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Memory and identity – about Blue grapes

  • Posted on September 30, 2016 at 8:42 pm

This is an explanation or background to the poem ‘Blue grapes’.

I am watching my own memory, as I have written here over these past years. Me then, me now, what I knew and what I did not. I have written about dementia, a devastating disease that touches most of us in some way, that is affecting my mother. I have written about photographs like memory. Is this a sideline or a sibling to identity?

As I talk to my mother on the phone, my voice is familiar enough, and she remembers her son setting off camping alone in the Peak District. And yet I worry that if I were to knock on her door now, she would not recognise me. She never knew she had a daughter at the time I remember her summer skirt, when I was so small and sat or on at her knee. My best memory of that may have been stimulated by a photograph of her wearing it. Which I saw many years ago. The photograph no longer exists because she threw it away, my memory does, hers may, because it is an old memory, where I am still her son.

Somewhere inside, she is still the same young mother, whilst outside her reality is badly distorted. Today cannot be reclaimed, whilst those old days are like fluctuating embers of a dying fire. The conversations we hold now are a tissue, always the same, very fragile, everything in a tenuous memory layer, nothing really in the present. I am in the opposite pattern, where my memories are least like I really am now. One of us is hanging on to the present, the other the past, as our strongest realities.

Our identities must be more than our memories, yet without them we don’t fully make sense of the present, and so my mother and I have slipped apart even more than my bad record of being in touch deserves. I feel more myself, she less, whilst we may both remember a time long gone when she was young and wore a skirt I shall never forget, in a pattern of blue grapes.

Hence the poem, which visually represents a dialogue that is slipping apart. It can be read as one voice, or two.

Blue grapes

  • Posted on September 30, 2016 at 8:13 pm

Blue grapes

                               I shan’t ask you if you remember

blue grapes on white

                                    you may remember much better than this morning

blue grapes on white and stripes

                                           this morning has faded too soon

blue grapes on white and stripes wider than my arms

                                               too soon to recognise the loss

my last memory of blue grapes

                                                    your cotton skirt printed

was a photograph of laughter

                                                         faded and thrown away

in green fields running

                                                              girlish mother country breeze

we were children in vivid grass

                                                                  throwing your wide skirt of blue grapes

memory prints of deep past

                                                                       wider than my arms being gathered and wrapped

fading with the son

                                                                              in single colours lost pink lost green just blue

that skirt that place

                                                                                     grapes on white with stripes so wide

skirt memory

                                                                                            blue grapes

of course

                                                                                                   how could we forget?

Vane perception

  • Posted on September 18, 2016 at 1:15 pm
Poppy Forge weather vane

When I began blogging in January 2012, I was reading extensively as a means to better self-understanding, and then writing the personal experience and response, as I was feeling it week by week. Everything was immediate, time was of the essence, much was to be done, and everyone else but me was moving at a snail’s pace. At no time did I feel I would not arrive, but frequently I thought I might arrive alone. Arriving? Was I travelling from A to B? I must have often written of this as a journey, with a beginning, a middle, and an…