Ullapool

Here
I am on the seafront in Brighton, in 1994.
I have just told my best friend that
we shouldn’t go out with each other.
‘We were meant to be just friends,’
I am saying.
I have read about love in novels and am sure
I know all about it. This is one of the cleverest things
I have ever done.
I am 18.
I exhale my cigarette, like a grown-up. Here
I am four years later, on the same stretch of seafront
with the same friend.
We are on a bench. My head is in his lap.
We are talking about what to call
our baby in my belly. My wedding dress is in a bag at
our feet.
We get married in three days. Since
we were last here,
I have learnt that
I knew nothing at the age of 18.
I know now that love can be a quiet, sure thing
– like the first April sun on
your arms – and not the pyroclastic blast
I was waiting for. In 19 hours,
we will find out that the baby
is dead. The grief that is coming for
us has five blades on each hand: it will fall on
us like a blizzard, and leave
us on the floor.
We will weep on
our honeymoon in Ullapool – so lost
I could not tell you if it did rain at all,
that time. At the time,
I thought the deep-sea pressure of sorrow was
so great, it would crush
my heart smaller, for ever.
I was sure I knew everything about it.

Taken from Caitlin Moran‘s column for the Saturday Times on 20th August, 2011. Submitted by 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, taken from a conversation with Becky Hunter. Submitted 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. Submitted by Marika Rose.

Clothes make the man

Naked people have
little or no influence
on society.

Mark Twain, quoted in ‘High and Mighty’ shop window in Newcastle, spotted 18 August 2011. A perfect senryu. Submitted 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. Submitted by Marika Rose.

Extraction

Black is blacker
Wheels turn
Lift drops
Water follows

Spinning tungsten
Teeth cut out
The black gold.

Some of the words written on benches in Chester-le-Street marketplace, spotted from a bus which drove on before they could all be copied down. Submitted by Marika Rose.

Gauntlet

They existed before my hands.
But it seems like I took them and
put them on my hands and put them
on other hands too. I like the
idea of rhinestones for fun.

Karl Lagerfeld’s response to a question about his gloves in The Peripatetic Fashionista, on the Imagine Fashion website. Submitted 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, as quoted by Futility Closet. Submitted 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, via Genealogy of Religion. Submitted 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. Submitted by Marika Rose.