The Web

For this, the final blog on my poetry, I am giving you just one example of my work. By now, I hope that you have seen enough to whet your appetite.

The story of the spider’s web, in this poem actually happened to me. I went out to put something in my dustbin one morning and, discovered that I had destroyed a spider`s web. I wrote the poem straight away, and read it at the next meeting of the creative writing class I ran in those days.

The comment came, ‘Oh, well. They’ll spin another one in five minutes, won’t they?’

Well, yes they will. But five of our minutes is more than five minutes to them, isn’t it?

Too late for the class, I later recalled that line from the hymn, Oh God Our Help In Ages Past:

‘A thousand ages in Thy sight are as an evening gone.’

I wonder what percentage that five minutes is of a spider’s life? And how many times a day does someone break up what is, basically, your home?

If only I had remembered it when the dismissive remark had been made. If only we all managed to think on our feet at any dismissive remark made to ourselves or to somebody else.

In the world of Assertion Training, you are taught never to discount or minimise the problem of another, however small.

And what we see as only the tip of an iceberg, only the seeming five minutes, could be only a small snowball which to somebody else is a avalanche.

I have an acquaintance who is not a deep person. Not a sensitive person. She often accuses me of analysing too much and ‘going into things too deeply.’ Yet, once, she saw some words pinned to my fridge. She stopped to read them. They seemed to mean a lot to her and she asked for a copy of the writings.

It was not a poem but, I think, part of an address, possibly part of a church sermon. And it told of everyone’s need to be heard. Really listened to and heard. In so doing one is asking to be thought of deeply. The speaker and listener may well find themselves drawn into analysis. For asking to be heard surely means wanting to be understood, and sometimes that could mean being helped to understand ourselves?

Writing for me is part of a discourse with the world. When I was nine, I was reading and I thought, this book is talking to me. I want to talk back.

I have been in groups where discussion has led to new insights, fresh ideas. A moving forward in ways which really mattered.  My dream is to lead such groups again, reading all works of literature, including poetry – and including my poetry – and for the discussion arising to create new awarenesses.

Meanwhile I hope you who are reading this buy my books. Tell others about them in order that we sell enough to get into print. Then I will publish my poetry as well. And with actual hard copy in front of you, you can have discussion amongst yourselves, and thus in a way with me.

 

 

 

SPIDER’S WEB

 

I didn’t mean to

Lifting bin lid

Spider’s home

Destroyed

 

Faint

Glistening

Didn’t see…

Sorry

 

Toiled all night while I slept?

From bin to window ledge secure.

Spider’s work

Undone.

 

Us – our web –

Our world…

Earthquake

Rail crash.

 

Giant’s hand?

Speck of dust?

Didn’t mean

Doesn’t know.

Sorry.

 

Pamela Pickton’s book Neverland is on sale on Amazon now, and on all good ebook websites, and you can also find more about Pamela Pickton’s travails and worldly challenges in her Zitebooks’ collection of short stories, Reasons, also available on Amazon.