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Len Webster's SPIRITS OF PLACE
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Spirits of Place
MUANG VILLAGE
The spirit houses are rotting on their concrete plinths,
The paint of yesterday flaking in the dull afternoon
Beneath clouds that should have brought rain
After so much morning promise.
Buffaloes and their carts once rumbled here
On red dust-roads that swallowed water in the month of June,
A month few villagers knew by name,
Their rhythm beyond the bounds of any city.
Those who know of this place will tell their stories
And each may touch the driest germs of truth,
None doing more than clutch at breeze-blown chaff
Though brimming confident in their knowledge.
The wat and the village meetings, not yet extinct,
Vie with the pick-up and the Honda Dream,
Capturing the imagination of the young
In picture-screens delivered from the skies.
They learn of washing-powders that could save the world
During the break in the nightly serial, the latest soap
Accompanied by the latest plaintive song
With designs on the empty wallets of the gathered host.
At the tamboon for the new house or hope
Saffron-robed chanting precedes the trusted routine
Of food and drink and drunken rejoicing
To raise the heaviness of the daily load.
But still they leave for the cities,
The sons and daughters of the soil,
Some reluctant, some with sparkling eyes,
Seeking out thunderous flashes of light,
Now seeing the rains as an inconvenience,
A malign force that will ruin their routine,
Spitefully intruding on the night's desires
To erect a fence of duplicity against their ambition,
To leave their spirits rotting on a concrete plinth
In a shadow-play of the mind.
AT A MUANG VILLAGE SHOP
Early each evening, at the same time,
I sit outside the shop amid the fumes
From the homeward-bound, and drunk
With the power of my own isolation
I pick up a pen in my head to write -
Sometimes, like this, on paper, but not daily -
And the fragments of a life lacking continuity
(Save this: I am the same consciousness
That cried in infancy at the sight of blue bars)
Piece themselves together into what should be a whole
But never is, not for any of us,
Nothing ever being completed,
Only left in abeyance for the right season
To give birth to an entity that remains elusive.
Early each evening, at the same time,
The same faces pass by the same shop,
Some deformed from birth or the pain of living,
Some round and golden with vitality.
Some stop for rice whisky,
Mixed with Red Bull for extra strength,
Sometimes lingering till dark,
Their faces red and bloated from more than the sun,
Out of politeness or a break from the routine
Daring to strike up words with the farang
Who sits under the striplight, looking whiter than white,
Like a shirt bleached in a myth of perfectibility,
Hurriedly folding the paper no-one could read,
Knowing he is a curiosity for being here,
For staying on to the bitter-sweet end
Of a world that tried hard not to go mad
But lost its youth to the lure of the cities,
To the triumphant roar of the Isuzu and Dream.
Footnotes
farang - a Westerner or white foreigner (Thai language)
Honda Dream - a popular kind of motorcycle in South-East Asia
Muang - the Khon Muang, or people of Northern Thailand
Songkran - Thai New Year (April)
spirit house - a replica of a traditional Thai house placed on top of a post or plinth
tamboon - a merit-making ceremony
wat - Buddhist temple
"At a Muang Village Shop" first appeared in 'Raw Edge Magazine,' published by West Midlands Arts, Birmingham, Issue 1, Autumn/Winter 1995.
"Muang Village" was published in the 'Chiang Mai Newsletter', Chiang Mai, Vol. 5, No.5, May 1996.
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SEASON OF BUTTERFLIES
For years the number of butterflies dwindled
But this month, coinciding with the greening of the garden,
They returned, unperturbed by our arrival,
Stirring thoughts of all those years ago
When they whirled around the old house,
Their spirits clothing the day with colour.
Pee seu they're called here - clothes of spirits
Or spirit's clothes,
Butterflies by a less sickly, more romantic name
Suggesting the inevitable transformation
From howling flesh through to crawling infant,
Falling toddler, and upwards on a rising scale
Until, after the stooping and uncertain footing of old age,
The release of the soul into the unknown.
Spirit's clothes are above all this,
Flickering their airy ways among the flowers
Or landing on a stem or leaf,
Unaware of their fragile history and destiny.
I remember one, big as a bird,
Entering the old house and wearying itself at a tricky window
Before taking second wind and finding release
Through the ever-open door.
Many who populated our world then have gone,
Passed through the door to that world of spirits
We may perhaps visit in our dreams.
I know the names of some - those closest to us -
And have offered food to keep them
More content in the afterworld
That is always present, so people here believe.
The world there must be so overwhelmed with spirits
Some are sent back in newly-coloured clothes,
To re-populate our daydreams in this diminished place,
Creating hope anew in hearts emptied by the certainty of loss.
SEASON OF DRAGONFLIES
The season of butterflies is the season of dragonflies
Hovering in a breeze that controls their fate.
Seen like that, trying to keep control but edging forward,
They form a silhouette squadron destined for destruction.
Close to, their colours multiply.
Shades of crimson, orange-yellow or an uncamouflaged black and white,
An array the watcher cannot identify without resorting to violence,
To damaging action that holds the moment by marring it.
The darkening clouds over the encircling hills
Become belligerent with the groans of dusk,
Filling us with hope that by folding our wings and huddling in clusters
We, too, shall survive the night.
THOUGHTS ON THE BLESSING OF
A NORTHERN THAI SPIRIT HOUSE
The candle has almost burnt out.
The evening lingers on.
The offerings at the spirit house
Have been shared among the family.
The sky is clear, so clear the stars,
And in the hills fires burn:
It's that season.
Only 7.30, the new spirit house blessed
With promises of good fortune for all:
Long life; prosperity; and the rest.
Not so long ago
I stood in an English winter
And waited for the cold wind to cut deeper,
A long way from home,
A world from the me that had been severed
With the leaving from here.
Two homes; two peoples, two climates;
And a head split into pieces,
Neither here nor there, but generally other.
The garlic is nearing the time for harvesting,
To be weighed and hung for drying,
Waiting the passing of the dry, hot months,
Of water-sprinkled Songkran and beyond.
Three seasons; three lives,
For between here and there I lie,
Something neither one nor the other,
But me all the same,
Not a pattern moulded by the thoughts and devices of others,
But me as I am,
As I think I should be,
An idealised me
- Neither here nor there.
IN A THAI HOUSE
A framed black and white photograph
high, near a Buddha image.
Eyes peering down from above,
Out of the living face of the man
in his youth.
Frozen here, waiting to be resurrected,
Placed at the head of the palatial cortege
That will take him on his last journey
To the site where the wood will be stacked
And the paper and hardboad palace dismantled,
To be re-built again over the casket
waiting for the fire,
The framed photograph rescued,
saved from all that
And returned to the house
where dust will gather,
Layering memory until a stranger, visiting, asks,
'Who's that?'
A DOG CALLED 'JUNIE'
A dog called 'Junie', here?
Here, among the ricefields,
Spring onions, broccoli and Chinese cabbage?
How pretentious! How mundane!
But the old girl cackles, 'Junie!'
And thinks how comically exotic the name,
As Tiffany was before,
Named after the daughter of a friend
Working in the hot kitchen of a Thai restaurant
In the cold, dark England of winter.
WORKMEN
Two men dead.
One of Aids (and who would have thought it?),
Another in a motorcycle accident,
Two popular killers on the loose.
One man I can't recall, his face a mystery,
A past ghost that cannot haunt me.
The other peered round the door
To hear the drums and see his dancing daughter
Re-enacting the tribal past
Until the videotape turns mouldy, rots
Or is superseded, as it soon will be.
Proud and curious, to see his daughter there,
Almost grown, dancing to the rhythm of the years
Alongside her friends at the police station
on Youth Day
SEPARATE LIVES
Silently,
Like a stuffed weasel,
In staring disbelief,
She heard him say:
'I'm leaving.'
She had been so bound
In the life of her world
She hadn't noticed his loneliness,
Taking him for granted
As he so often had taken her.
Now faced with the loneliness
Of being in the crowd
She waited, wide-eyed,
Part of the whole
That she has been born into,
Unaware that her shock, too, was his.
Separate worlds in collision
And a stunned, stunned silence
That would lead to her anger
And tears at his going,
And his vacant, lingering longing
That it could all have been so different
And his guilty, certain knowledge
That but for him
And the old, old frailty of ego
It could.
BEHIND GLASS SCREENS
Behind glass screens, they lived and died,
Each watching the other's flame flicker,
Roar up and singe the air,
Each wondering whose flame would be the first to go.
Glass screens shield words from words.
There is only a mouthing, difficult to follow,
Like an airport terminal's dividing wall of glass
Where passengers mouth back their fond farewells.
Glass screens without doors, separate worlds
Containing treasure troves of bonds
That only death can break.
We have parted many times before like this:
The farewell before the journey beyond the glass,
The mouthing of meanings we merely guess,
Each journey a new beginning, it is said;
Each journey a new ending;
Our lives lived out like this,
Behind glass screens.
(c) Len Webster 2004
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What next?
Check out the three links given below.
Happy surfing!
Len Webster
E-mail contact: lenspoems@yahoo.ie
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