Well it’s Wednesday 7 September and I’m on day three of my ‘new dispensation’ wherein I am no longer anybody’s typist!  Apart from being on retreat, it’s the first time in about 25 years I haven’t had an office (or shop) to go to work in.  I’m still Mitra Convening (ie supporting women who want to practice the Buddha-Dharma) for Bristol Buddhist Centre, but doing this based in my garret.

I’ve been wanting to post this poem, which is co-incidentally about Wednesdays, for a while.  The first stanza was written on a Dhanakosa Wolf at the Door retreat in 2001.  When Manjusvara was writing The Poet’s Way he went through all the old anthologies of writings from those retreats and fished out my poem ‘An Average Wednesday’.  After his death, I realised it was 10 years exactly since that retreat, and so wrote the final stanza, i.m. Manjusvara.

Two Wednesdays

An Average Wednesday (June 2001)

And the usual number of poem images
went by like buses.
And again I forgot
to stick out my hand.

Another Wednesday (June 2011)

Full-moon, lunar eclipse, invisible
behind a bank of cloud and you,
my friend, fading, faded, far away
then passed. I raise my hand.