don’t forget faces are flowers
the best at the heart of a garden
grow seek your face

good flower remember the sun
good flower push through the soil
good flower bathe in the rain

the sun feels you steal light
as you blaze back what you can’t take
leftovers of sun feast delight
is that what faces are?

A. H (30th November 2020)

I attended a largish meeting on zoom the other day and the gallery view made me think of the faces like those in the Paris metro for Ezra Pound, for a moment. Then at the meeting we did some writing and I was reminded of a garden inside us. Then I finished First you must change your life: the story of Rilke and Rodin by Rachel Corbett over the weekend and was thinking of Rilke’s quest for identity, and I’ve thought of flowers and written on such lines before, probably not as concisely. I’m not sure if that will make any sense of it to you. My thinking of the flowers blazing might also be influenced by a film I liked very much when I saw it in the last year or two, Hana-bi, written and directed and starring Takeshi Kitano and in fact maybe now I think of it also impacts the idea of faces as flowers, though it wasn’t on my mind, but his beautiful art work in the film is also part of the influence on some of my drawings here (but much more primitive for me) and possibly some photos (though some predate seeing the film I think).

toni

edit – I seem to have lost track of my roman numerals somewhere, a quick review suggests I may have typoed xxiv as xxvi — but I think this is the real poem xxvii for 2020, and at some point I’ll summon the energy to go back through and make sense of all my titles. (that probably sounds very sad — to summon the energy for that, but at the moment I am using a new laptop and it keeps doing the most unhelpful things when i try to scroll back through my posts.)

further edit – and recorrected when i found the fault lay further back, I can count, honestly.