To P.
Are words partners in crime with life?
A heated argument going on,
While the rough wild sea can’t wait
For souls to dive in and on no accounts
Can flowers rise-
No funny ghosts, but real wrath and hunger
If over here, away to the left,
In the lane alongside your fields,
Maudlin ballads or garish sunsets keep shouting
At full blast that life is wonderful, the trick of blue gamblers-
But hush now, look, hope and desire walking arm in arm?
Great, you’ll fail big time, so let’s sort this mess out,
Let’s play along best we can, almost high tide now,
Stars, please don’t outstay your welcome,
The night is waning among the waifs and strays
Of no man’s land and redemption’s on the house,
A hymn the guilty sing when stares mirror
A racket never spoken aloud-
Clouds, please stop creeping by, you pointless blue dashes,
Blue, please don’t misplace your birth and source,
The sky’s secret when sin tracks you like a restless wind,
And even God can taste your blue regret-
Leaves, please stop shaking with guilt, if roots deceive-
You, sin, stop fooling us with shades of blue,
And you, life, let the blue flowing into her mind
Be a sky pleading with God to dress your night in loss,
His redemption in silence-
Anyway, all that is by the by, if even sunlight
Can’t disperse blue failures just think the moonlight,
Those blue innuendos of a mind smitten with words,
When ‘Sheer bliss, and drop dead twice, you lot’
She growls once the visit from hell is over-
Such a madhouse, all of them, a family
Where they bend and break to grace
Sins become daft questions, and God waits
to see how time is kind to stones,
Those prayers skyward in this tangled sanctuary
While green keeps growing on loss or shame,
In a rhythm you can’t sync with,
And only ravens translate the silence,
Their caws a hymn to choices or shadows-
All of them unmade.
To S.
‘Today the sky feels like a promise’ you keep ranting-
Yeah right, dream on, his blue a threat
Of endless lies and old wives’ tales,
Ghosts, light, water, moon,
Point is Heaven has no use for personal data,
Too busy struggling with a hungry wind-
Don’t fool yourself, the blue will start to wear away
Under your haunted stares and hope too,
Drawn to blue glares, will dart around
Like a deb at her first dance
While our thoughts get filled with a blue dispersing
Under the weight of souls, chats and trinkets-
And leaves? Oh, they’ll crash down in sad shades of blue,
As if a forest afraid of an ambush
Opted for a blue disguise-
Thank God the light has got the soul of ancient trees,
She’ll shrug if the horizon is just a tale dawn whispers,
And hope a wound that never scabs,
A raw blue smearing hands reaching out-
More power then to eclipses and Eternity
Who can’t answer, they just listen
In a blue wolfing down silence
Where no reply turns up but the sound of tides
A useless blue if water churns like guilty whispers
Of a night that never knew the fake mercy
Of a morning you still claim as your own,
When sky, dreams, hopes, unseen hands
Have nothing but shades to remind you
Of your time, a mystery turned into a tale
Of a blue holding the weight of night’s misdeeds,
The invisible threads that tie the stars to sin.
To W.
Hyper little girls, frayed teachers,
Ah, the lovely gifts of a spring God threw away,
Where dreams dare you to grab them
When darting through the grass, when hope
Comes fraught with danger, clouds born in rage
Leave lovers aghast, cry out for God, reshape demise
Among punchlines, flip sides, and families mess up skies, Fields,
clouds, with their endless guilty spread,
Such evil weeds-
To make things worse, winds on the moor
Make slippery paths to broken minds along slant patterns,
And even love lies on warps of danger or misdeeds,
The dark beats of shades only the grass can feel
In the background-
So, there you go, bit dazed on the outskirts of prose,
And shall you bend or break if spring drives you
To call it quits?
Trust me, don’t sell him short, blue is bit cranky,
Let poetry arise from grass, stones, or paper,
Let blue and time stand on the shore,
As the sea is another story, not much to cheer about
With wild streams, invasive thoughts, obsessions
When reckless poets let the mind go adrift like clouds,
Grab tricky shines of the moon, then die,
While spring treats us to boring flowers, chatty blades
Of green, and thank heaven the elusive houseguests
Traipse around, stars, gospels of light, so are you in?
Yes, you are game, no dark in the wood of blunders,
It’s mostly bright, well, springtime now,
The weather is fine, and you can feel the light close by,
It’s your bread, break it, and don’t forget,
Love, beauty, wisdom will crop up later if the sky shows
Blue gets nothing from your flowers.
*Happy National Poetry Month! Check out more April poetry HERE!
—About the Author—
Born in Italy some decades ago, Gabriella Garofalo fell in love with the English language at six, started writing poems (in Italian) at six and is the author of these books “Lo sguardo di Orfeo”; “L’inverno di vetro”; “Di altre stelle polari”; “Casa di erba”; “Blue Branches”; “ A Blue Soul”, “After The Blue Rush”.
—About the Artist—
Anna Atkins from NYPL Digital Collections:
“The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects as minute as many of the Algae and Confera, has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel’s beautiful process of Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves,” explained Anna Atkins in October 1843. Mrs. Atkins (1799-1871) was an amateur botanist especially interested in scientific illustration and taxonomy. Her goal in producing Photographs of British Algae was to provide a visual companion to William Harvey’s pioneering but unillustrated 1841 publication Manual of British Algae; to that end, Atkins’s specimen titles follow Harvey’s nomenclature.
Through her father, scientist John George Children (1777-1852) whose Royal Society circle included Herschel and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Atkins was aware of the group’s experiments with photography. Talbot’s “photogenic drawing” technique involved placing a flat object against a light-sensitized sheet of paper (sometimes pressed beneath a sheet of glass to prevent movement and ensure a sharp image) and exposing it to sunlight until the area around the object began to darken. Herschel devised a chemical method to halt the darkening and “fix” Talbot’s silver-salt image – the basis for all photography until the digital era. Hershel experimented with other light-sensitive metal compounds in addition to silver, and in 1842 discovered that colorless, water-soluble iron salts, when exposed to sunlight, form the compound known as Prussian Blue; unexposed areas remain unaffected and the salt rinses away in plain water, leaving a blue ‘negative’ image. Inexpensive and easy to use, the blueprinting process, or cyanotype, is familiar today as an artists’ medium as well as a popular children’s pastime.
Atkins used Talbot’s “photogenic drawing” method, arranging her specimens on sheets of glass for easier handling for repeat exposures, and adopted Herschel’s blueprinting process, to generate the multiple copies of specimen plates comprising Photographs of British Algae. She also used this same method to produce title pages and contents lists instead of having them conventionally typeset. Atkins issued the work in parts, distributing them privately between 1843 and 1853; she occasionally supplied new plates as updates and substitutions when better specimens were available (for example, see the variations in The Library’s two copies of Part IV), which recipients all handled differently. Today British Algae survives in at least thirteen different copies in widely varying states of completeness. The Library’s copy is among the most complete; it is also one of the most rare for retaining its original parts’ wrappers and stitching.
Photographs of British Algae is a landmark in the histories both of photography and of publishing: the first photographic work by a woman, and the first book produced entirely by photographic means.