Author: gwengrant

Growing older and having survived cancer at 40, a long time ago, certainly focuses the mind on the future and I was very aware of this when I wrote the poem FUTURE TENSE. I've always loved writing and still remember the excitement of the first longer piece of work I did. It was very experimental and I was certain it wouldn't get published. It probably wouldn't have but one of the small magazines, who did such great work for new writers, took that piece and many others. But that wasn't all they did. With infinite kindness, they often pointed out where I could improve my writing. My first book was a picture book, MATTHEW AND HIS MAGIC KITE, but after that, I started wanting to capture the humour and interest of where I lived, so PRIVATE-KEEP OUT came next followed by KNOCK AND WAIT and ONE WAY ONLY. They're not biographies because all I wanted to do was to catch the spirit of those times. It would be good if everyone wrote an account of their lives so their times are not lost. So many valuable histories unwritten and unread. When I was a girl, I loved the American writer, BETTY MACDONALD, with her very funny accounts of her family and her life in the 1940's. But NORMAN MAILER's, 'THE NAKED AND THE DEAD' spun me up to the stars when I stumbled across it in the subscription library I belonged to at fifteen. ERNEST HEMINGWAY's 'CHRISTMAS IN PARIS 1923', was so sublime and beautiful it was like a torch for writers and the Toronto Star Weekly must have published it with joy in their hearts. I wonder if there still is a Toronto Star Weekly?

ABOUT BOOKS No.1

ABOUT BOOKS No.1.

On a freezing winter afternoon, looking over the fields only gives the view of swirls of fog pushing into the garden, over the gate and into the apple tree.    

Last year, I bought Vol.1. of Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings 1913-1926 and have been reading his essay on ‘A glimpse into the world of Children’s Books’ which is extraordinarily interesting. In the middle of this essay there is an absolutely lovely nursery rhyme from an old German picture book, ‘Steckempferd und Puppe’ (Stick-Horse and Doll) by J.P. Wich.

This rhyme tells of all the things a little child sees in a town and, in particular, how the child sees a cat.  The rhyme ends with the enchanted child thinking what a lovely little place the town is and, ‘I’ll make a note of that.’  There are many such lovely little places and, whenever I find myself in such a town, like the child in the story, I, too, ‘make a note of that.’      

I do wonder who else but Walter Benjamin would introduce an essay on children’s books with this quotation –‘A soft green glow in the evening red.’ by C.E.Heinle, but this is the thing about books and writers.  They bring such joy and delight with them.

DANGEROUS HARBOUR

 

DANGEROUS HARBOUR

As we stand here,
On the edge of the world,
The wet streets peeling away
From the tiny harbour,
The sea, in a fit of spite,
Swirls and tumbles
Onto the stony shingle,
Rattling the shells
From one bony ridge to another,
Hissing its peevish laughter
At the moonbeams dancing uneasily
Down this stretch of wild water.

Until, in a fury of authority,
The moon calls all to order.
Combing the white frilled water
Into its thin silver fingers,
Braiding light into the aching darkness,
Its own face darkening as it considers
The water’s bold and fierce behaviour.

Now look what’s happened!
The moon has turned her back
On the tiny, frozen harbour,
Battered by the shell hung water,
Smashing foam flowers
Onto the old stone causeway,
Onto our icy, hasty shoulders,
As we run helter-skelter for safety
To a deep and far away doorway.

Now the sly and sliding waters
Try to tumble us off our frozen feet,
Try and pull us into the rolling sea
To be another bony shell in the making.

                                   © Gwen Grant

STOP

 

        

       STOP

Every child
Should be able to grow up
Without a gun
Shooting at them.

Every child
Should be able to grow up
Without a bomb
Dropping on their head
Making them dead.

Every child
Belongs to love,
So let us join heart to heart
And love them.

                    © Gwen Grant

EARLY CATS

It has been very cold here, lately, and the two cats that
are around the fields and the garden, one our marmalade
cat and one his sworn enemy, the black cat, are so lithe
and graceful in their hunting, that I often stop to watch them.
The black cat is a stray which we feed and have put him a
bed in the greenhouse.  Our cat is so jealous, he will stand
guard over the food put out for the black cat until he’s called
They both try hard but are never within sight of catching a
bird.  If our cat brings in one of the little brown field mice, he
always drops it and then, with it being so small, we have to find it.
Not easy.  The last one hid in the round opening for the hoover hose
and took us hours to find.   Let out into the garden, these tiny
mice vanish in an instant down the sides of the path where they all
seem to live.

                            EARLY CATS

If you walk the long grass in the morning
When it’s white with frost
And grey with the visiting clouds,
You see the cats.
They stalk the robin and the doves
Come from a nearby garden.

Those snake quiet cats
Slither through their silent world,
To spring from the stickle grass
With a startling coloured grace.
Those cats!

They go hungry this morning
Because a thin black twig
Fell from a wintered tree,
Frightening the red chested robin
And the gentle doves.

And those quick cats,
Those early morning hunters,
Wailed their anger to the fading moon.

                                   © Gwen Grant

AND WHEN NIGHT COMES

 

     AND WHEN NIGHT COMES

And when night comes
And darkness drifts over the earth
And fields vanish
And hedgerows become blurs of colour,
And the falling frost
Lays a bridal veil on the darkened grass,
And the lovely trees,
And all trees are lovely,
Fill the darkness with their magnificence
And their little inked-in leaves
Chuckle and rustle and whisper of the love
Shown for us in the drenching beauty of the night,
And the thin, thin beam of moonlight
Shines down like hope shining
Through the darkness of all those lost lives,

Well, then, that anxious heart
Staring through the midnight glass
Should find rest.
But those ears are deaf,
Those eyes blind to the radiance of the night,
Seeing only the darkness of the hour,
And then, for it is then, the frightened,
The fractured heart cries aloud,
‘O God, my God, where are you?’ 

And as the dying echoes of those trembling sounds
Vanish into the vanished fields
And sink into the blurry hedgerows,
The little inked-in leaves rustle and chuckle
And whisper those eternal words of love.
‘I am the light to your darkness,
I am the hope to your despair.
I am the peace to your pain.
I am the love you can rest on.’ 

                                              © GWEN GRANT