Tag: Marika Rose

If this is love

Back when I was five, I used to stick yellow Hula
Hoops on my fingers and pretend to be engaged. Tiny
hands all salty, our big maroon-grey rescue Mastiff
– a girl, like me – licked them clean. Bundled in duffel
coats and balaclavas we’d meet Dad at Seal Sands
after work, watch the black-footed Little Stints wade
in the froth by the pipeline.

Dad had a stroke in the year that Lady had her first
litter. The nurse taught me to inject Lovenox (“if this is
love,” we’d grimace) straight into his stomach. He
was so angry, that’s what kept him with us so long.

But last year, we threw Dad’s ashes on the Estuary,
and skimmed stones after him.

I love walking by water, talking to him.

In pink jeans, walking Lady’s daughter (all grey now)
by the chilly inlet off Scotts Road, I catch a sapphire
sparkle – steel hoops and a furled wire net – “Planet’s
Biggest Public Art Project”, the Gazette said. Far
across the water, in silhouette, one giant loop is a
half-inch circlet. My ring finger fits right inside it.

Gallery texts written to accompany an exhibition by Annie O’Donnell, from a conversation with Becky Hunter. By Marika Rose.

Of godly life and sound learning

Totter legged and pilled priest; stinking
knave priest; scurvy, stinking, shitten boy;
Polled, scurvy, forward, wrangling priest;
Runagately rogue; prick-eared rogue;
Drunken-faced knave; copper-nose priest;
Wrangler and prattler; Scottish jack;
Jack sauce and Welsh rogue; black-coat knave.

Insults suffered by members of the clergy in 16th and 17th century Britain, taken from a review of The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570-1640 by Christopher Haigh. By Marika Rose.

Full of dead men’s bones

All your talk
about freedom and democracy
is sheer claptrap,
parrot phrases,
fashionable twaddle,
or hypocrisy.
It is just a painted signboard.

And you yourselves are
whited sepulchres. You
are mean-spirited boors,
and your education, culture,
and enlightenment are
only a species of
thoroughgoing prostitution.

A quotation from Lenin’s Collected Works, found at Stalin’s Moustache. By Marika Rose.

Way Out

You develop an
instant global consciousness,
a people orientation,
an intense dissatisfaction
with the state of the world,
and a compulsion to do something about it.

From out there on the moon,
international politics look
so petty. You want to
grab a politician
by the scruff of the neck
and drag him a quarter of
a million miles out and say,

‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. By Marika Rose.

This Is That

Do you know why teachers
use me? Because I speak
in tongues. I write metaphors.
Every one of my
stories is a metaphor
you can remember. The
great religions are all
metaphor. We
appreciate things like
Daniel and the lion’s
den, and the Tower of Babel.

People remember these
metaphors because they
are so vivid you can’t
get free of them and that’s
what kids like in school. They
read about rocket ships
and encounters in space,
tales of dinosaurs. All
my life I’ve been running
through the fields and picking
up bright objects.

I turn one over and say,
Yeah, there’s a story.

Taken from an interview with Ray Bradbury. By Marika Rose.

From H– to L–e.–

Your letters are destroyed
and you have nothing
to fear from my indiscretion.
Your ring, &c., is ready packed,
and will be sent when
opportunity offers or
you choose to indicate a way.

Your ‘ever’ lasted five months
and I was a fool to expect
it would be otherwise.

An advert in the Times, some time in Victorian London. By Marika Rose.

Corpses To Remember Him By

I hope I shall not offend you; I shall
certainly say nothing with the intention
to offend you. I must explain myself,
however, and I will do it as kindly

as I can. What you ask me to do I
am asked to do as often as one half-
dozen times a week. Three hundred letters
a year! One’s impulse is to freely consent,

but one’s time and necessary occupations
will not permit it. There is no way but
to decline in all cases, making no
exceptions; and I wish to call your

attention to a thing which has probably
not occurred to you, and that is this: that
no man takes pleasure in exercising
his trade as a pastime. Writing is my

trade, and I exercise it only when
I am obliged to. You might make your request
of a doctor, or a builder, or a sculptor,
and there would be no impropriety

in it, but if you asked either for a
specimen of his trade, his handiwork,
he would be justified in rising to
a point of order. It would never be
fair to ask a doctor for one of his
corpses to remember him by.

The typewritten message Mark Twain would send to autograph seekers. By Marika Rose.