He did it

A Work in Progress
51

So now he’s done it 

was he dared on 

or did he do it

himself?

Was he lied to?

Whatever it was 

It’s now a salient fact

It was done

and he did it

and because he did it

suddenly a cease fire is possible

bringing an end to …?

what about Gaza?

what about Ukraine?

Iran and Russia are one and the same

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

Glenn Hughes Digresses

A Work in Progress
50

Lesbia’s slaves are remaking a disheveled bed, and they display another coverlet. 

This has an embroidered scene showing Lesbia abandoned by Catullus, who is sailing away across a lake where a military company is waiting on the other side.   The scene portrayed dissolves into footage of Roman cavalry (Catullus among them) raiding a town in Gaul, looting its consecrated Druid space and either killing or enslaving the inhabitants.

We also see World War 1 footage of trench warfare and Richard Aldington on a dark night leading soldiers from his company illuminated by occasional flares, moving between corpses of gas masked soldiers suspended on barbed wire, removing their dog tags.  When touched the dead fall apart.  They have been on the wire for a long time.  Some of the dead have German helmets, others British.

Next Episode (Denny Hall, University of Washington)

Glenn Hughes turns back to the class after watching the footage:

“What happened over two thousand years ago is old enough to be shrouded in myth.  Can we really distinguish the story of Catullus and Lesbia from other stories that were probably well known to a Roman audience in the time of the Triumvirate?  Stories about couples such as: Aphrodite and Anchises, Artemis and Hippolytus, Orpheus and Eurydice, Jason and Medea, Theseus and Ariadne?  In all these myths the male is mortal, not a god.  They were mortal men who loved either a goddess or a mortal woman.  In the myths, the women were depicted in ways that would fire the imagination of a warrior although in the Jason story the woman is a powerful sorceress capable of exacting revenge.  Catullus depicted his Lesbia in ways that went beyond these older treatments of women.  He set her in a contemporary location and let her appeal to his intellect as well as to his loins.  She is a mortal woman who can love and leave, perhaps more than one man.”  

“H.D and Aldington also come to mind.  It’s because I met them, I had the idea of linking them with Catullus and Lesbia.  I met H.D. briefly in Paris, I even danced with her in a night club where she had a great time with Aldington, who was also there. I’d stayed with Aldington at his cottage in England before.  I exchanged letters with both, a lot more with Aldington.  I’m selling all those letters to a library in Texas by the way.”

“There is no evidence to show that Catullus did not know Lesbia, perhaps even married Lesbia, when he was 21 and she was six years older.  There is no evidence that they separated soon thereafter.  Did she have a miscarriage?   Did Catullus go off to fight in Spain or in Gaul?  The scholars will tell us there is no evidence that Catullus was ever in a war.  But he was a high born Roman.  War was a summer job, something Romans did to get rich!  Why would he write about something so mundane?  The scholars will confirm that divorce was easy to accomplish in pre-Augustan Rome, perhaps even easier in Verona, his hometown, where his father was a prominent businessman.  Now ten years have passed, and Catullus is in Rome at the same time as Lesbia.   She is married to a very rich man and flaunts her wealth and prestige.   Catullus is dependent on his father.   He has been composing poems about her again, finding himself jealous of her husband and her other lovers, even equating her with a whore.  Just as Aldington, having rejected H.D. ten years before, may have fallen in love with her again in Paris where she was now unattainable.  Both Catullus and Aldington wrote about women in revolutionary ways.” 

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                   2025

Catullus: Critical of Caesar

A Work in Progress 
49

Though we live free we are oppressed

these are tense time my muscles know

crave a hot bath so they might unclench

wash away faraway wars I’ve no part in.

Caesar’s putting a wrench into what once worked well

now all must suffer his constant farting

oppressions of freedom cruelty to science

trampling of citizens human rights

bringing back slavery for those we made free

for whose benefit if not for our enemies.

No conquering hero he he owes Crassus his wealth

he's more an appeaser who’ll delay deciding

waiting for bigger bribes to stay his small hand

we are being oppressed there’s no peace in the land

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                         2025

Glenn Hughes Develops his Theme

A Work in Progress
48

We see Glenn Hughes teaching a small class in Denny Hall in the 1930s.  Gone are multi-media effects, instead there are pieces of chalk and blackboards.  On one of the blackboards is a triangle with names associated with the three vertices.  Aldington, Theseus and Catullus' H.D. Ariadne and Lesbia; Ezra Pound, Dionysius/Bacchus, Caesar

“Myth adapts.  While the key motifs stay the same, new tales are continually being told, founded on series of events which are seen repeated again and again.  For example, Orpheus having to plead for the life of his beloved Eurydice; and, a man loving a woman and subsequently losing her.  Either the woman is unattainable due to some circumstance or, very often, it may seem as if the man has betrayed the woman.  He might disobey the gods like Orpheus and turn back to look at Eurydice as they are about to emerge from the underworld, or, having enjoyed her favors, as did Theseus with Ariadne, he could just decide to travel on, leaving her on the shore of a Greek island.   In the play I’ve written, the young Catullus wanting to try his hand at soldiery, leaves behind a Lesbia who felt as betrayed as did Eurydice and Ariadne before her.  Aldington had to leave H.D. to go into the British Army.  He volunteered when he was about to be conscripted.  He left his wife distraught from the loss of their still-born child.  By the time he came back from the war he had another love and she was pregnant by another man.”

Lesbia’s slaves are displaying another coverlet.  This has an embroidered scene showing Theseus fighting the Minotaur and escaping afterwards by spooling up Ariadne’s thread until he emerges into sunlight again.

Next Episode (Denny Hall)

We see Glenn Hughes lecturing again – this time to a larger audience in the 1050s.  He uses colored view foils. 

 “Catullus breaks off from writing the story of Jason and the Argonauts and the marriage of Peleus and takes us by way of an embroidered coverlet into the story of Theseus and Ariadne, in particular to Ariadne abandoned on the beach at Naxos by Theseus, not the outcome she was expecting.  She had helped Theseus slay the Minotaur.”   

hen we see H.D. abandoned on Dover Beach in the moonlight by a quiet sea listening to the dull roar of artillery across the English Channel and watching the far glow of war above the far dark horizon.  

Glenn Hughes again: 

“Now Ariadne was rescued by Dionysius, God of wine and song.  Aldington would be the first to tell you that Cecil Gray, the man who got H.D. pregnant, was a poor substitute for Dionysius, or Bacchus.  Cecil Gray wanted nothing to do with the child he had fathered.   What of Aldington’s honor?  He thought the child should be named for Gray not Aldington.  But this was not the only reason for their separation.  Aldington now had another lover who was not repelled by his pent-up ardor as H.D. had been.”  

Here we see Aldington and Arabella Yorke  

“You’ll find all of this in her poems and letters.  As it happens, Aldington and H.D. will be rescued by Artemis, personified by Winifred Ellerman, otherwise known as Bryher.   This was a modern deus ex machina, but nobody recognized it as such.   Like a God, Bryher swept in and took H.D. away from poverty, away from being Richard Aldington’s responsibility into the world of servants and children’s nurses.  Now here is Lesbia, another Ariadne abandoned by her lover, an archetype perhaps Catullus does not recognize, but Virgil will confirm some fifty years later, when he will have Aeneas abandon Dido in Carthage.”

The movie shows Catullus on a ship departing across a lake, Theseus (same actor) on a ship departing from Naxos, Aldington (same actor) once more leaving H.D. in the French hotel room to go party with Nancy Cunard.  

 

Then we see Lesbia on the lake shore watching Catullus/Theseus departures and hear H.D.’s incantation from the poem Calypso: 

“O you clouds

here is my song

man is clumsy and evil

a devil

O you sand

this is my command

drown all men in breathless suffocation

then they may understand

O you winds

beat his sails flat

shift a wave side-ways

that he suffocate

O you waves

run counter to his oars…” 

“Then, another deus ex machina, Lesbia is approached by a Dionysian-like figure, one of the illustrious Metelli family, accompanied by musicians and attendants carrying food and wine.  We soon see Lesbia and Metellus having a sensuous feast on the lake shore.  Metellus will marry Lesbia and give her the status of Roman Consul’s wife.  Aldington will write a poem about her linking her to Caesar”.

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025

Ananke

A Work in Progress 
47

Episode (Trenches in WW1)

We are in a dugout.  Shells are falling overhead.  Richard Aldington is writing his love poem for H.D., Ananke, by candlelight.  We hear it being recited, interspersed by explosions and the whine of falling shells.  We hear and see images of trench warfare superimposed on images of Lesbia, meadows, streams, marshes and scented uplands, blossoms on fruit trees, bees visiting flowers.  Finally, we hear warning cries of “Gas!” and see Aldington putting on a gas mask and going up to the trench.

Ananke

In bitter sorrow and despair

I said unto my love:

‘All the far meadows, the cool marsh

And scented uplands I have searched

For blossom pleasant to the gods;

I have begged just ripened fruits

From all the pitying tree-nymphs,

Have gathered many honey-combs,

Poured wine,

Poured milk,

Poured all my words, in vain-

For yet the implacable gods

Turn their untroubled faces

Austerely from me,

Yet the cold envious wind

Whispers that no man born

Tricks the wide-open eyes of Fate’.

And seeing the pallor of her cheek,

Her fear tormented eyes and tremulous hands,

I turned aside

To check the desperate tears burning my eyes;

Then came to her again, smiling,

And kissed her lips,

Saying no word save this:

‘Do not despair’.

But yet 

I have not seen here since that day.

Richard Aldington

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                    2025

Whatever the Weather 
       for Helen Carr

A Work in Progress
46

When Helen points out heroes from Troy’s parapet 

we’re transported by words that have weathered 

inspired by muses that knew the Achaeans

that inspired our predecessors’ poets all

Helen Carr’s book: The Verse Revolutionaries

was where Donal discovered Glenn Hughes

located in Paris in 1929 pre-crash

among the literary set gathered in Paris then

A Moveable Feast describes that time

Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms

Aldington’s Death of a Hero, two novels

written in Paris were published that year

Glenn Hughes, a visiting academic with a grant

To cover expenses while researching Imagism

For his anthology Stanford University Press 

will publish in 1931 was there in Paris

his wife and child living in Aldington’s English cottage

while Aldington was attending to his affairs

with women while writing his first novel

and for a few fleeting hours re-uniting with H.D.

which she confided to Hughes in a letter 

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

Songs of South London

A Work in Progress 
45

Of Esaw, Mabel, their second son Donal,

and the Street where they lived...


                       

                          1. 

                       Dawn

A path that led from a country churchyard

became a footpath over the fields

to a stile where Donal sat and watched

the sun tip up the night's dark shields

through clodded dirt he heard the footpath

resonate   thickened with composted leaves

suggesting earth's accretion

how from all things natural beauty leaves

rain divided evenly about the stile

sunlight pared through cloud

a rainbow arched above the hedge

song thrushes sang out loud.

                           2.

                         Esaw

          Esaw's a lonely old man

          who ain't dipped his end in

          to any of that honey

          for a long  long time

          He sits on the steps

          of tenement dreams

          a waif on the edge

          of an extinct happiness

          remembering how it was

          when he talked Mabel in

          to the twenties

          when men enraged

          had marched and sung

          and he was fired twice

          for fighting

          The Fusiliers took him in

           took him to India

           he brought back brass trays

           boars tusks    pictures of the Taj Mahal.

           Esaw just sits

           a soft spoken old man

           his glass eye matched to his brown

           One day in the desert at Frenchmen's Hell

           he was blown up by a mine

           and the Ministry insisted on sending him false ones

           but the eyes they sent were always the wrong color

           Remembering how it was

           when he talked Mabel on

           to his motorbike

           and they went to Box Hill

           He sits on the steps of tenement dreams

           of piano playing in Peckham pubs

           getting Mabel to give him back rubs

           No one pays him any mind

           or the men who lie

           in the gutter beside

           drunk a century ago

                        3

                    Mabel

            Mabel was a barmaid

            when Esaw first his eyes laid

            on her charms

            her face    her arms

                   eyes that ogle

                   eyes that leer

                   men in braces

                   sipping beer

             Smiling Mabel seemed to hear

             a voice proclaim her prowess

             Esaw swung around to glare

             decided it was just a dare

             (saw that William was not there)

             While his fellows discussed the track

             spilt beer on the counter started to tack

             Esaw wondered

             if he'd lost the knack

                   eyes that ogle

                   eyes that leer

                   men in braces

                   sipping beer 

             Was William with her that other night

             when Esaw was coming home by bike

             and saw him in the early light

             in Mabel's street    suspicious like

             Esaw was a working man

             when Mabel first to smile began

             at him alone    a special smile

             that lasts    and last    and lasts a man

             eyes that ogle           eyes that behold

             eyes that leer            eyes that bind

             men in braces           a man and a woman

             sipping beer              growing old and kind

                                4

                  Ballad of The Street

              This ballad spans the many years

              that Donal tramped the Street...

              listened to her many tales

              who knew so many by their feet

              A widow lived by Myatt's Fields

              in Calais Gate    off Cormont Road

              her life was bleak as week by week

              she bore a heavy load

              Three kids were left her

              when her husband died

              one could walk    two could run

              The street could tell you which one lied

              about hiding apples in a jug

              or who drank the Christmas brandy

              which one broke his mother's heart

              which one brought her candy

              They lived in roomy Calais Gate

              the best flats for miles around

              so well built that from outside

              you couldn't hear a sound

              She wished they had stayed in Brixton

              where a motor bike was class

              not found themselves amongst

              the motorized top brass

              But homes for wounded heroes

              were provided at low rent

              so Esaw and Mabel got

              a flat from heaven sent...

              Servants bells the children rang

              when they pretended to be swank

              lots of room for silver spoons

              and trees outside    not streets that stank

              Home from the wars the soldiers came

              and motor-cycles roared

              like Esaw they tuned their Nortons'

              and pretended to be Lords

              Now William owned an Anglia

              which he drove with leather gloves

              he parked it in the City

              if you please...

              In the war he'd been a warden

              patrolling Calais Gate

              keeping watch for fires on rooftops

              from next to Mabel's grate

              Now his wife patrolled in turn

              looking for her man...

              as Sergeant Esaw once looked for him

              when he heard they were holding hands

              The street had seen it coming

              seen it develop over time

              watched Esaw   Mabel   Bill   and Doris

              acting out their mime

              Poor Esaw didn't last long

              he had a stroke one New Year's Eve

              then Bill resumed his visits

              fooled the kids with makebelieve

              But Doris wasn't fooled at all

              nor were the kids for long

              she paced outside their windows in the cold...

              Then the street knew what was wrong

              The kids were growing up fast

              to Bill they didn't take too kind

              especially when Doris

              accosted them outside

              This tale went on for many years

              before the play was done...

              and the world of childish make believe

              had several lives undone

              Now that is what divorce is for

              The Street told Donal primly

              It's wrong for a man to womanize

              before his wife so openly

             Some good advice I give to you

             who live in the world of faces

             It is the type of tread a person has

             leads to such bad consequences.

                     5

      Donal Solipsist

      Damned cold

      beside the window

      he sat up in his bed

      & he said to himself

      Donal   he said

      you're getting the thin end

      of the wedge

      The moon was grey

      under the big tent

      like a one spot dab of light

      on the deserted stage

      of a darkened theatre

      Moon swimming in a mirror

      & Donal sat in bed

      thin DAMNED COLD he said

      & WHITE

      with a yellowed whiteness

      very pale thin

      swaying buds of sun against white

      he was he said

      COLD

                     6

      While Washing Windows

When Donal worked as a window cleaner

equipped with a bucket and a bag of rags

he'd work awhile then stop and ponder

the streaks on the glass that were drying fast

Window cleaning    work all poets should try

so many moments of calm to savor

visions of the innermost eye

As once when a stranger to her darkened room

he watched her brow against the pane

touch the streetlight's glow

Remembering how her silhouette

pressed sodium yellow to the brain

he'd squeeze his sponge for another wipe

then start to work again.

                     7

          Candles

Black night studded by streetlights

streetlights running in chains

at a window pane a forehead touched

pressed despair into the brain

Eyes tilt down the running streets

streetlights like Cavafy's candles

candles for the years passing

and in the darkness    no moon

Come let us do the arithmetic of cities

the counting of souls

male and female

with an abacus count two

A soul saved is one

a soul lost is zero

binary one and binary zero

alive is one    dead is zero

Do you hear wind chimes tinkling?

ghosts are registering the dead

the dead silenced cells in your brain

cells that dissolve in sound

"Come on love

come round the corner

come and hug me

come and squeeze me

hold me tight

on the building site

Mind that shovel

mind the puddle

come on love

let's have a cuddle

Use that mug

that white tin mug

that lies there in the pool

See    it's full of lifetime's sludge

swirl it round and read our future

aches and pains and useless drudge

oh throw it at the concrete mixer".

                    8

      Said the Street

      "You came back then

      after all you said

      about people who live here

      being common    ill bred"

Yes, I came back

Donal said,

and now I abhor

envious mean-spirited people I meet

      "You came back then

      but not to forgive

      or to be one with us

      not to live and let live"

Yes    I came back

but to visit    not stay

not to be one with you

feeling pinched every day

      "Oh Donal    dear Donal

      for me you won't fall"

Your body of rubble

and muck municipal

      "Oh Donal    darling Donal

      love your lover's lane

      your old street loves you

      lie down with her again"

He slipped into bed

eyes rimmed with red

soft his eyelids closing

watched the lamp shade

soar   then glide

its movement hypnotizing

inhaled the anesthetic air of bed

his mind swam buoyant

blood bubbling with oxygen

the ceiling like a skin

opening it pores

& breathing in

               9

Street:

Ah Donal dear, wait until you're a bit older

you'll find yourself a nice girl and settle down

you haven't been in love yet have you?

not really in love      well go get yourself

a nice girl    get married    have children

Donal:

Nah nah     wot I want is a mistress

so I can get IT regular

Street:

Ooh    that's all you think about - bleeding sex

but I never get any of it DO I...you never give ME

anything DO YOU

Donal:

Wot!  you want me to lie down   give you

a bit of finger down the drain

'ere you are then    how's that?

tickles you up a bit does it

garn you randy old bitch     get your knees up

                 10

          Pivot    

Close your eyes

take convalescense

somewhere at summer solstice

a man may stand on his shadow

courage  don't weep

though a million cells broken

the moon shines in puddles

there is water in the womb

          *

Lens swivels

world spins

world turns over

sand drops down the glass

laughing knockabout tumbledown jest

in ramshackle kitchens of ramshackle rooms

while the wind shuddered once

windows trembled

the halflife of happiness halving itself

Hurry

          *

At 9B, below footsteps in a street

in dark shadows of limitless recess

rafia matting fraying under bare feet

sitting at a table    drunk to excess

writing poetry without great success

red lamplight in the windows of a door

melancholy guitar    its strings caress

an urban wilderness    bricks for the poor

          *

Because mingled strands of our thoughts

rewound themselves to a slip knot

that lay easy

because words framed lies

cars collided in mid sentence

sounds queued up for the ear

and the ear ignored them

preferring a simpler vibration

of blood

because each day swallowed more

from the stock in the cellar

that may soon empty because of grapes

left un-plucked on the vine

because lovers made love

on creaking brass bedsteads

and by-product rubbers got thrown

into a cardboard box under the bed

rhat month may have been a record number of lies

                11

Lines: Anti-Beckett

He who propels life forward to death

moaning by day and by night

to blind tides and deaf skies

pushing a wheelchair towards us

We hide from the knowledge in his eyes

for we want life to go on forever

and the sun to be always shining

and even if it rains      

we want a rainbow

                12

          END

Stopping at the milestone

in Kent's dull dawn

looking back Donal

counted miles he had gone

no sign he had been

in those streets so long

 Richard M Russell © Dick Russell

                             2025

Glenn Hughes starts to explain

A Work in Progress 
44

While some music is heard an audience assembles at the Penthouse Theater at the University of Washington.  Thomas Campion’s My Sweetest Lesbia is a suggestion.  The Director may wish the musicians to not play this piece pretentiously but animate it with brio.

An actor will shimmer onto the stage sheathed in a bedspread which another actor will unwrap.  Both are ballet dancers.  When unwrapped the bedspread becomes a screen revealing an image like that described by Catullus in his poem about a wedding.  Only this screen will depict first the marriage of Aldington and H.D. pictured on the pavement standing outside the registry office in Kensington, London and then H.D. abandoned with her child like Ariadne on the beach of a Greek island where Dionysius (Bacchus) will come to her rescue.

The dancers wrap up the screen and exit.

Enter Glenn Hughes.  He stands next to a double bed with rumpled sheets in a hotel room near the Luxembourg Gardens, in Paris.   The room is high enough that through the window near the bed the tops of trees in a small square below can be seen.

 Babette Hughes enters through the audience.  She goes straight to the bed, feels the warmth on the sheets and looks at her husband.   

“I was wining and dining Hilda Doolittle.  (At this point, the camera will traverse to the window where Babette on stage is looking out of the window down to the square below, watching the diners on the sidewalk by the bistro).  

“Down there, we had lunch at the bistro.  Where’s Mary Anne? 

(Unexpectedly, Glenn’s young wife Babette had materialized in Paris when he thought she was living at Aldington’s cottage in England with their child).

Cut to the UW classroom in Denny Hall where Glenn Hughes taught drama classes

Glenn Hughes: “She had already written a poem entitled Eurydice, (behind him is a blackboard where Hughes has chalked a triangle and written names at the three points) and once I met her, I knew that she, herself, was the subject of the poem.   For H.D., as all poets called her, had been as much spiritually crushed by Richard Aldington, her husband, as Eurydice escaping from death had been crushed by Orpheus, almost as if she had been living in Hell.”  

We hear H.D. reciting from her poem Orchard with a tender imploring voice while we see a younger H.D. and Aldington alone in a cherry orchard: 

“O rough hewn god of the orchard

I bring you an offering…

these fallen hazel-nuts

stripped late of their green sheaths

grapes, red purple

their berries dripping with wine…

I bring you as offering.”  

Then we hear H.D. reciting, as if about to pronounce a curse, from her poem Envy, while we see a young soldier just back from duty in France and desperate with battle rage violently copulating with his wife:  

“I envy you your chance of death, how I envy you this…though you clasp me in an embrace that is set against my will, and rack me with your measure, effortless yet full of strength, and slay me…” 

“She had then been abandoned by Aldington, who wanted a life of promiscuity, not responsibility.”  Here we see H.D. with a baby and Aldington walking away.  He hesitates, turns back and looks at her, then goes on his way.  H.D. is reciting from her poem Eurydice: 

“…why did you turn back…? why did you turn?  why did you glance back?  why did you hesitate for that moment?  why did you bend your face caught with the flame of the upper earth above my face?”

Next Episode (Historic Denny Hall)

We now see Glenn Hughes giving a lecture.  

“I was working on getting to know those Imagist poets I’d come in search of.  We had crossed the Atlantic by ocean liner in order to meet, among others, H.D., Ezra Pound, and Richard Aldington.   They were all to be found there in 1929 in the year of the Great Crash on Wall Street.  It was May 1929.  The crash was still months away.   H.D. was a married woman, although she lived mostly in Switzerland with a long-time lesbian lover and a series of male lovers.  Besides Eurydice she reminded me of Lesbia.  Lesbia, as the great Roman poet Catullus described her, was bold and vivacious.  You could also see that in H.D. if you got on her wavelength.  She liked to look fragile to the outside world, but inside she was sparkling with joy.   She was like Calypso once you had entered her sacred space.  You could never leave until she let you go.  H.D.’s husband, like Catullus, who wrote about Lesbia in the time of the First Triumvirate, was a poet.  But H.D. and Aldington, had been separated for 10 years.  He was in Paris too, a big bluff fellow, carrying on a very public friendship with Nancy Cunard while Nancy Cunard conducted her own affair with an American jazz musician.   Who was Lesbia?  A gentleman never tells!  But you will have already guessed, because you’ve accessed the syllabus, that she tormented Catullus.  And it was easy for me to see that the story of Lesbia and Catullus might not be so different than that of H.D. and Aldington.”  

Babette Hughes has left the stage and Lesbia enters, dressed as a high-born Roman woman of the time of Catullus.  She has two slaves with her and commands them to show her the next coverlet on the bed.  It depicts two lovers kissing by a lake shore while some old men look on.

Next Episode (Lake Garda and Paris)

A Roman Villa on the shores of Lake Garda in Italy where Catullus is reciting a bitter poem written on a scroll to Lesbia, who is kissed in public while elders pass by with disapproving stares.   

“I had long thought that Lesbia and Catullus were a Roman version of the great Greek poets Sappho and Alcaeus.  Now, I realized H.D., and Aldington were interchangeable with them, just as Sappho could have been with H.D. and Aldington, Alcaeus.  The two modern poets, H.D. and Aldington, had been married just before World War 1.  They lost their own child when it was still born.  This was in May 1915, a week or so after the Germans brought America into the war by torpedoing a passenger ship, Lusitania, causing immense death.  They separated soon thereafter.  She'd had a child by another man.  She could not bear the man Aldington had become as a result of fighting the Germans in France.  It was as if he was French-poxed by trench warfare.  

H.D. and Aldington were two poets in a series that began with Eurydice and Orpheus.  In all of them the men abandoned their women.  But the modern poets were destined to meet again in Paris.”  

We now see Glenn and Babette above the Parisian square  watching Richard Aldington and H.D. (the same actors as Catullus and Lesbia) having an intimate meal below.   Their hands touch on the table.  They rise and walk across the square beneath the trees and enter the hotel.  Glenn and Babette are seen hiding in the stairway when Aldington and H.D. pause to kiss in the doorway before entering the bedroom.

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

In Mid-May

Scents of lilac colors of columbine lavender purple 

beside a path strewn with cedar chips sun bleached

between rhododendrons some already bloomed

Fresh white blossoms beneath an early flowering bush

shriveled red blossoms near another like blood 

while multi-hued buds unfurl on an even later bush

Lush lemon-size green buds unfurling gold sheaths

enclosing gorgeous, upturned kiss-pursed red lips

becoming melon-size many stalked blossoms basking in the sun

Persimmon leaves are paler green than the walnut tree

rhododendron leaves another shade of green

holly leaves are dark with endpoint imagery 

A fountain where fortune grants free wishes

which free range crows with no saliva needing water 

pollute with peanut shells

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                         2025

What Happens in the End

A Work in Progress
43

Just an inch a year 

the ocean creeps

higher and higher and higher

we don’t mind

just as long as we get

higher and higher and higher

tariffs bite

prices rise

higher and higher and higher

we don’t mind

it makes us get

higher and higher 

it’s what we do

while rich guys rise

higher and higher and higher

we’ll get poorer

but we don’t care

getting higher and higher and higher

until we’re broke

we’ll just get 

higher and higher and higher

we’ll be homeless 

destitute

driven higher and higher and higher

we still have hope

King Trump’s rising

higher and higher and higher

he now owns space

we can see him

disappearing

going higher and higher and higher

and when he’s gone

we’ll be glad

to have him as a memory

fading out of sight as memories do

traveling far out in space

going higher and higher and higher

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

 Donal's Early Career

A Work in Progress 
42

When I was sixteen, in 1960, I l went to work at Burroughs Wellcome's chemical research laboratories in Beckenham, Kent, England where I was a lab assistant.  They gave a day off a week for continued education.  On those days, that I didn't take the train, I would ride my bicycle from Camberwell to Beckenham to Norwood two afternoons a week to attend Norwood Technical College. I'd then ride home to Camberwell.  About 20 miles all told through London traffic.

My favored route by bicycle to Beckenham took me on a private road past Dulwich College, a private school for boys with a noted art gallery and an accomplished list of former pupils including P. G. Wodehouse. On non-college days my route home took me down steep Sydenham Hill where a traffic light waited at an intersection with a main road at its foot.  I rode a fixed-wheel bike and kept up with the busy motor traffic going downhill to stop at the light.

I had started to think of being a writer and I saw a job listed in the newspaper that would mean living in a village in Kent, as an assistant to an author. I sent a letter to apply listing my current employer.  Perhaps he had looked up the Burroughs Wellcome number in the directory as I was very surprised to be summoned to the phone. This phone, in the age of landlines, did not ring in the lab where I worked but in the administrator's office.  I was embarrassed to take the call and have a short uncomfortable-to-speak freely interview with the author in front of three women secretaries.  It might have been H. E. Bates.  I wasn't offered the job, but I kept looking.

Geraldine was the young woman who summoned me to the phone.  I was far too shy to approach her but she was my age and I thought attractive.  There were two other young women in the admin office besides Geraldine.  They would mingle with the young lab assistants as we queued for our weekly pay packets. 

Those who were not salaried staff were paid on Fridays when at lunchtime we would line up to receive our pay packets which in my case was four pounds, some shillings and pence.  We were paid in cash.

The girls from the admin office were among those who assembled.  Christine, Valerie who later became engaged to Roger, and Geraldine.   Christine, a tall girl, wore a short tight miniskirt to work one Friday when we were waiting to be paid.  Roger slapped her hard on the bottom while we were standing in line.  He was that sort of person.  He later complained, a few days later, that on copulating with Christine on the carpet in the back of his van she wasn’t even wet.

Just as at school, William Penn Comprehensive School, now long defunct, my older brother had preceded me working at Burroughs Wellcome.  He was in his third year there and getting ready to leave and go to University with a grant that provided enough money a student could live cheaply.  He had studied for the needed A level certificates while taking the day release I also enjoyed.

Organic chemistry was not for me.  One day, carelessly, while manipulating some chemicals in a fume cupboard for an experiment, I managed to drip some drops of a lachrymator, stuff that makes you cry, onto one of my shoes.  Not long afterwards, I walked over to the dining hall to pick up a tray and get some lunch. As I walked down an aisle between lunch room tables I did not notice people hurriedly rising from their seats and exiting the building.  It was a warm day and the evaporating drops on my shoe were wafting behind me as I walked.  It was powerful stuff.  

I got another job as a lab technician at Whitbread's Chiswell Street brewery in the City of London.  This was a job where I could walk to The Oval underground station to take a train to work.  The brewery had cellars that dated back to Shakepearian times.  The Lord Mayor of London's ceremonial coach was kept at the brewery behind a glass wall in a temperature controlled room.  The brewery which used the drop method of fermentation was several stories high, one of the higher buildings at the time, a film had been made from the roof of the fires in the City of London one night when London was heavily bombed by German aircraft in World War II.

At first my job involved running an experimental brewery.  The chemistry of fermentation was not then, and probably is still not fully understood.  The problem to be solved was head retention.  A phrase that elicited laughter when I used it in America.  Whitbread's problem was that their renowned bitter beer did not have such a big foamy head as Watney's carbonated beers.  What could be done by varying the ingredients that go into beer to get a better head on the beer, one that would last longer and not dwindle quickly as it currently did.

My project was to run the glass brewery which had been constructed to try out various recipes.  It modeled the real brewery and descended two floors with a metal staircase around it.  I wore a white coat as one of the professional staff.  I might have been 18.  Most of the work in the glass brewery was done by a young fellow wearing a brown coat who had been brewing beer long before I arrived to take charge.  Together we mashed in and made second runnings varying the recipe and doing the best we could to provide some good samples to the senior brewers who conducted tastings.  

Using the privilege of my white coat, I sometimes wandered the old brick brewery, passing by the big wooden vats of beer on various levels, descending staircases that went by the stately board room where the Director's met down to the cellars where cobbled streets possibly dating from Shakespearian times were still visible among the storage tanks.

 At school, I'd enjoyed acting in school plays and the brewery had a drama club that put on plays it staged before audiences at a nearby theatre near the Aldersgate station.  Rehearsals were held in the evening and through the cast members I first encountered literary London.  Our manager's secretary in the new computer programing department, Mary Adams was also one of the cast and she shared a flat with Maggie Clews, an announcer for the BBC World Service radio programs.  They were friends with actors such as Tom Bell and poets such as Peter Porter. Mary would sometimes invite them to meet her after rehearsals in the private brewery bar.  On one occasion after some jovial imbibing in the bar Tom Bell made off with a bunch of daffodils from the window boxes that lined Chiswell Street, presenting them to Mary as a bouquet.  And So To Bed, was one of the plays the drama club put on.  Another was HayFever, for which I got good reviews for my part from Mary's claque in the audience.

Most of my free time was spent studying for the English "A" level exams I needed to pass in order to apply to a university college.  One of my teachers had suggested I become a journalist when I left school but I hadn't heeded that advice.  I was intent on getting a degree in the sciences.

My story is one of continuing education.  As the story goes, Whitbread management realized that it could no longer hire staff to work as clerks with quill pens now that computers were coming into fashion.  So, aptitude tests were passed around and after taking one I was selected to go to an IBM training school to learn how to be a computer programmer.  A computer room with a raised floor was being prepared to house the IBM 1440 computer that had been ordered.  It was being built in a basement approached by descending a staircase that otherwise led up to Colonel Whitbread's private accommodation in a private wing.   A refrigerator and supplies of bottled beer were kept adjacent to the cool air-conditioned computer room.  We sometimes encountered the Colonels's butler entering the building from the courtyard.

Now a trained programmer, I was sent to work at Stowells of Chelsea, part of the Whitbread Group, whose distribution center for the wines they sold to restaurants, clubs, wine bars and off-licenses was just off the King's Road.

At Stowell's, I met Bill Sowerby, who taught me to how to properly answer the phone: Russell, speaking, not Mr. Russell.  A well tailored management trainee, he seemed to mostly be a liaison between the new team of ex-IBMers that Whitbread had hired to manage the computer project and Whitbread's old-school management led by the Colonel, who had led his own paratroop regiment in the recent war and who regularly entertained the Queen Mother at the Brewery as well as organized horse racing at Cheltenham.

At Stowells of Chelsea I became acquainted with punched cards.  Besides their use for collecting information, they fit very well into the inside pocket of a jacket and it was the custom in those days to always carry a few in your pocket ready to pull out and write notes on while at the pub, say.

Punched cards are paper cards which when punched with holes encoded eighty columns of alphanumeric information a tabulator could read.  I worked on my own at night running boxes of punched cards through a sorter.  Each card represented a transaction.  Then, I ran the sorted cards through the tabulator to print a report organized by customer.  I was warned not to let my tie get caught in the tabulator which read cards at high speed.

Jim Lewis was the manager who had set up the punched card system at Stowells that was due to be replaced by the incoming computer at Whitbread.  The Whitbread Group encompassed many breweries throughout England and Jim would soon move on from Stowells to a brewery in the Shires to be the data processing manager.  In the meantime, he was keeping things running during the day managing the young women who punched up the cards from the invoices sent and payments received.  The tabulator was programmed with wires plugged into a board, much like an old telephone exchange that had many holes in front of an operator to select.  Jim had programmed these boards to produce needed reports.  Stowells was a profitable subsidiary with higher margins on its products than beer.  Eventually, some decades later Whitbread would sell off its beer business to concentrate on restaurants and hotels.

The first computer program I was assigned to write was a make-work project given to me by my manager, Michael Russell, no relation.  He had been recruited by John Dunbar, his senior, also his former colleague at IBM.  It was a bell ringing program where eight imaginary hand bells would play a tune directed by the program.

The last program I wrote was to make mulitple Cray-1 vector register instructions chime.  That was after I had quit programming to write full-time and then returned to programming several years later in order to make a living having achieved success as a poet at the expense of becoming somewhat destitute.  

A learning experience.

Dick Russell (C) Richard M Russell

                     2025

Ode to the Chicken House
         For Gina Dearden

A Work in Progress
41

There was a structure called the chicken house

well-lit maybe once a Nissen hut where she worked

nearby a caravan where an overflow guest could sleep

a quince tree in a paddock where geese flocks cackled

a dry floored shed where fruit was left to season

on spread out sheets of newsprint from The Times

a woodshed with ample split firewood for the winter

an axe and a chopping block all kept dry

her room in the big house and access to an Aga

a fridge and a wooden table where actors would sit

and chat before leaving for the Southampton Rep 

coming home later to make cocoa before turning in

her heart was inside her studio where all seemed faraway

as she mixed colors made etchings always new things

nearby ponies traveled New Forest paths, private places

in a time when many young Americans travelled abroad

some had served in Vietnam others reluctant awaited fate

four dead students had already fallen for their cause

peachie le nic was one of those a hungry New Yorker

raiding the fridge for chicken wings scooping it all in

a Columbia journalism school grad with portable typewriter 

set with an italic font to imprint onion skin paper

artists, actors, exhibitions together in the chicken house

when the sixties hit ten and the seventies began

when we were all very young when we all felt free 

in the first act of an epic we’d all been cast in

her sketchbook cover was decorated with color

Its zeit geist design still etched in my mind

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025

What Those Words May Have Said

A Work in Progress
40

Before they fell like flakes from sculpted stone

words repeatedly hammered and chiseled away 

there’s no detritus at Donal’s feet no substance

no scrap paper in a basket or on the floor

nothing to slip and slide on perhaps to fall

felled by a knock-on effect from ambiguity

a moment when the gripped chisel slips

and un-erased evidence remains

a bust of a President’s head

front lobe exposed

dementia more apparent 

ego expanding beyond all limits 

avarice unchecked

ugh…do not look, do not see, it’s far too ugly

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                   2025

Clean Coal

they’re carrying clean coal to China

those filthy train cars passing by

once bright green in company colors

now overcoated with coal dust mixed with grime

pollens and pollutants

clean burning coal from Wyoming’s open skies

to brighten China’s murk and gloom

by trains on Burlington Northern’s tracks

as far as Canada’s coal port

a highly automated process

dirty old coal train

we know who owns you

though he stays faraway in Omaha

where the fields are green

and deer roam free

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                    2025

Remembering the Nixon Era

A Work in Progress 
39

So Donal typed this poem up and sent it by U.S. Post

to the Editors of the Workshop Press in faraway U.K.

and soon became a published poet

It was 1970 and he was living in a country 

where four students were killed at Kent State

shot by the National Guard

for protesting the Vietnam War

America, USA

your buttons splay 

rising like antlers of gazelle

your coat dark

like shadow land of jungle

your buttons epitomize furtive deer

your club   impact of a summer without rain

a sidewalk canopy

of a boarded-up store

offers you shade

a shadow 

moving over the rim of sight

distorts your mirage

one hawkish eye

its lid stitched back

watches...

vulnerable to an irritant fly

Oh America

the surgeons removed your tear ducts

you are unable to cry

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

Donal Got a Job

A Work in Progress
38

So, Donal auditioned got a job in New York.

Bruce Choppin was there, John Hall

The Who performed Tommy at The Filmore East

when Donal lived in Northumberland

at Roughside Bruce visited with Rachel

only a few did that

It was 1969

Gilbert Peaker got mugged on Morningside Heights

having flown to New York from the Lake District

and the Fast Fourier Transform man

John Tukey lay with a bad back

across desks at an IEA (UNESCO) meeting

Forrest Baskett was there from Stanford

Bruce brought together mathematicians     

    statisticians     

           computer scientists 

      Donal 

                            a poet in machine language 

                                    for a mighty

                     machine

               IBM’s 360/91

Forrest said Assembly Language was too low level

impractical for IEA 

                                instead

he would choose FORTRAN

to write programs that involved scoring exam results

of multiple-choice questions marked on cards pre-punched

with the codes for country school and student

collected from all the countries participating in the study

to measure educational attainment at various ages

and that was wise advice from a Silicon Valley savant

but Donal wrote the programs in Assembler anyway

he didn’t know Fortran and there was one particular

subroutine he wrote in Assembler in Sweden 

working with Britt at the Karolinska Institute

where they read all the cards into a special machine

that invoked an Execute instruction that proved useful

Britt said in a postcard later

    Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025

To the Imagination

A Work in Progress 

37

with Respect to Cole Porter

I’ll not try to say the unsayable

express the inexpressible

write those last few syllables

that clicks it all in place

that thing that memorable measurable thing

that’s inexpressible

that’s unsayable about you

I’ll not try to say that you’re beautiful

overstate the understated you

extol all your good qualities

that made me fall in love

you’re more beautiful each time I see you

I’ll try to find words that will portray you

as you are in present moment

exemplifying truth

but every time I think of him

masquerading as a king

his shadow stands between us and the sun

casts a poor light for lettering

painting in that thing that memorable thing

that’s inexpressible

that’s unsayable about you

Dick Russell © Richard M. Russell

                    2025

Rage

A Work in Progress
36

The arc of this work in progress began pre-war 

that first World War with archetypal couples

Aldington and H.D. Ariadne and Bacchus/Dionysius

curved to include Catullus and Lesbia

passed a milestone, Ezra’s death

then found itself a century later poised

on the brink of a third world war

brought on when Empires collide

Rage

of bloodied gums

of teeth wrenched out

though you reduce them to soft muzzles

no different from your dogs

the pent-up fury of history prepares

a sweeter kiss, prepares a permissive caress

an ejaculated moment

& vaster is the emptiness of the soul without boundaries

more unanswerable those questions Helen strip-teased him with 

*

Hero leading a crowd

his banner thrust forward

his pose: bare forearmed

self-conscious

so, heroes strain forward

held back by vanity

a momentary failing

that painters cannot color in

*

the abacus was broken           lay on a building site

its once bright words bent & rusty

while the taxman counted souls on a computer

binary one & binary zero

Donal sat on a bollard with a morse key between his thighs

tapped out three dashes, three dots, three dashes, three dots

the abacus was broken

beads fell from its wire

three red ones three blue ones

each fell from the wire

came to rest

equilibrium

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                         2025

Ezra’s Dead

A Work in Progress
35

in a library aisle 

scrolls newly added…

“May I, for my own self, song’s truth reckon…”

from Philadelphia he’d traveled to Venice 

then to London Imperial center of Empire 

to found a new school like Apollonius Rhodius

writing SeaFarer in Alexandria

Ezra peered at a vaporetto’s wake 

                                  intent on its scrollable steep incline

rolling itself up to slap him awake

         silhouetted by Guidecca’s skyline 

                          standing still on a stone wall splashed by waves

                                 stopped along Fondamenta Zattere

watching how light with water misbehaves

           reflecting Redentore’s dome that day

                           Out for an ice cream one bright October

he sat outside an ice cream shop

oblivious of all in sunlight silent

while Ginsberg solaced his sins

heeding lyre playing Orpheus well

Eurydice wailing that life is hell

that scroll snapped shut

Ah Tony, you would have done better elsewhere

with better material 

nobody ever noticed those doors on bronze pivots

opening to let English go where it now resides

when it isn’t in Italy

where spaghetti 

shot from six guns

conquered Hollywood’s great

Ah Tony you would have done great in Milan

with design done by gifted Etruscans

you could have gone to France to see Merwin

Newcastle might have been more fit

going further north into deeper warmth

there is Edinburgh

Paris of the North

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                   2025

Then

A Work in Progress
34

Basil Bunting was in Northumberland

Samuel Beckett in Paris

William Burroughs in London

Ezra Pound was dead

and according to peachie, burroughs told him:

words are chemicals

& effective words are those that impinge

on the consciousness 

and are reinforced 

by

a rich mind reagent

just words alone

as dangerous as LSD 

creating fantasies

just like AI

                          

the sea spat stones onto the beach

on the night of storm sand girdled the stones

stones lay

day        night

                        traversed by stars

         the land

         recumbent

        nude

        drowning

songs of silence breaking on beaches

polyps coral world

from the mountain

views of the sea

storm of spume & white water

song of noiseless silence

deep in your depths

(

&

in the morning

high snow topped the sierras

gleaming day of mules

pine trails wands of bamboo

oxen & horses

bells jingling

hooves 

on the beach

wound & woven

safe kept in softness

there

& there

there

)

kelp    tow    pebble    strand

gull        urchin               anemone

fretful follows the sea

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

Fragments of Papyrus

A Work in Progress
33

Those times too few…

I’ll write them as I think they would have been

when Kalliope’s primal scream

awoke her sisters 

sensing her son in torment

torn apart by impassioned women

urged on by Aphrodite

riddle me riddle

arm in arm jauntily

Dionysius and Ariadne

kicked a tin can along the pavement enjoying the noise 

they felt like making

peachie le nic has been cast in this play 

his wife Claire as Ariadne 

jilted by Jason

now making merry with this half-pint

who met her in a pub off the Edgware Road

where a younger crowd hung out

to me

pass

to me again

goal 

beautiful goal

    & the cow jumped over the moon

                                                           tra la

cut the wires of the abacus

twang

they looked at each other as if to say

where are we going?

In life?

he emptied his bladder against a wall

his bladder throbbing with grateful release

as arcs of steaming piss traversed the night air

a window opened

a policeman

a fine wall to piss against

let the piss spurt urgently like rampant garden hose

irrigation of brickworks

amidst the concrete and the choking weeds a pale flower slowly died

piss piss

gave back to the ground its debt of life

splashier piss

take aim at the window

alas, not enough pressure head left in the bladder

dying gurgle of fountains

turn the cocks off

zip

*

Tony Selina dropped by 9B Cabbell Street once 

when the nights were drawing in

we were hanging out in the kitchen

peachie was there

Claire making tea 

we were smoking and chatting

                      Charlie Waite    Jessica too

              Bob Ellis passed round a joint

Val waved it past after one quick drag

                        David Horne took her share

Sen was there also Yvonne

Tony Selina said

the sound of water heating in a kettle 

                              was what he looked forward to 

                  when he came home

        and Bob looked up from rolling another joint

                                said he’d been having tea that same afternoon 

with the Beatles talking about going on tour 

                    to take photos and over mugs of tea

                                    in a simple sandwich place

it was all very normal 

he said

                      &

Claire 

          brought Tony a cup of tea

  and Tony stayed awhile

            because she made a second pot

but then he had to go

                    he was unrequited in love then

Tony said Roughside was too remote

impractical for him                              

he chose to live at Robin Hood’s Bay

instead

at that table

every evening 

in the kitchen

seemed a feast

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                                          2025

  

Hope 

Our Swainson’s thrush singing in the woods

A free bird unheard by those enslaved by headsets

Words erect meaning without benefit of mortar

no need to mix water, cement and lime

stories emerge turn to myth over time

transform, fragment, mother becomes daughter

father becomes son tragedy laughter

stories repeating over and over

dry-stone walls won’t crumble will outlast

masons that built them won’t become rubble

unlike words on paper or papyrus

physical media known to decay

digital media it’s here today

tomorrow who knows what will be outcast

So shall I speak of a world without wheely bins 

where wooden ships once sailed

where honor was most of the law

beliefs in only in what you saw

for the world was a mythic place

of witches, warriors, tyrant kings

where pottery was precious

there were no disposable things

just half lemon rind spoons impaled on twigs

except masonry there is no trace

but words describe it

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                         2025

Mathematics & Metaphor

Consider the magic of numbers

how they multiply and divide

clothed in symbols

Consider 

nine times nine

and know my age

Consider the sinuous shape of an integral sign

inferencing meaning from ambiguity

metaphor making magic

a digital twin that can 

be imagined

or re-imagined as a woven sheet

where nodes are interconnected

like so many cobwebs on a hedge

in the morning dew

Consider the wisdom of an integral

a value of all that you have known

perhaps St. Peter checks

Consider a thicket of dark spiked holly

green thick with red berries

then feel its pricks

as you push past its leaves

on an overgrown path that leads to a gate

that opens to poetry

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                   202

The Garden of the Golden Valley

By Tu Mu, Tang Dynasty

Prosperity

          lavishness

like scent 

         just gone

Water runs on

grass grows each spring

in the evening breeze

birdsong sounds sad

Falling petals

a fallen beauty

once wrinkled

one’s gone

translated by David Sen and Dick Russell

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025 

Of A Fallen Flower

By Chang Hu, T’ang Dynasty

A full moon is shining

through the branches of a tree

in the palace courtyard

she sits staring 

at a bird on its nest

her eyes shining

she slides out the long comb

that held her hair rolled

to keep a moth away from her lamp

but who will save her from despair?

Translated by David Sen and Dick Russell

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

Upon the Tower at Yu Chou

By Chen Tzu-Ang

Heaven and Earth are separate

I cannot see great principled leaders past or unborn

Viewing a vast landscape from up high

Confronted by loneliness and dew falling from the sky

Translated by David Sen & Dick Russell

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                         2025

For Michael March
1947 - 2025

A Work in Progress
32

(better known to Donal as peachie le nic) 

                                                

a flagstone path    moss in places     lichen

well made for constant traversal beside our home

ten wheelbarrow loads to the herb garden

three beds replenished with black wormy loam

down the slope of the hill to the dogwood tree

where the path steepens and forks three ways

takes you near, far, and faraway from thee

into other domains each wilder, may

you safely return who go that way now

there’s work to be done out on the border

or, if you venture without knowing how

into tangled tumbledown disorder

outside the gate on our property’s edge

beyond the prickles of our holly hedge

Dick Russell

Copyright © February 18, 2020

Thinking of a Dear Friend

By Chang Chi, Tang Dynasty

Last year

you led your soldiers out from the city

I watched for your return

but you did not come

there has been no news of the campaign

you just vanished

beyond the walls

I was going to commemorate you in the temple

but I can’t believe you are dead

I know so little

less even than your horse

he may now honor your standard

he may now graze by your crumpled tent

we will be apart forever

like life and death

what can I do?

except grieve for you

wrench my gaze from the far sky

Translated by David Sen, Dick Russell

 Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                          2025

A Blank White Page - for Pierre Joris (1947-2025)

A Work in Progress
31

A blank page invites written words to bring

purpose to the page next to each other

ruled lines park words where they’re easily found

by the eye or by fingers if embossed

braille on stiff paper touched by fingertips

either way by sight or by touch words matter

A blank page invites written words that won’t

disappear so try your best choose wisely 

knowing words scanned by AI for sentiment

may incur an unfavorable weighting

if read from a certain perspective

intolerant of other perspectives

A blank page invites words that profess

love puts value on forms of expression

value puts price on some product or service

that resist that disdain that drool a trail

like a snail headed up the windowpane

for no reason than to rise always words rise

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

Leah’s Trunk

A Work in Progress
30

Cord wood split and stacked while green

in May while waiting for news from town

Leah’s hair tied up in a yellow scarf

the color of fresh hewn alder

wood smoke scenting sunlight

sunlight ageing alder

finches perched on thistles

spreading thistledown

Donal was advised to avoid green suits

in business if you want to make them buy

dress for success with dark suit and tie

don’t wear clothes from which buyers will shy

northern harriers hunting a marsh

redwing blackbirds nesting in cattails

cutthroat trout in the shallow stream

a kingfisher by the pond near the beach

longer days warmer weather

emergent bumble bees

daffodils hyacinths

house finches warbling

well-seasoned wood

a year quickly past

Leah’s cabin now vacant

Still no news from town

We bought a trunk from Leah

for she was traveling light

leaving to live with an artist

down the coast and out of state

a capacious blue trunk

for toys and winter clothes

a platform for a doll’s house

for tea parties for scones

then came news that Boeing would buy

a seven-million-dollar list price deal 

for a Cray Research Cray-1

with full commission being quite a sum

wood smoke scenting sunlight

sunlight ageing alder

finches perched on thistles

spreading thistledown

after a dry spell it rained

plants that weathered well thrived

sudden growth seemed obvious

as if Persephone unbuttoned her blouse

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                     2025

Origins

A Work in Progress
29

I’ll close my eyes on a rainy day and choose a sun drenched cricket field edged by shade trees where leather meets willow and there’s watercress not far and a brook where a nymph lives that should a cricketer come in search of a hard hit ball he might spy it at the bottom of a deep pool that should he reach in to grasp would be too far for an arm to reach and she’d soon have him in her grasp

While fronds ripple in the splash

And find young Donal on his little bike riding pell-mell into the park through the wrought iron gates to fling himself down on the grass inside and hide behind his bike from the police car stopped outside the gates he’d just whizzed in front of risking scratch of paint

Sing to me muse as once you sang 

tell of Penelope in a nightie telling her son

he never slept, Odysseus, he never slept

with pajama bottoms on

So, Donal’s mother told him one day his father slept

but he had died. He felt unhugged afraid of touch 

flinching from contact with her skin

his mother's love had not outlasted him

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                     2025