Poem: The Day David Attenborough Found the Kraken by Meredith Debonnaire

A new poem for you all! Enjoy! This one hasn’t been anywhere yet… You are the first to see (other than my family). I wrote it on a train

The day David Attenborough found the Kraken
Was a Tuesday in June:
The sunshine was hazy,
it was half-past two.
He was on a boat out in the big blue
having a short break and a cuppa with his filming crew.
They were working on a new documentary,
looking for spinner dolphins and tuna,
when the sea began to boil
and fume
and spume.
The waves grew large and began to loom.
David stayed calm despite the unseasonal gloom:
Darkness fell swift that afternoon.
The camerawoman kept filming
as up from the deep
rose the leviathan
tentacles steep as skyscrapers,
taller than trees.
David Attenborough fell to his knees,
weeping,
and shaking with joy.
He felt once again like a little boy
as she arose, glorious, from the abyss
filling a space in his heart that he didn’t know he missed.
The boat tossed on the waves,
the Kraken bellowed at the sky.
David knew we were all saved,
though he couldn’t say why.

“And here we see,” he whispered, “that fabled beast,
“the Kraken. She is rising up from the deep,
“as she does once every three-hundred years,
“to feast.
“She is believed to herald great change.”
David Attenborough’s face was sodden with rain.
It was strange, but
She left the boat untouched.
She turned.
She roared,
the roar was such that the camerawoman’s equipment shattered.
The entire crew felt a little bit battered.
And around the Kraken gathered a flotilla of sea-creatures ready to take a stand
and as one they began to swim,
furiously,
towards land…

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That’s all for now, I hope you enjoyed my silliness. Feel free to buy me a drink through the magic of the internet should you so desire.

Guest post: Luke Eastwood

Hello and welcome back. I’ve been quiet for a while, I know. Had that post Winter Doom Festival illness that just would not stop. I’m a little better now, and thought that, to get this blog back into gear, I’d host a guest blog. A little background for you: I don’t talk about it all that much on here, as it doesn’t always come up, but I’m Pagan myself. In a sort of, still-figuring-out how I’m doing this, wandering about poking various traditions gently as I sort out what’s for me way. Part of the appeal for me with Paganism is that there’s a level of gentle anarchy in its organisation: I don’t do well with people telling me how I should relate to the spiritual or the sacred. For me, that’s a personal relationship. But I can certainly say that, as a Pagan, I consider myself to have a duty to the earth. It’s not easy, and I never really feel like I’m doing enough. Most advice that’s out there about how to help is about cutting things back, and a lot of the things that we’re advised to stop doing I don’t do anyway, or am not in a position to be picky about (I don’t, for example, earn enough money to buy local veg from a market).

So here, guest blogging for me, I’ve got Luke Eastwood who’s written a book about saving the planet. I hope you enjoy his words.

How To Save The Planet  – we are all responsible

As a member of the Pagan community for many years I’ve always had a deep interest in the environment – I grew up in the country and reluctantly helped my parents with the vegetable garden. As a teenager Greenpeace became an important symbol of change and I was fortunate to be able to volunteer for them in London.

I’ve observed over the years that many Pagans do not really live the life they aspire to on a spiritual level in the physical world. I’ve visited the homes of Pagans with 3 tvs, playstations and decorated like a consumer temple, plus a garden bereft of plants.

I’ve written for a spiritual audience, mostly Pagan, in the past but I wanted to write something that went beyond the already converted Pagan and ecological types that I often spend much of my time around.  This book is not aimed only at Pagans, it’s aimed at everyone and anyone who might have even the slightest interest in this subject.

My hope is that people will actually make decisions to change their actions after reading this and pass on the ideas to others around them. I’ve deliberately written this book to be as short as possible, each chapter is around 1000 words. The core message is very simple and I’ve tried to communicate the ideas as simply and succintly as possible. We badly need a change of behaviour as well as our thinking, not next year, but right now. This book is intended to be educational, explaining how we got in this mess, but above all it is practical – highlighting what we can do personally to be part of the change that is so desperately needed. We are all responsible for the sad state of mother Earth and it is our duty to do what we can to reverse the damage for future generations of all life that lives here.

Luke Eastwood

You can buy  How To Save The Planet at lukeeastwood.com or well-known online retailers. 50% of profits from this will book go to Greenpeace.

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As ever, you can buy me a drink through the internet. I hope to be back next week with a poem about David Attenborough.

Poem: Towpaths by Meredith Debonnaire

As is traditional, this poem has gone to Piranha Poetry, so it now comes to the blog! Enjoy!

October rain splashes down, muddled up with sunshine.
I am walking down the canal, trailing ghosts and giants
and I can barely breathe.
The trees hang low,
the trees drop jewelled water on me;
a shower of newness.
The air gets stuck in my lungs – my ghosts will not let me breathe.
I need reprieve.
I am walking the canal tailing the memories I left here yesterday
and the day before,
the day before that.
All the old versions of me who have walked this way, this path.
The sky opens, unfolds, and quivers.
It sings to me that it is circling the world,
it sings to me that it is an arched woman pregnant with burning stars.
It shivers.
it says to me that it is the ocean reflecting the sky reflecting the ocean.
It croons to me that it is a fishbowl.

I am still choking on ghosts in Autumn,
eating leaves and leaving poppyseeds scattered behind me.
The day gathers pace and springs forward,
I am tumbling headfirst into water, knowing you hold me
Hold me, hold me and
My bones are singing, telling me of marrow and blood cells and decomposition.
Your fingers hold my bones where you hold me
On the towpath;
where I dream of ducks and dread and barges.
Where I grip your head and drown you and your memories.
Where I snap your fingers and spit you out gasping.
The ground is wet and smells of cider where apples have rotted –
I will excavate you from my landscape,
dig you out and label you and leave you behind in some dusty museum cased in glass.
I have nothing to ask.

I’m trailing the memories of the mes who came before,
who walked here yesterday and yesterday and yesterday
and holding their hurts in my hands,
whispering words of healing
and picking over footprints
and leaving you the way leaves leave trees.
And it is October, the towpath is wet.
I forget my umbrella.
I know, I know I will drown you.
Tomorrow another me walks this path and picks me up
and holds me
and keens
and splits at the seams.
Tomorrow another me chases you from my dreams.
The ghosts will not choke me – these visions are all exactly how they seem.
The trees whisper and lean and the water is new.
And I am an entire landscape letting go of you.

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Update: ill!

Hello! I’m ill this week, hoping to be better soon but it’s gonna be a quiet if not silent week blog wise. Having trouble uploading to youtube as well, sods law. There’s a proofreading video intro already filmed, and I’m not sure what might be amusing as videos after that, so feel free to leave suggestions.

 

See you all soon 🙂

 

Book Review: The Axe, The Elf and the Werewolf by Alexa Duir

 

It’s not every day a werewolf gets a call on British Pharmaceuticals.

Sometimes something is just exactly what you need and this was one of those books. I’ve never come across anything quite like it and apparently there are eleven more in the series so I’m excited.

The main character is Isolde Moonfleet, a werewolf alpha lawspeaker AWESOME LADY *be still my bisexual heart* who SOLVES CRIIIMMEEESSSS (and maybe a little bit commits some)(but shhh). The world is unlike any fantasy world I’ve come across: I’m struggling to articulate what was different here, but I have my suspicions that the author is maybe a bit Pagan. The Axe, the Elf and the Werewolf managed to be a crime thriller whodunnit which also had a nuanced fantasy reality based in Norse and Celtic myth, and had some emotionally challenging relationships and romances going on (TW for anyone sensitive to coercive control in a relationship –  Isolde has a very tricky relationship situation going on which SPOILER is resolved by the end of the book END SPOILER).

I don’t know how to describe this. It will take you places. It will take you for a strange ride through Gloucestershire and Herefordshire with werewolves and selkies and fae and magicians. It will take you so much deeper than most werewolf books, into what people’s hormones smell like, into hidden histories and isolated/oppressed communities and into goddesses and deities and things hidden in paperwork. It makes you ache for a King in the North, something I’ve only ever experienced in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and this was deeper, this sudden longing for something that was totally fantastical. It will make you laugh aloud at the bloody paperwork and the slimy MPs, and snarl at the big companies doing dodgy deals.

You will be punched by reality ( I knew an elm dryad, he died of course. Dutch Elm Disease). You will hurt, but this book is so worth it. I’m excited to see where the series is going, and I have a feeling that the thing that looks like a love triangle is not going to do that…

Rating: read this book. Go and look at the moon and feel a longing.

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Video: Introduction to Tales From Tantamount

Hello! Happy Monday, I hope you’ve survived all the way into the afternoon. Here is video number three, a slightly wittersome introduction to Tales From Tantamount.  Also there’s a lovely skull in the background, isn’t that nice?

I hope you enjoy, catch you later in the week!

Buy Tales From Tantamount: https://tinyurl.com/yxu443k8
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DebonnaireMerry
Ko-fi: https://www.ko-fi.com/meredithdebonnaire

Writing Without Time: Indie October Guest Post by Meredith Debonnaire — The Passing Place

This is my guest blog on The Passing Place. It was lovely to be invited to write this, and I had a lot of fun. Check out the other contributors to the Indie October Guest Posts on The Passing Place – they’ve all been really interesting so far!

WRITING WITHOUT TIME: Being a poor indie writer trying to write while juggling with two-and-a-half jobs and the electrified zombie of your social life. I often see advice for writers along the lines of “Write every day” and “set aside two hours every day” and “have a writing room”, and while none of this is […]

via Writing Without Time: Indie October Guest Post by Meredith Debonnaire — The Passing Place