It's a good thing because it gives me more time to work on Real Port Talbot, a book I've been commissioned to write about my hometown in South Wales, which will be published in November 2013. And you know how one project can easily and excitingly lead into another.
And it's a sad thing because I will miss this concentration of poetry, your voices, our conversations on this blog.
But the AppleHouse site will remain up for people to browse through. These have been wonderful years and there will be more in the future, I am sure.
Let me leave you with the following poem that appeared on The Writer's Almanac today.
Keep saying it too. And stay in touch.
L xx
Saying It
Saying it. Trying
to say it. Not
to answer to
logic, but leaving
our very lives open
to how we have
to hear ourselves
say what we mean.
Not merely to
know, all told,
our far neighbors;
or here, beside
us now, the stranger
we sleep next to.
Not to get it said
and be done, but to
say the feeling, its
present shape, to
let words lend it
dimension: to name
the pain to confirm
how it may be borne:
through what in
ourselves we dream
to give voice to,
to find some word for
how we bear our lives.
Daily, as we are daily
wed, we say the world
is a wedding for which,
as we are constantly
finding, the ceremony
has not yet been found.
What wine? What bread?
What language sung?
We wake, at night, to
imagine, and again wake
at dawn to begin: to let
the intervals speak
for themselves, to
listen to how they
feel, to give pause
to what we're about:
to relate ourselves,
over and over; in
time beyond time
to speak some measure
of how we hear the music:
today if ever to
say the joy of trying
to say the joy.
to say it. Not
to answer to
logic, but leaving
our very lives open
to how we have
to hear ourselves
say what we mean.
Not merely to
know, all told,
our far neighbors;
or here, beside
us now, the stranger
we sleep next to.
Not to get it said
and be done, but to
say the feeling, its
present shape, to
let words lend it
dimension: to name
the pain to confirm
how it may be borne:
through what in
ourselves we dream
to give voice to,
to find some word for
how we bear our lives.
Daily, as we are daily
wed, we say the world
is a wedding for which,
as we are constantly
finding, the ceremony
has not yet been found.
What wine? What bread?
What language sung?
We wake, at night, to
imagine, and again wake
at dawn to begin: to let
the intervals speak
for themselves, to
listen to how they
feel, to give pause
to what we're about:
to relate ourselves,
over and over; in
time beyond time
to speak some measure
of how we hear the music:
today if ever to
say the joy of trying
to say the joy.
