It's getting on for five years since most of us said our hasty farewells on the sudden closure of Red Room, surely the grandest literary salon there has ever been. It was a forum for stimulating debate and the time of day, where writers could post blogs and advertise books in respectful company which was representative of many nations and backgrounds and levels of achievement. A truly cosmopolitan place.

This is what I wrote back in 2014:

Okay, I'm trying to smile...

I just wanted to say goodbye in this forum and to thank Ivory, dear Hunti, and all the team for their part in making RR such a fantastic experience and an astronomical learning curve in the best possible sense. Little did I expect', when, having returned to authorship in the 'noughties' and was seeking showcases for work, that I'd stumble upon such a warm, vibrant, cross-cultural, wise, inspiring, dynamic community. You know - I have to say this - it never really was about fame and selling books...for any of us. It was about recharging, sharing and discussing what there was no occasion to discuss in the busy context of 'real time' and the obligations of our daily relationships. It was about examining what really made us writers in the first place and affirming who we are as individuals.

Make no mistake, the warmth, friendship and appreciation I have received in this wonderful cyber salon have been life-changing. And no way would I have thought of producing a book of poetry (with two more in the pipeline!) without it. Like the old pioneers, I have crossed many frontiers in the New World!

I wanted it to go on for ever.

So thank you team and Red Room friends from the bottom of my heart. I wish you all the very best. We shall meet elsewhere, I am sure.

Now it is time to look to new horizons, braced by having known... This may be my last post, but it's not the past lost.

That was then.

A few days later, some of us boarded the Green Room barque and set sail on a voyage of our own. Sometimes the waves roll and sometimes there is a tempering breeze. It matters not. Several of you have called this vessel 'a refuge', 'a haven of peace', and have been brave enough to embrace a different technology. So I want to say thank you to the loyal bloggers who value this space and to tell you how much you are appreciated. It would be lovely if a few of those other writers who, at the outset, signed up with us to comment only, would share a post or two of their own. It's a great way to keep in touch!

Image courtesy of 123rf (modified)

Diamonds dazzle Lord Nelson’s hat,
that vintage oak wind-sculpted on the hill.
Light-pierced from a bold, all-seeing sun,
it nobly ponders summer's embers.

Bronzed acorns slip their leather cups,
reverberant upon the ground and proud
their forebears made those 'wooden walls'
on crescent tides that drove invaders back.

Sheep browse a hoof-worn treadmill,
eschewing thorn and thistle where random seed
may take no root, no quarter gained by rising
verdure in the evening blaze of history's days.

Wind burns its timeless song into the soul,
clouds flee to brood and congregate elsewhere,
earth braces for a remnant harvest home.
Another spring, another life, another year...

But Michaelmas is bright with angel mist,
the ether wired with energies of beating wings.
The blinding circle inches westward, a whirling
cursor poised to link to otherworldly scenes...

 The tree in winter which was the poem's inspiration

from Mysteries of Light (collection in preparation)

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover
that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

In summer, the song sings itself.

William Carlos Williams 

 I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days,
three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.

John Keats

Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.

Rudyard Kipling

The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.

Abraham Lincoln

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift;
above all it teaches entire trust.

Gertrude Jekyll

How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence.

Benjamin Disraeli 

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Cicero 

 
Then followed that beautiful season... Summer....
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 The garden is the poor man's apothecary.

German Proverb

 Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps;
Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvest reaps.

A. Bronson Alcott

Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.

Pablo Neruda

Garden as though you will live forever.

William Kent

The second of two passages from Next Year In Jerusalem

Frustratingly, my eagerness for adventure was no measure of my ability to keep pace with the high spirits of the rest. Dr. Jennings had forbidden me to dance. At Christmas, I danced solo in the pantomime we put on for our patrons and almsgivers and a lady from the audience was so taken with my performance she offered to arrange proper tuition. Nadia, her name was, a gamin creature in red fox fur up to her ears, a real ballerina, Reverend Mother had emphasised, and a member of the Rambert company. “Such an honour, Angel. You are blessed.”

It was a fairytale come true. Little had I thought to become what I most longed to be! Undaunted by the discipline, I practised my steps morning and night. Madame Minoret at the ballet school was amazed by my progress. A natural, she had confirmed to Nadia, an empathetic dancer, whatever that meant. And Nadia had twinkled. “We shall see what we shall see,” she said.

But Dr. Jennings had come along and put a cold stopper upon my ribs and squinted down his aquiline nose and warned that the dancing must cease. All strenuous activity was to be avoided.

“A slight heart murmur,” he confided to Sister Agnes, relaxing his stethoscope. “Nothing to be unduly concerned about at this stage. However, we had better play safe. Eh, young lady?”

During the night, I went down with a fever. Dr. Jennings was summoned and diagnosed a severe attack of ‘flu. Alarm grew when I failed to respond to treatment. For two days and nights my condition did not abate and even in delirium my toes formed points under the covers. On the third day, the crisis passed. I surfaced, clearer-eyed, to a new world of textures, tastes and sounds. The acuity of my perception was startling. It was as though I had been recast in another mould. The calm relationship of objects, after the storm which had imparted a sinister meaning to them, moved within me a remote happiness. I found myself in the sick bay, in a large bed high off the disinfected linoleum, with Felicity Rag-Doll ailing beside me and a painted Tau Cross on one wall and the Sacred Heart of Jesus on another, inflamed and bleeding, and the Michelangelo Pietà on a third. Down the corridor, Mildred Semple was practising her piano pieces. I sat up and flung the blankets aside. But the second the floor touched cold to my foot, I remembered. How I pined for my lost freedom! It was torture not to be able to take flight and dance, like being a bird and having your wings clipped.

Life was never the same again. All I did involved undue effort. I tried not to give in but tired quickly. What I hated most of all was being left behind like the lame boy in The Pied Piper of Hamelin, forever shut out of the enchanted kingdom inside the mountain because he couldn’t keep pace.

In the garden, I looked on dispirited, while the hole dilated at my feet and my companions alighted on the rewards of their industry. Several blue glass beads were found, an old clay pipe, its bowl still intact, a tortoiseshell comb and a bun penny. As the afternoon wore on, we lost all track of time and place until we heard Sister Agnes calling us across the snow.

Thomas hitched his spectacles up to the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and consulted the position of the sun. “Right men! Pocket the booty! It’s a long trek back to base. Look lively, Novak, or you’ll be spending the night in an eighteen foot drift. Wolf-fodder, that’s what you’ll be!”

We followed him, our Wellington boots cutting a swathe through the smudged lawn. Already the snow on the terrace had melted. A thrush sang in the apple tree stippled with green. The conservatory threw back a pale sky splashed with flame. It was warm. The air smelled of spring and of picnics postponed, of an outing to the sea if we were lucky. Tomorrow all trace of snow would be gone.

It was as we were stamping our boots, about to file in, that a resounding thud drew our attention. A young blackbird had collided with the window and lay, a tumbled heap of feathers, on the path. I darted to his rescue, but it was too late! He fixed me meekly with his beady eye and lapsed, quivering, into stillness. I stretched out a finger and stroked his soft wings. He was as warm as my own flesh and blood, poor scrap, so deceived by the reflected universe. I couldn’t take it in. I fell on my knees and moaned and rocked to and fro and refused to be comforted. How could I bear such passive obedience to order?

That night, I had a nightmare about the hole in the garden and how it could be made good before Simms found out. I awoke, sobbing, to the recollection of yesterday and that precocious silence about which I could never speak.

Image courtesy of Carl Bovis