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1. |
Doing the Garden
07:12
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I am doing the garden
Probing and slicing
Tearing and slashing
Toiling away
I am doing the garden
There is a resonance
With the gardening when I was at mother’s
Back in the day
I am doing the garden
As I did back then
With clippers and mower
In the garden alone
For one did the garden
And for me back then
I was avoiding
A jungle at home
I was in the garden
Giving some order
To that which, if left
Would overcome us
Morning or evening
Doing the garden
Not a garden, mind
Like those down the road
Doing the garden, I was
But no mini landscape
Of fluorescent flowers
Or lawn line-mowed
No , not like those down the road
I was doing the garden
Keeping wild sprouting within
Boundaries acceptably good
To avoid catastrophe, I see
Now, I was doing the garden
While those in the house
Wept, as they would
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2. |
Banks of Sweet Italy
02:38
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And must you go my flower my gem
My laughter and my hope of joy
To follow fortune through all the world
Make luck pursue you my darling boy
The sun shines bright in France
Yellow it shines on high barbaree
O be my light of day
Tarry not long on the banks of sweet Italy
A golden ring is a precious thing
Red stockings and shoes of green
A dwelling place with painted door
A wide white bed to love you in
Summer's gone with calm days
Ungentle now is Biscay Bay
A cold fear claims my heart
God save all sailors from the cruel waves
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3. |
The Moths
03:43
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Your corduroy jacket. And the striped cravat
I’d bought to celebrate us buying the flat in Looe
The moths, the moths, the moths
Have eaten what was left of you
What was left of you.
What was left of you, I’d hung in the attic
Where they ate their way through.
Your dried sweat, slept with you and then died in your hat
The moths, the moths, the moths have eaten what was left of you
Your corduroy trousers and the striped cravat.
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4. |
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5. |
Harmonium
06:18
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Give me your pocket
In which to place
A little of my history’s feeling
So it won’t go to waste
Wherever you are
I know this will find you
But I won’t be long
I’m always just a little behind you
Sometimes I detour through those lanes
With my shopping list
Hoping to trap some experience that I
In the meantime might have missed
A faded suede jacket
An ill-fitting shirt
Which shall I wear?
Which is worse?
But there’s an odd conflagration
I was told
That comes about you
When you get old
I’m chasing through others’ feelings
Ditching the medics, opening the clam
But with the microscope of doing so
I’ve forgotten who I am
I noticed his openness
His honesty that night
With me in the old, old room
Lit solely by firelight
Not the last throw of the dice but
The last wheezing of breath
A last grasp for connection
Though he’d be satisfied with much less
Here are the time’s possibilities
If you see them, you can walk in
A landscape contravening one
Of guilt, of blame, of sin
And in your pocket
You will find my folded note
Journaling a time
When I was just about afloat
Through automatic writing
Or lights high in the sky
Or via a leaf that flutters with no reason
I expect your kindly reply
And the open skies are watching
Benevolent and grand
They gave me writing materials
With a warm squeeze to my hand
Sometimes the gentle tides of yesteryear
Raise me to my feet
When I’ve no data to enter
And I’m ready for a little sleep
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6. |
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7. |
Pantglas
04:25
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At Pantglas
The lights are out
The phone is cut off
For good
There are voices
Clear, youthful
Rung with feeling
That are silent
The wheeled track
With ruts down
To the hill’s stone
Has overgrown
No tiny windmill turns
The ancient solar panels
Long ago sold
In Exchange and Mart
And still time takes me
Both green, still, and dying
To that height
When this was not so.
I was 18-years-old and not long after we went up the hills to Pantglas. I have no idea how we got there. Did we walk? Did someone drive us there? It was the first of many journeys. The place was powered by what we’d now understand as the most primitive means of producing what was called, then, natural energy. There was light, but little else. And I remember playing my songs, innocently, as if they knew this time in this place belonged to them…and all listened, and why? Because I was young and earnest and so were they and we were all filled with the spirit of this time and place. It would have been autumn. We walked the five or more miles down from the hills, not knowing the way exactly and having no torch, but we were carelessly hopeful. Soon, this time ended, and different needs and different passions occluded those present on that evening. Now, every aspect of it has gone.
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8. |
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9. |
Jazz Evening
03:09
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They’d come for a wedding, they said
From West Yorkshire. Huddersfield, I think they mentioned.
Soon – early in the conversation –
We were told that the full-haired - short-cropped – gentleman of seventy-ish, I’d guess
Had a grandfather who had been headmaster
Of a noted school in this historical city
Jazz had been advertised. And indeed
A more than decent pianist, who I’d describe
As (rugby) stocky more than obese, was laying down chords with his left hand
While, with his right, he played and then improvised around each melody.
Sat next to him, also in her thirties, his playing partner:
A nimble-handed, fluid-fingered woman
Fretting neat patterns on a low-actioned Fender Precision bass
When returning from the…lavatory (as I imagined he’d call it), the headmaster’s grandson
Offered his hand to the woman of another couple of similar age
As the jazz duo had moved on to old TV favourites
After an interval which the piano player had introduced
Via saying how much he and his musical companion were enjoying themselves
And if we were too, that was a very good thing.
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10. |
How it was
04:30
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This is how it was
A sky cloudless
Full of planets and stars
When I went outside at night
Looked up at the Llanfair sky
Oh Mary, Jesus, the gods of all times
Here I am. Now I join you
Here I am
This is how it was
All things were possible. Life in the spirit
The Spirit will guide us
And the light of the constellations
Will be my light
As I go through
All my days, all my days
This is how it was:
A massive care curved in light
With unending possibilities
The night visited upon me
Here you are, Jon
This is how it is
The universe is outside you
As it is within you.
It was within me
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11. |
The Witch Trials
06:23
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They had trials for the women
Someone thought to have cursed the stock
Killed the infant in the cradle
Brought the drought that had wrecked the crop
And the learned argued from criteria
From the factors everyone knew
To decide if the scaffold should rise
If the medicine was a witches’ brew
It was not the mob. It was systemic
It was an accepted part of life
There were lawyers, the brightest minds
Doing what they thought was right/Doing what they genuinely believed was right
Protecting the community
With a moral compass. Sensitive and stern
Pouring over pertinent historical cases
To discover what they might learn
On the table lie the documents
Beautifully scribed with the neatest of hands
Decisions made all could agree on
On the basis of what each could understand
They had trials for the women
For those accused of killing the stock
Thank God we’re rid of all that superstition
Now the brightest minds science have got.
In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the leaders were elected by the freemen of the colony.
In the Bury St Edmunds trials, eminent thinker and Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir Matthew Hale drew on supportive evidence (i.e. to conviction) from philosopher and scientist Thomas Browne (1605-82) who, in turn, was influenced by the work of Bacon. Hale himself was one of the most influential authors of the 17th Century. His legal writings became a critical source even years after his death. One of the two Lowestoft women convicted at Bury St Edmunds, Rose Cullener, was condemned in part due to empirical evidence in court that she was able to open children’s clenched hands (which was seen as a sign of daemonic impact) through simple touch, while others could not through any means, and that she could do this even when the children’s heads were covered with an apron so all to make all ‘touchers’ ostensibly anonymous.
[Quaker, Thomas Maule, commented upon the trials: ‘It were better that 100 witches should live than one person be put to death for a witch, which is not a witch’. Maule was imprisoned for twelve months before a trial found him not guilty].
‘By the end of the sixteenth century most educated Europeans believed that witches, in addition to practising harmful magic, engaged in a variety of diabolical activities’
‘Now it is important to note at the outset that these witch-beliefs, all of which concern the relationship between witches and the Devil, were mainly the property of the literate and ruling classes and not the common people’
‘The great European witch-hunt could not have taken place until the members of the ruling elites of European countries, especially those men who controlled the operation of the judicial machinery, subscribed to the various beliefs concerning the diabolical activities of witches…’
(All: The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe’, Levack, 1995 (2nd Edition))
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12. |
Shiloh
05:00
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13. |
More Than Tired
04:33
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I am more than tired. I am spent
Looking at the fishing boats
And the movements of the sailors
Are they landing their catch?
With the sun having fallen over the hill
It is cooler, but tolerable, tolerable
As I look on
And I am thinking of the banks of Italy
Where I found a huge longing
For the waters of home, and those I love and miss
Thinking they do not know how much I love and I miss them
And I imagine them toiling there
On the banks, on the banks, on the banks
Of the sweet Ebbw
I had a period of singing on stage. It’s not
Something I do much anymore. And I don’t know
What it was, but I was clutched by a deep sense of loss
Maybe the artifice, meaning the abandonment of the song of my heart
For what do I have if I lose the truth of song?
And again I thought, of those I loved, and their distance from me
On Italy’s banks
Here I am. Watching the sailors
With their well-drilled procedures
I am tired. I am spent
To watch this is the best I can do
And right now to report this fact to you
It is the best, it is the best, it is the best
That I can do.
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Jon Airdrie and the Enablers Newport, UK
The Enablers is a band/project having the central notion of bringing a core number of people together to fashion a collection of songs, and then to record these songs, capturing the mood of the time - the mood both of the compositions themselves and of the band for the project's duration. To date, there have been eight Enablers. ... more
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