Poem and Award

Interviewed, decorated, blushing, bowing, scraping. Kind compliments from all of you, and then this glorious award from Tessa, whose glowing blog really does light up the soul. I feel utterly humbled to have received this. I don't often win things. Although I did win a sheep when I was ten, but that's another story.


I must pass it on, yes? To those who have light in their souls.

It goes to Chimera then, of Holey Vision whose wit clinks and sparkles like ice in a gin and tonic. To Chimera I'd like to quote Leonard Cohen - "There's a crack, there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

It also goes to Reya of the Gold Puppy, whom I have never met in the flesh, but who seems to be surfing the same bit of wavelength as me. We're plugged into the same galactic thought source. So often I visit her page to find she has articulated something I have just said to someone, or just thought, or just written about. Its like finding a piece of treasured jewellery that you didn't know you had lost. Or a sister you didn't know you had. Or something.

And on her blog, I am advised that today is the Fourth International Bloggers (silent) Poetry Reading. So this, by Yehuda Amichai.

In This Valley

In this valley which many waters
carved out in endless years
so that the light breeze may now
pass through it to cool my forehead,
I think about you. From the hills I hear
voices of men and machines wrecking and building.

And there are loves which cannot
be moved to another place.
They must die at their place and in their time
like an old clumsy piece of furniture
that's destroyed together with
the house in which it stands.

But this valley is a hope
of starting afresh without having to die first,
of loving without forgetting the other love,
of being like the breeze
that passes through it now
without being destined for it.

(translated by Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes)