My main priority in relation to the sense of purpose I carry with me is to push my recently completed novel 'The Mental Doctor' towards publication. I say 'completed' - it isn't! All the chapters have been created but if it landed on a publisher's/agent's desk right now I'm convinced it would be destined for their reject tray. Deep down (well, not that far down) I've thought that since I typed in the final punctuation mark. However, a friend I met recently on Twitter whom I know only as Shelley offered to read my first chapter. She works as an editor for a publishing company in America and I'm afraid she more than confirmed my fears - in the kindest and most constructive way I must add. I am already indebted to her, as her comments and suggestions have enabled me to re-write the first two chapters (only 39 more to go) in a way that might now cause a publisher to think 'Hm? Maybe' instead of 'I really don't think so.'
Other than that, the odd poem and a few haikus continue to sneak their way into my working day, until childcare duties take over when I pick the small people up from nursery. By the time bedtime arrives I am usually done for! As for weekends, forget it! It's into creative-survival mode for my wife and I in order to shepherd two, small children safely towards Monday morning and the beginning of another 'working' week for me.
So, although there is little to read here at the moment, I hope gradually to fill the pages of this blog with interesting words, music and photographs, together with the odd snippet from 'The Book'. Thank you for reading me ... please call back again soon.
Samhain
(The Celtic Halloween)
In the season leaves should love,
since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,
legend says there is a seam
stitching darkness like a name.
Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil
that hangs among us like thick smoke.
Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.
I move my hand and feel a touch
move with me, and when I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother's mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting
self, I find her, and she brings
arms that carry answers for me,
intimate, a waiting bounty.
"Carry me." She leaves this trail
through a shudder of the veil,
and leaves, like amber where she stays,
a gift for her perpetual gaze.
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