Dawn

One of the poems in Outside Looking In is called Dawn. It has three stanzas of four, four and six lines. Instead of focusing on rhymes which is what I often use to give shape to my work, either at the end of lines or internal ones, I started with three words: ‘sift’, ‘shift’ and ‘soft’.

I liked the assonance, the ‘s’ moving to ‘sh’, the ‘i’ of ‘ift’ to the ‘o’ of ‘oft’, the quiet of all three words, the way the meanings could link and lead from one to the other. I liked how the basic words could be lengthened and used in different ways – ‘soft’ to become ‘softening’ for example – or how the traditional meaning (‘sift’ as flour through a sieve, to be used to describe how the dark of night gives way to daylight).

And all this without actually thinking it through in these clinical terms. It gave me a frame on which to hang one of those perfectly ordinary, but astonishingly rare events, to focus on more than a mere happening, but on what it could mean – for others, for the me who remembers it as a child, for those who value magic.

It’s become one of my favourite poems. Maybe in part that’s because so often my poetry focuses on my autism, on making sense of what to me is an alien world, even though I’ve lived in it more than six decades. Those poems are just as heartfelt, just as honest and authentic as anything else, but time and again they draw me to bewilderment, to frustration and to anger.

This poem was a pure celebration of nature and a human’s willingness to love it. Of course, being English, it’s a celebration of weather – that’s what we English take refuge in, after all, isn’t it?

And thank goodness we can! I lived for a couple of years in Dubai. We created a garden around our house which was out in the desert. When we started, there was, literally, just sand around the house. We dug trenches, laid thin rubber hose-pipes studded at intervals with tiny nozzles and planted shrubs, trees and flowers over them. And every evening it was my job to water the plants – that was in addition to the water fed automatically through the pipes. Every evening, about two hours watering the garden.

And it repaid us. Within a year it was producing fruit and flowers and attracting birds and snakes and insects. Wonderful. Well, this particular evening I was standing there, barely concentrating, just playing the manual hosepipe over the plants when somebody threw water over me – just a few drops, but enough to discombobulate me. I glanced up and looked round to see who’d done it – our neighbours houses were several dozens of yards away, behind their own villa walls. Nope, no-one there.

So, as an afterthought (I was imagining something dumped from a plane) I looked up – and was astonished to see a cloud. The first cloud I’d seen in about eight months. No-one had chucked water on me, it was raining! I’d forgotten what rain was. It only rained on five days a year in Dubai in those days (it might have changed now with climate change) and this was, marvellously, miraculously, one of those days.

If you’re ever tempted to moan about the weather, believe me, unremitting heat and sun is boring. So bring on the rain, the snow, the wind, the sun, the damp autumn days, the quiet summer buzz – everything, I love it all.

 

And here’s Dawn:

She didn’t know she woke,

There was merely a shift into being

As chilly night was sifted to become day

And the drape of curtain softened from shaded dark to cream.

 

But there was, this morning, another shift.

She paused her breathing, thinking:

Something else had shifted out, some small thing…

It was an absence, a sifting out.

 

She heard the quiet, heard the morning

On the cusp of softening from ordinary

To a gift while she was sleeping.

And now she draws open the curtain on the new day

And sees the soft snow, sifting down,

And shape-shifting the whole world.

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