Sapphire Sea

Kitchen Conversation

My Poems (2)

Grandma yelled out 
'There's tails in the pan',
And then it caught fire.
So soon the draughty back playroom
Got a new stove and
Became the hub of the house.

But what of the old kitchen,
Beneath the loft where I lay
Frozen with the large windows all around,
Bodget and squash
Transformed it into a bog
And a store,
For mother's material 
For her market stall.

He hung his pain there,
The stinking riddled bang birds,
Put there to deter
Anyone from entering more than once.

But mother was there
In her store,
Was she listening 
To the Dales Poacher above,
Creeping up
And sliding his hand under the fabric?
Dark deeds, dark days,
A stolen Testament of my youth.

He strung up his prey
In the old kitchen's new bog,
To keep the French girls away
From the store with the stink.

A new loo in the new kitchen's cupboard instead,
While he continued to poach
My pancake flat baps,
The poor cold bang birds beneath my bed,
Hanging there riddled with flies.

Oh yes, father had it in mind to deter 
Visitors to the old bog 
In the older kitchen 
Hub of the house.

But wasn't mother next door in her store
Sorting her fabric and writing her social studies?
Her hearing was tuned
To the creaks above,
Or was she off to her jubilee committee nightly?

As if a dead pheasant myself,
Stinking out the bus
I lay lifeless limp and petrified each night.



By Patricia Goldberg © 2021

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

£3.00

£9.00

£60.00

£3.00

£9.00

£60.00

£3.00

£9.00

£60.00

Or enter a custom amount

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate Donate monthly Donate yearly

Treasured Words

For Charlie


Lord
Please be with women or their children who have disabilities,
Visual impairment, learning or physical disabilities,
And especially those with mental health disorders,
Surround and enfold them in your love,
And help them to live life to the full
Without fear or oppression.
Help us to bring an end to discrimination against people
Based on who or what they are.

                     Amen

A prayer for the committment service during my first holiday after my son went away, six years after, to Iona. It was the middle of the refugee crisis when all the people from war torn Middle Eastern countries and Afghanistan were walking across Europe to get to the deserted beaches of Scotland with their shimmering seas and cold clear skies. Washed up on the cliffs and beaches of Sussex or Essex first if they managed to survive the journey. We had a service featuring Paddington bear that reminded me of my son as his grandmother, Non, had given him those picture books, and he had done some lovely collages and cards of Paddington. And of course, his aunt had been a nanny in South America. At the time I liked this poem on the Statue of Liberty by Emma Lazarus.

For Charlie

My son always loved Annie Lennox, and she has such a soaring beautiful spirit, and that helped him with his autism and non-verbal learning disabiiites to learn about beautiful uplifting emotions and spirituality and expression of personality and identity. It may or may not have been until his eighteenth that he got to hear this song, Universal Child, but it was perfect for him at the time it came out. However, it didn’t help me to bring him home or prevent his suffering.

Universal Child by Annie Lennox

War — Awesomengers

A poem by Mahesh Mali

It isn’t just the impact on the human casualties at the time, but war is also a terrible contribution to global warming and desertification that wrecks the ecosystem. The impact of the wars in the first couple of decades of the new millennium will be felt for generations to come if we don’t change.

Detonators blowing
Every now and then
Causing tender ears of kids to bleed
Mines are placed,
Roads blocked
People being checked.
Harassed and stripped.
Feeble cries
Lost in the roar of the deafening blasts.
Roads soaked in blood.
But you’re busy greasing your muscles.
Celebrating your “victory”
Naming your massacre a defeat of the enemy.
Killing thousands in the name of nation or religion.To claim it […]
War — Awesomengers

Compassionate Farming?

Living in a very rural area close to several large farms and many public footpaths through them I frequently witness some worrying things going on when out walking. At one time I supported Compassion in World Farming (https://www.ciwf.org.uk, and later on just became more into general animal issues by supporting the RSPCA. Now I mostly have to be concerned more with prioritising speciesist issues personal to me, ie learning disabilities. One thing that is often said of poor treatment of humans is that they are being treated like an animal, and that is why it is so important to try to help the animals too, as by doing so we improve the attitudes and treatment of humans by making any kind of cruelty completely unacceptable in any circumstances. It also makes us realise what cruelty is. Recently there has been a dreadful court case in New Zealand about a farmer’s cruelty to his cows. This poem by Heidi Stephenson of the All Creatures Christian vegetarian group helps us to digest and remember the issues, and not to let it just slip away into the ether with hundreds of other similar stories.

THE COW BEATER by Heidi Stephenson

Three female cows,

three tired, female cows,

three bereaved, female cows

Pregnancy – birthing . . .loss

dare to RESIST

their slavemaster,

the constant kidnapper,

the killer

of their calves;

the profiteering

milk snatcher,

the “contract milker”,

their cruel oppressor.

And so he BEATS them,

BEATS them

with a steel pipe

with hard steel

. . .until they reel.

He beats these benign

bovine girls

repeatedly,

in order to “educate”

“those three grumpy bitches”

(continued here https://www.all-creatures.org/poetry/ar-cow-beater.html)