Hannah's Peony - a poem

Next to the front door at Hannah's lake cottage was a spectacular peony. After she died and before the cottage was sold, I dug up part of the plant and moved it to the garden of my Czech home, where it flourished. I was unable to take the plant with me to England, when I moved back, so have bought a similar one in memory of her - not quite the same, but the best I can do.

Here's a poem I wrote on the subject. It was first published in Dawntreader magazine (Indigo Dreams).

Hannah’s Peony. 

By the tumble of stones the peony
too red to be natural, too bloody
to be anything but
a token of things to come, and yet of itself
a now thing
bursting into flowered song
 
each petal a note
until they fall, stripped by rain
or just exhaustion,
the quick decline of the perfect,
and helmeted seed heads stand instead
until they too must bend to the seasons.
 
How it had blazed, asking
for nothing but a place in the earth.
 
When you died I dug up a piece of you –
this flower too bright to live –
planted it by the ruined woodshed,
surrounded it with stakes
to protect against the deer’s rough tongue.
 
And so each year this witch flower
burns again.

Going back to Prague

As you will know from previous posts the Czech Republic has always been inspirational in my writing. My latest project (although it is a project already several years old) is a poetry collection about the country and my friend Hannah Kodicek: my relationship with both and their loss. 

I am currently stuck. I have a reasonable number of poems that are inspired by South Bohemia and my home there, but I have very few about Prague. And yet Prague was where I first fell in love with this country and where I first felt its inspiration. For many years now Prague has been somewhere I went through on my way to somewhere else or at best somewhere I was showing someone else around. How could I rekindle my poet's response to the city?

I decided to make a visit to the city with a view to writing, to remind myself of some of the feelings I first had when Hannah introduced me to her home city in March 1990. This is the last day of my six-day visit. And I can tell you it hasn't worked or not yet at least. 

This photo above is symbolic of the task I have set myself. It is of the statue of a girl with a dove in Park Holubicka. I first stumbled upon it in 1990 and was enchanted. I was completely alone and snow nestled on her head instead of a pigeon and muffled the air. I made a point of seeking out the park a few days ago, but as you can see I was far from alone - the park benches were full of noisy people, many of them tourists, and the magic just wasn't there. I suspect I need to come either early in the morning or late in the evening to get what I am looking for. Perhaps I am looking for something that is lost. Or maybe it was simply the gloss of memory and never was. But I don't believe that, Prague's deep soul could not be so easily mislaid. 

Revisiting the House 1

 

I apologise for the gap in posts. You must have thought I had given up on this blog, and maybe I had. Maybe having sold the house and been confined to the UK by Covid, bad knees and back it hurt too much to look at what I had lost/been forced to give up. It did and does hurt. 

In November 2022 I did return to my little Czech village, staying in the house of my puppetmaker friend directly opposite my old home. It felt very strange to cross the bridge across her drainage moat and look at the bright lights shining out from my old home. In the November gloom the house was a beacon on the lower slopes of the Lisci Dira hill. I saw it as I crowned the hill on the track I took on my walk home from the bus, calling me down to the village and yet not calling me, because it was nolonger mine. 

In the house someone else was stoking the stove, someone else was chopping onions and making goulash, someone else was talking to her friends. Someone else but not me.