Thank Crunchie it’s Friday! Another weekend beckons.
Let’s hope it’s sunny.
Here are some little haiku that are about trees. Just trees. Nothing else. No deeper meaning, lol.
I was reading an article about writing and inspiration. Where does it come from? Very few of my poems are about
myself or my life, so I often find it interestingly funny when people think
they are about me. I think writing about myself would be pretty boring, unless
I was writing a memoir. And that would be a rocket to the bizarre.
At school, in the big school, our class was encouraged to write about
ourselves, our own experiences, but do we? Do we want to? Interestingly, at infant and junior school, we were encouraged to write about anything, the more fantastic the better.
When I was listing my book somewhere (while self-publishing), I was surprised to find poetry listed under non-fiction. I felt like maybe I needed to stick a 'fiction' label on the front of my book.
Is poetry meant to be non-fiction? I don't think there are any rules when it comes to writing. It would be boring to stick to them. I guess some people
write poetry about their lives, but I reckon a lot more are writing fiction. I guess
with fictional novels, it’s obvious it’s fiction. With poetry, maybe it’s not so
obvious. I’m doing a poetry course at the moment, and looking at everyone else’s
poems every week, I think they’re also mainly fiction. That’s the adventure in
it.
I think many people write as a form of escapism, so
you’re outside yourself, you’re writing whatever comes into your head in those
minutes or hours about made-up characters, situations you’ve read about elsewhere,
situations you imagine, snapshots of life, ideas, emotions made into scenes, people you’ve encountered, life’s mysteries, the common elements of experience.
Your own life or your way of looking at things might creep in at the edges at times,
but the fun of writing is that you imagine things outside yourself. Otherwise I
wouldn’t find it fun. I’d be writing about facts, like a journalist, or keeping a diary.
I wrote a song on this subject, called If I Write a
Song (it ‘ain’t gonna be about me). I went out for a walk last year in lockdown and started thinking
about this subject, came home and wrote it up. My uncle came up with a melody for it and
sings it. He turned it into a song, into something bigger than it was. But, anyway, enough of the natter, here we go with some
trees…
Blighted trees
Lightning singed, limb-struck,
blackened trunks empty out of
life. Hollowed ground. Sit.
White plague creeps over
brown knobbled branches emptied
of apples. It yearns.
Hollowed out, grey self.
Once majestic, skeletal.
A woodpecker stops.
By night they walk, stalk
their forest lair. Faint spectres.
Giants with no bark.
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, February 26, 2021
