I stole the image from Elizabeth Floyd, the foxgloves mounted in earthen pots upon a pretty tablecloth. The blossoms dangle from their calyx like bells in a carillon. In his poem below Louis MacNeice paints a picture of a perfect moment suspended in time, a meeting with a special lady in a coffee shop with a table cloth depicting deserts, an ash tray decorated with a forest, crockery decorated with motifs of mountain streams flowing through heather. On the table a vase containing a bell shaped flower, maybe foxgloves?
Louis was born on this day in 1907 and died the year I was born. He was recording sound effects in caves on the Yorkshire moors and was caught in a rainstorm. He didn’t bother changing out of his wet clothes because his Irish mammy died when he was just a boy of seven. So he never learned that you must change out of wet clothes. And as a result he caught a cold and that turned into bronchitis and he was admitted into hospital with viral pneumonia and died only nine days short of this 56th birthday. This is why you must listen to your mother.
Meeting Point ; by Louis MacNeice
Time was away and somewhere else,
there were two glasses and two chairs
and two people with the one pulse
(somebody stopped the moving stairs):
Time was away and somewhere else.
And they were neither up nor down;
the stream’s music did not stop
flowing through heather, limpid brown,
although they sat in a coffee shop
and they were neither up nor down.
The bell was silent in the air
holding its inverted poise —
between the clang and clang a flower,
a brazen calyx of no noise:
The bell was silent in the air.
The camels crossed the miles of sand
that stretched around the cups and plates;
the desert was their own, they planned
to portion out the stars and dates:
The camels crossed the miles of sand.
Time was away and somewhere else.
The waiter did not come, the clock
forgot them and the radio waltz
came out like water from a rock:
Time was away and somewhere else.
Her fingers flicked away the ash
that bloomed again in tropic trees:
not caring if the markets crash
when they had forests such as these,
her fingers flicked away the ash.
God or whatever means the Good
Be praised that time can stop like this,
that what the heart has understood
can verify in the body’s peace
God or whatever means the Good.
Time was away and she was here
and life no longer what it was,
the bell was silent in the air
and all the room one glow because
time was away and she was here.
Mindship 