Leaders right now, this is a hard stance to keep up. But ultimately, we answer only to our own consciences, we can only attend to and act in line with our own morals, consider our own capacities and also, how we are of most use to the world.

One (there are others) of the ways I know I need to turn up is via my words. If I am a writer, if words are my way to create change in the world, then I must write about the stuff that matters to me. In this I am flawed (as we are all uniquely flawed). Sometimes I can’t find a way onto the page. I have also written poems that I haven’t posted because I didn’t feel were up to scratch. About climate change that I’ve saved for later (erm, once the world has fully burned?) These are poems that wanted to be written.

You always hope that a well-written poem will gain more traction - maybe more empathy or more awareness for a cause you feel so deeply about, amongst other things. So of course you edit hundreds of times (and over-think?) and desperately want to get it right. That’s natural and valuable.

But, when I become too scared of getting it wrong or decide to keep words to myself, that’s my ego getting involved. Again, what privilege. No one gives a shit if what I write about genocide is ‘good enough.’ It only matters that I speak up.

It only matters that I keep on writing when I feel I have something to say, keep speaking out, keep checking in with myself, keep doing what I think I can do best, keep knowing that we can always do something. Which may mean writing or it may mean protesting, designing, advocating, organising, educating, donating, giving the kids stickers to teach how propaganda can be used (currently!), there are options. Doing nothing is not one of them.

And also yes, that we keep on living. The futility of not recognising all the good in my life floors me. Imagine not cherishing this lucky hand I got given in being able to get up in the morning and write in my journal listening only to the birds. The joy of our children finishing school and dashing into my arms, the luxury of opening the fridge and seeing full shelves of food. I’m not saying this is always an easy thing to do. But it is something I feel merits intention.

We have just returned from visiting Croatia - a fairly remote area of Croatia not massively touched by tourism. The scenery was beautiful, the sea icy cold and startlingly blue, the people kind and welcoming. It was a family holiday filled with so much love. The first poem I’m sharing below was written there, meaning that these poems don’t sit side-by-side. They feel uncomfortable side-by-side. Which is why I have left them that way.

Because this mirrors what I began this post talking about. Everything that is so wrong right now. Rioting on one hand, reading retreats on the other. Sunshiny holidays and starvation. Terror and beauty. I can’t make it make sense. Maybe as poets it is not our job to make it make sense, only document the senselessness. I am devastated and full of rage. I am rested after a holiday and full of creativity. I am determined that we cannot tolerate what is happening to our humanity (has already happened). I am roasting butternut squash for dinner tonight. I am helping my daughter create a presentation for school in which she has chosen to talk about Gaza and the money we’ve raised for crucial aid that CAN’T GET THROUGH. I am hanging out the washing.

I am nervous about being honest about this. I am hopeful that being honest might connect me with one other person. I am feeling despondent and I am trying to stay hopeful.

I am still writing. I am hoping that you are too?

With love, always

Nelly x

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Topless Summer

On the sixth day, I decide to go topless by the pool. 
Not before a scan of the surroundings, mountains, mainly, the owners of this cocoon-like-retreat-of-a-place live nearby but not so near that requires children to be shush'd.

The water looks even bluer against the creamy reclaimed stone walls, to my left and right, only green, and my husband, bronzed and slouched within sofa cushions, 
looking up from his book to give me a smile.

The children chant for me to make my entrance quick, they want me in their pool ball game and yet I find my hands on my hips, slung to one side stood on the edge, I feel different somehow, like my body has been cut-out and drawn in full size and

I'm considering the first dive I've done in years, I'm asking my teenager to turn up the dance music they suddenly like to play (which has brought these new Ibiza-like vibes to our holiday) and one of them wonders where my bikini top is

and I lie. I say that, "I can’t find it and who cares anyway" because I don’t have the energy to explain, and right now I am relishing not having to and also, because I know my daughters watch me without looking and all I want to do is soak it up. 

Not just this view and the sounds of my family, the swallows chasing each other between sandy-coloured walls, the passionfruit that flower for just 24 hours but also how this passionfruit bush has learned to trace the entire wall of this place. 

I want to revel in how cold water feels on bare nipples and sunshine, when it finally gets to lie upon shoulders and a body when it finally gets it's own gaze from over a blooming landscape, I feel like I might actually be high.
 
I’ve never been prude, you understand, just your regular body hater, a human demolition expert, a tragic perfectionist, perhaps, although this is only in hindsight. 
So what does that make me now? 

I lie back on a lounger and let the naked air dry fully the additional skin which softens my stomach. I decide I don’t feel like dressing again and wander inside to grab cold ice-tea and salty crisps. 

As I saunter my way back out I pause, noticing a mirror. 
I look nothing like I imagined myself to look.
I laugh out loud.

---

A mother by the waters edge

If you were to walk the shallow harbour wall in the sunshine that day you’d likely
see the blood stain. A thick, cloud-shaped swell of it. You might want to pretend it isn’t blood at all; tomatoes can surely stain stone, paint is another liquid that holds power. And yet you know the colour of blood too well. The sticky residue of black. The way it leaks, like it longs to be released. You might speed up your step, your eyes desperate to be back on blue.  

It is my daughter who mentions it. Asks if we should try and clean it up. I consider this as I hold the tissue tight against the sole of my youngest son’s slashed foot. Young voices have dashed over, competing to tell me about the sharpness of stones on a sea bed and how quickly play can be upended. It's just surface-level skin, I tell myself, trying not to imagine how much blood has been lost. I hold him in my arms and think about how grateful I am that what happens next, is that he will be ok.

Because I am not the only mother sitting by the sea, a child in their lap. Not so far away there are other mothers with no such luxuries, other parents who don’t have a pack of plasters decorated with cartoon characters for wounds far greater than the one I attempt to treat. Who can’t cheer their little boy up with promises of ice cream and healing, “in no time.” Who can't try to stop themselves imagining the worst because the worst already has already happened. Mothers who know too well the smell of blood. 

I want to tell my daughter that blood stains for a reason. That blood can act as a record of pain, it cannot and should not be easily wiped away, we must not forget the thousands of toes no longer able to slip out of shoes and scramble down walls to the water's edge to play. But she is just a child too. All our children, how they are drawn to the sea. Same children, same sea's, same blood. I stuff bright red tissues in my pocket and watch my son limp away. I rock and weep as the boats in the harbour creek and sway in the light summer wind. 

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