THE LAST NIGHT, A NIGHTINGALE by Vahni Capildeo

You begin with a design:

the artist’s strokes

a kind of preening that elicits

frictive glosses from your close-up wings.

Whoever drew you also caged you,

this freehand desert-colour time-box

partly pinkish, like your eggshells.

Through a set of lilac lines,

and dawn, and dusk,

you look sideways.

Sweet, invasive and entirely silenced thing,

I’ve company to place beside you –

not yet.

Passerine bird,

in your passage from Persian to English

you’re no longer a nightingale, though you’ll warble

and curl your toes.

While you perch,

I’m minded to bring you a tree and a night

and a song to be yours: the memorable one

flung out by your namesake from a moonstruck twig

that time our deaths were forecast on the news

so we went for a walk, and rested in you

our everything lyrical forever.

Emperor by Nick Owen (second draft)

Just a sketch

Guidelines for street art

A welcome for the Spanish Governor

And the most compelling object in this old museum

These are the lines of battle                                 

Lines of sorrow

And defeat

No face has endured more

His eyes

Look back into his soul

Look outward in fear

His will to power holds him hanging by a thread

His lips

Set firm

Are yet resigned to what must come

The crown sits awkwardly

Tipping backward from his forehead

Ready to fall

He knows nothing of surrender to the Self

He holds high his sceptre

An almost empty threat

A sword without an edge

He will never know the peace of letting go

His body bent

Right foot inching forward

His head torn sideways

Death distracts him from left field

Armour and authority

Hold no sway with this assailant

The orb, the world

Held in his hand

Is eaten by shadows

His liver is all shadow

This wounded King knows

Nothing of the grail

His inner world

His outer world

A wasteland

Only fear

And an ego of steel

A habit of rulership

Fight off the darkness

He needs to feed on the world he mastered

Draw its mother milk to his embrace

No sustenance comes

Soon he will be food for worms

Despite his conquests in this world and time

He must return again to dust and slime

For in this portrait we can clearly see

He found no moment in eternity.

©Nick Owen 2013

Updated Readings for June gallery Readings

Gallery readings for June 15^th

12.30-13.45      14.30-15.45

Poet                  Name of poem              Object                         Gallery

Gabby Tyrell            Netsuke (Manju)                    Netsuke                                      ?

Nick Owen                Emperor                          Emperor (Rubens  sketch)         Dutch gallery

Jennifer A McGowan    Morning at the Maru-Aten Temple  pavement painting          Egyptian Gallery

Andrew Smardon       Aestel                             the Alfred Jewell            Room 41 England 400 - 1600

Giles Watson            Morrigan         Bronze Raven's Head- Shaped Spout,                                                                                

                                                                                  First Century B.C. Hod Hill, Dorset.  Gallery 17                                                                                                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                        (European Prehistory)

Olivia Byard       In true Colours.    The forest fire by Piero di Cosimo     Renaissance gallery.

Diana Moore    PAN AND HIS PIPES          PAN LISTENING TO ECHO                        WESTERN ART, GALLERY 43

Vahni Capildeo      The Last Night, A Nightingale    Red-vented Bulbul.     Gallery 33, Mughal India.

Paulette Mae       no title yet               The Cast Gallery... the casts in general  around the 'Old Fisherman'.

In True Colours (‘The Forest Fire’ by Piero di Cosimo) by Olivia Byard

I have always known such creatures

prowled in the forest; felt their flint eyes

watching; sensed them stir behind

thick boughs. Now here is proof.

Spilled out by fire into the fading day

they scatter in search of other lairs.

The cannier, with human face, look

almost shamed to be exposed like this;

yet lions and lumbering bears

race out unthinking beside a bellowing

domestic cow. In such a scurry

nightmares dissipate

to their fragmented parts. Yet

when, the fire tamed, plants begin

to reclaim those scorched-out tracks,

these creatures sneak back in,

conceal themselves in undergrowth

nest among burgeoning branches,

and wait, with silent intent,

for the dark dreams to quicken.

Olivia Byard

Published by The Flambard press

Poems on aspects the Morrigan (Pagan Triple Goddess) by Dr Giles Watson

Gallery 17 (European Prehistory)
Cabinet: Resisting Rome
Item 5: Bronze Raven's Head- Shaped Spout, First Century B.C. Hod Hill, Dorset.

Morrigan

There's a way of ripping Roman flesh
that only ravens can do.  You take
a whole field-full, slaughtered
as a legion, and begin to fillet
the flesh, tweezering it between
blackened bills.  You gobble down
the cosmopolitan influence, disdaining
to choke on the fishbone-snags of
politics.  Politics isn't worth
a raven's feather out here, where
whole carcasses can be flensed
by wind alone.  Brawn goes down

the craw so easily, greased by the
subcutaneous lard of civilized men.

Poem by Giles Watson, 2013.  Inspired by a bronze raven's head spout from Hod Hill, Dorset, c. 100 B.C., created by the culture which resisted Roman occupation, and now on display in the Ashmolean Museum. The Morrigan is a ferocious Irish pre-Christian war-goddess whose sovereignty is attested in mediaeval manuscripts, but who was clearly sovereign to the Celts in the Roman era and earlier.

Nemain

If you saw me in my frenzy, my black hair
streaming behind me like a flock of rooks,
you would ram your own spear through your
entrails, rather than face me.  I can turn
friends fierce against each other: the merest
misunderstanding will set them filleting
and garotting, until the whole field
is a harvest of the twitching dead, furrows
channelling a full-on irrigation of steaming
blood.  The soil is fruitful these days:
there has been such a ploughing-in of men,
and crops grow out of livers and of brains.

One man to rot, one man to grow, one
for the mouse, and the rest - for the crow.

Poem by Giles Watson, 2013.  Nemain, an aspect of the Morrigan, is a fairy spirit who appears in times of war, bringing frenzy and havoc on the combatants.  She is capable of setting friendly armies against each other, and it is said that she can kill a hundred men with one battle cry.  The last two lines are derived from an old proverb about sowing grain.

Macha

I've got a steady grip on the bole of the beech tree:
you've not seen woman's muscles until you've seen mine.
One shake, and the mast starts falling, a bountiful crop
of men's heads.  Don't cross me at a red moon: my face
will sprout black feathers, my eyes harden into ebony
beads, and out of my arms the quills will thrust,
ready to batter whole armies into submission.  You can't
buy time from Macha: it has croaked out. Be afraid.

There is a groaning in the roots: whole generations
of luckless infantry, waiting to troop, by xylem
and phloem, up the trunk towards fruition, sucked
towards the branches, coalescing into kernels, turning
nut-hard, ready for cracking.  There's a squall
of raven calls above the husks and splintered skulls.

Poem by Giles Watson, 2013.  Macha is usually regarded as an aspect of the triple-goddess known as the Morrigan, an instigator of battle who often appeared in the form of a raven.  In her incarnation as the daughter of Ernmas, the Yellow Book of Lecan claims, she shakes out "the mast of Macha": a euphemism for the heads of slaugtered soldiers.  Beech mast would normally be shaken out by swineherds, because it provided valuable sustenance for pigs in autumn and winter.  Rarely, it might be argued, has Macha been worshipped more faithfully than by our modern politicians - even though they do so unconsciously.

The Garden of the Badb

Men's eyes hang on stalks of stubble,
swinging from their optic nerves,
pendulous as foxgloves.  There are
blood spots and other interpunctions
bold as orchids.  Heads, cleaved in
by horses' hooves, mould outwards
like mushrooms.  You can pick out
the rare flowers of ring-fingers
severed by swords, and spattered
gall-bladders like bitter herbs.

Men do these things spontaneously:
sow them once, and they excel
at self-seeding.  I can croak, preen,
swoop heedless through my blooming

garden.

Poem by Giles Watson, 2013.  The Badb, an aspect of the Morrigan, takes the form of a hooded crow.  She often plays a banshee-like role, calling to foretell important deaths, and she relishes warfare.  The battlefield is known as "the garden of the Badb".

I’VE GOT THE SILVER-FINNED BLUES by DIANA MOORE

PART ONE  ~  Bicci di Lorenzo ~ St Nicholas of Bari Banishing a Storm

~  Early Italian Art Gallery 42

I’ve got the silver- finned blues

I’ve been painted by a muse

They’ve labelled me as pagan

I might as well be Satan

For every time I sing sublimely

I get accused

Of stirring up a storm

When all I want to do is warn

*****

When I see waves a-lashing

Masts come down a-crashing

I could make a sailor cosy

Take him to my shell abode-y

Down, deep under the sea

But how can I lose

My silver-finned blues..?

******

Here comes Father Nicholas

Saviour of the day

He is kind and generous

He wants me out the way…?

If… I offer him oysters

In the cloisters

Sing to the wind

After we’ve... ‘sinned’

Pray for his soul

St Nick, St Nick, St Nicholas, St Nicholas

Grant this fish

This human fish

A wish

Splish! Splish!

For, how am I to form a bond..?

One sprinkle from your starry wand….

What! No?

He says go!

Well that’s not very generous

St Nicholas

(Huh!)

Help me!

I am gone

I must swim on… on… on….

And I feel

Bicci di Lorenzo

We are no longer friends so

I think I’ll find a different ship

I’m on my way, I’ve had a tip

I must say ‘bye-bye’

No tear in my eye

But that’s why

I’ve got the silver-flnned blues

I’VE GOT THE SILVER-FINNED BLUES  ~  PART TWO

Parcel -Gilt Silver Ship  ~  Michael Wellby Collection (Item 14)

Here I am with Wellby

Do you think he’ll want to sell me?

Are you hiring

A siren?

Maybe

I won’t let slip

I’ll hide on the side of the ship

Cruise along a table in an elegant castle

In my silver, salver of a silver-gilt parcel

And stopping close to the cream

A prince, I beam

His eyes, they gleam

©Diana Moore

www.diana-moore.com

Poetry and pictures at the museum ~  notes from Diana Moore

Diana says:  I love this painting, the magical quality; the dark and the light; the Saint arriving in a blaze of stars to save the mariners;  the mermaid craning her neck upwards and swimming  out of the picture… I decided to write about it from the mermaid’s point of view as she is almost incidental in the painting… (some people don’t notice she is there) and to experiment .. give her a voice… and I found my poem turning into a lyric (in line with the fictional singing mermaids) which, I feel, suited the take I had of a ‘misunderstood mermaid’.  My second performance worked well with the introductory lines sung in blues style – and the farewell to Bicci in tango style...  A large swell of people gathered in the gallery and I really appreciated the applause…!

I also appreciated the help I received from the Ashmolean research team:

Dr Catherine Wheeler, Senior Assistant Keeper, Department of Western Art

  for answering my questions on the Bicci di Lorenzo painting, and

Professor Timothy Wilson for his help with the parcel-gilt silver ship in the Michael Wellby collection.

For information:

The Bicci di Lorenzo painting: St Nicholas of Bari Banishing a Storm was object of the month back in 2001.  Here is a link to the painting with further information

http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/objectofmonth/2001-12/theobject.htm

And a note I received from Professor Timothy Wilson

 The silver-gilt ship is a late example of a type of object that was much loved on Medieval tables as a centrepiece and conversation piece, known as a nef. Some larger examples (there is one in the British Museum) have guns that fire and clockwork parts.

This one is only the most token representation of a sea-going sailing ship, but of course European sailing ships were increasingly dominating the world’s sea routes at the time the nef was made.

The charming sea-equines embossed and chased on the sides are a sort of sea-creature associated with Neptune and other sea deities of the ancient world; they ultimately derive from classical sculpture but were much taken up by Renaissance artists in many media. It is of course here conceived as in the water round the ship rather than as part of the ship itself.

The inventorying of the Wellby collection is at an early stage and I fear that is all the information, beyond what is on the label, I can give you.

Best wishes

Professor Timothy Wilson

Barrie and Deedee Wigmore Keeper of Western Art

Netsuke by Gabby Tyrell

Netsuke (Manju) taken from image Tales in the Round on museum website

Poem 1

Sweetcake

Carved by father’s hands over time

The man who dressed in a hurry - late for his meeting ran

through the village.

Hair slapdash with no care

Robes like open sails

Swirled around Sweetcake

destination unsure.

A smile crept across father’s face

With tools called Sou Sou and Mou.

He caught this moment in Netsuke.

This story is between you and me.

A secret laid bare Sweetcake

aptly named Loved his Netsuke

Each crumb and wrap of material

Belied his fate.

Fined 200 Yuan for once again being late.

Gabby Tyrrell

  

Poem 2

The tax collector

Carved by hands in ancient times in ivory

Or wood

the man who dressed in a hurry

late for the ceremony ran past me.

Robes unfurled like open sails

his hair slapdash.

Father in a time long gone watched and smiled

Carved this scene as Netsuke

-  this story between you and me.

The tax collector Sweetcake

Was fined 200 Yuan for his love of Netsuke

made him late once too often.

Now his wife makes him shop.

He always walking, put on a diet of veg and rice,

head bowed in front of his wife.

Gabby Tyrrell