Emily’s Jewels.
Emily’s shoes are red and the diamonds on the soles of her shoes are shining iridescently crimson, bringing warmth and comfort our way. Her shoes are instantly recognizable as hers. There are no other shoes in this world with red diamonds on their soles. Red diamonds are extremely rare.
When she claimed paradise as her own nirvana and made it a space in which she became the moon-queen, larger than life and overwhelmingly present, she placed an unrelenting glow around us! Each diamond, you see, is a symbol of Emily’s life’s philosophies. There are seven diamonds in all. They symbolize Emily as, a Woman, a Daughter, a Mother, a Sister, a Friend, a Thinker, and a Leader. Emily is a life-force; a woman of strength and wisdom.
Although you may never have seen the light that shone from those red diamonds on the soles of her shoes, I know that you have felt the energy that Emily emitted in each and every step that she took throughout her life– an energy as vast and as roomy as a tidal wave that swept over us all making us different and new and better people. Her words were always moving things – never still and grounded – because Emily had the power and significance to change people – she was unutterably giving in that way – blessed with a capacity to talk straight talk and find her way around all of our worlds in how she used her words and how they used her. Emily lived in the creases and hollows of words and believed in them. It is in remembering her words that we will all find our residence and the meaning of home.
Emily was deeply philosophical.
Emily always thought of women and their children – of how to be a woman and give love, and of how these things mattered if life was to be navigated and tread upon with attention to detail. She thought often of all the places and times in which women lived and of how the good and bad things in their lives often made them strangers and exiles yet powerful and central to being able to walk in their own shoes no matter how shabby and worn. She knew that it is a person’s soul that gives them the light of life, and not merely their material being.
When you feel her breeze against your skin it means that she is thinking of you, for she is thoughtful and kind and always and forever will be a messenger of life. When she stood upon this little bit of spit and sand and stone that we call the earth she knew that paradise was hers, both in the here and now as well as the ever after. Emily knew how to live with soul! That’s why she is wearing red diamonds on the soles of her feet – they are a sign of the light of her soul and the power of her speech and of the imagination in its’ most profound moments of knowing and in its deepest moments of collapse.
Within the vibrancy and the depths of her character she knows that ‘he’ makes the sign of a tea-spoon while she makes the sign of a wave – the poor boy combs his h
air and puts on aftershave – to compensate for his ordinary shoes!
She is walking around us now and her red shoes are alight from the glow of the red diamonds that are on the soles of her shoes …………………… no journey has en end only a beginning she told me once. When the moon is shining you will see my face in the shadows of its afterglow …… and see my red lips, tinged by the red diamonds I am wearing on the soles of my shoes and the moonlight’s pink and silver white hues …… enchantingly beautiful ….. just like me.
My jewels will show you where my footsteps are on a dark night when you lost and alone. See, there they are …….. dancing through the night into the break of a new day, fantastically bringing me to life! There I go ………..
Cath Corri
Losing Faith.
MOTHER OF ALL BATTLES
Trespass weakening her breath
the breeze is bitter from her throat.
Broken notes – a little whisper from the past
– the chaos of her soulless wild dreams –
– a backstreet lounge with a pool table –
a beach
where the sun plays ring-a-ring- a- roses
round restless little children
and the lonely leaves and the silent horde
follow a breed of irritated dog locked in a vicious den
and men sell souls for nothing more than idle pickings.
Now and then,
Rose-blooms
bloom in Auschwitz
their stain spreading
through poppy fields
and Tulips from Amsterdam.
Tall thin dancing heads –
bowdlerizing cuts that run deep through each stem.
Trespass weakening her breath,
She sighs, –
– who has not seen you
– in your glory
sitting by a Cider-Press –
your head uplifted by
the wintry wind?
Blown
like Thistle-Down hither and thither,
the dirt of the day clings to hard to her boots
while thousands of hands thread time
through a needle in a haystack,
… the slow trap of steel
wrapping itself around your heart
that beats
loudly
still
Days are hanging like ripe apples on a tree –
billiard balls not moving on the table of life.
Father time from his steep tower smiling
Indifferently.
Mother Earth
sleeping soundly in her bower while the
hours ooze life.
Mother of all battles?
‘Now Voyager’ makes me sick up my naissance,
– the early stages of a grown up little girl’s
peripatetic lessons in love!
Where the sun sets over a Western lake
on a cool day, my staunchest friends become
these heavy bones –
fast moving through the thick and thin –
children hanging, as if weighty, upon every
move I make –
a hand emerging samite white
from a bloody lake!
With an unchained will, exuberant cup of time
held in my small and unshaped hand
I bear in mind the solid astuteness
of my womanhood
– a lost bottom draw
– woollen things,
the lambs bleating cry
early morn.
– bootleg
– never worn cardigan cuddles
tied up with a bow –
– a shawl neatly stitched in
– a white cotton row.
I am replete with wisdom and economic policy –
disaster, bad weather and chaos …
seductress of the unknownthe odour of
chrysanthemums sticking on my tongue
beautiful music,
cacophony of strings,
resting
peacefully on the shoulder of the day
As Jennifer wants to get back with her ex-boyfriend
she shuffles the cards and thinks of a
battle-filed romance while the devil warns of danger
and self-deception the juggler throws our
freedom into the air …..
Eastward North West and South –
Mandala:
spiritual principles written on –
tabloid, cloth, parchment, paper chain
carried on the breeze like blowing leaves
wandering into the four corners
of the world –
Mother of all battles –
Only for herself will she weep –
though her mother
did not warn her – not a single mouthful of her air –
that she would stand upon the graves of thousands,
contracts of clients spilled – nations in mourning –
the voice of Divinity unheard yet!
in imagery sanitized by unsoiled words
his hands scarred by driven-in nails
and the mark baptismal across his throat …
she laughs upon the many scenes of horror –
no pain in a soul you haven’t got –
when midnight comes you will hear her
lonely,
weeping.
One son died in the womb,
the girl by the roadside on a boiling day –
after the loss, she took to polishing her array
of thimbles and chestnuts.
His voice – always saying this and that –
what use is a girl? She can’t even pick up a
brush to sweep, a sponge to mop,
she can’t even sew,
her fingers chubby, choppy
as her quaking shell.
Raised in a secluded cube
called home our father is a father
with a preachers tone!
A sin every second –
the promise of hell – beat out the demon
or she’ll take you as well!
In spite of that, at her edges
the mountains
and hills
a valley that is green,
blue sky
white clouds
red sunsets
and
around her feet
orange orbs
of light.
Disparate drippings
of on-going
melted grasses,
fume
of poppies,
tulip tips,
pumpkin pips
wild geese
flapping
wings
no flight
no rise
but a fall
from grace.
Her passion is a Venice gateway –
gondola dreams and un-torn days.
As her weeping weeds call out
she rails against the tall walls that wall her in –
… stories of God ascending right in front of her swollen eyes.
His whiteness a black-out
for the stars are not showing in a filament sky
only a bowdlerizing call for self-indulgence fills her heart –
swellings she can always see in the sodden earth
taste of dirt in her mouth a bird in the hand
worth two in the bush?
While moth wings chase her shadow on the floor,
the dragon’s feet dance on new dug graves
and butterflies flee the fleeting furnace of their day,
while a cup of energy emptied of the dull opiate
hangs in her mouth like a jewel
on an Ethiop’s ear –
Some witchery I think that ebbs and flows like
a still yet moving stream of magisterial might
nature’s delight coursing through these veins
like the night.
Mother of all battles bedazzling beauty
with her presence –
her arms around my waist like fairy-touch –
floura of her scent lingering for a while –
like the undisturbed passion of the wind
in a spider’s nest blowing secret wars this way
– the double-edged sword ready to strike
slashes her cheek rose-red
letting out the flood and blood of life
– nothing more than the blanched stain of nurture’s
hand on the sheet in which we she is bound –
until her exterior rag’s sashay flounce
summons up the goddess within –
Esoteric energy that is indisputably hers-
An infinite universe resting in her hair
– perched behind her in the tree the night-owl –
prophecy from the stars that have fallen from the skies
to rest upon her head.
Mother of all battles-
sleeping illuminary
guardian of my centre –
Yamadutus –
ancient escort of the soul …
With her diamonds flickering around her
fine-lined neck
on a Chimerian night she can feel the weight of a
darkness falling all around the brim of her
Summer hat frolicsome
with rainfall,
ruin,
year of the rat.
Knotted branches, twisted webs of silent sounds
going round and round in her head
as if baby breath has awoke silently rocking in this crib.
Motion sickness meandering hours
her heart a tidal wave covering the land
ice-breakers snow-topped trees wind not blowing
feet not walking foot-prints melting blizzards –
losing faith!
Heavy hearted she drops into the
slender depths of her sights-
wet and windy shores sands and castles.
Intensity of sky: light of the universe on whose face,
by night, the disorder of the world is written.
By the side of rich Autumnal sunsets she sits
her skin see-through – A Holy being –
As the mud of the earth turns heavy below her feet,
above her head, she imagines a surprising
burst of flowers and as she takes her brush
and paints loose-haired women and visions of
low-class mothers whose tongues tell tales
of white nightgowns,
suggestive of a newly wed bride,
her children come to her.
Pia Mater – flames at her feet – spread-out
like the likeness of Christ on the cross
she turns suddenly towards herself –
a sentimental domestic subject of woman born
and walking next to false gods, haughty in her sensual
clothing, she laughs!
The breeze is bitter from her throat –
– on a Winter’s day her dress is made of bird-feathers
and the seeds of the earth –
the clear glass clarity of her flattened presence
rising above it all-
dissolving like ash her skin becomes a flowerbed,
tattooed tight with thistles and thorns –
her mind an invisible clockwork orange ticking
with the juices of incivility.
As she polishes her array of thimbles and chestnuts
she rocks the cradle twice –
One son died in the womb,
the girl by the roadside on a boiling day –
lost in thoughts she refuses to pray.
Cath Corri
What novel/novelist has inspired or touched your life most and why? For me it is Toni Morrison’s BELOVED ………… unique in its style and works with history, language and motherhood in a fantastical but completely new way. Opened up Afro-American women;s writing to me and deconstructs the female literary canon. In fact, this novel propelled me into the theoretical undertones of writing from a ‘position’ – formed part of my life from 1992 and ongoing!!!!!!!!!!! changed my understanding of culture, womanhood and art/aesthetics. x
Jen Corri
Is hard to pick one novel – lots have shaped me. But for you… The grapes of wrath. Poverty/class, family/community, politics, loss, discriminination, inhumanity to man, value of human life, strength of human spirit! Love symbolism/style but more so the themes they show. The first peek to a privaliged girl with a middle class upbringing that justice is not always found – Salvation doesn’t always come, ‘happily ever after’ isn’t dependant on goodness or hardwork. People are absorbed with NIMBYlism, selfishness, missing that fundamental human gift of ‘conscience’. These were all revelations at the time – and still are! Makes me appreciate mine all the more. And reiterated what I already knew – that the love of a caring family won’t fail you, that the human spirit can and does endure way beyond. ·
Jen Corri
Do you mean you weren’t a feminist before Beloved – or that you only wrote as a feminist after Beloved?? x
over a year ago ·
Cath Corri
I became more ‘conscious’ after reading Beloved – it is a novel about infanticide, slavery – history and re-making a language to speak of the horror of slavery and all the attached elements of such a bereavement . I was studying feminist theory at the time and thought about how women are different – we were mainly taught white middle-class stuff – our only glimpse of ‘difference’ was a thirty minute viewing of the Supremes – wearing western wigs (that was to teach us how they had to fit in to Western culture. From that viewing i intensely studied Afro-American women’s writing – and that’s when Toni Morrison’s work FOUND ME!!!!!!!!!!! Afro-American women talk os sisterhood in a different way and they name themselves as ‘Womanist’ rather than ‘feminist – which i like (inclusive of men not exclusive of them) ….. wider cultural implications are considered.
Jen Corri
She’s a woman
Phenominally
Phenominal Woman
That’s Ms Toni
Am inspired enough now – Gonna use the reach of my arms around Paradise. Hope the ratio of non-oppressive, integral men is better thou? I like ‘womanist’ but took Paul B/D/P? as more of a surprise than Morrison’s standard of men.