I live by two calendars, one, which is nature’s, is circular.
Cycle of days. I like to wake at daybreak and see the light return.
I need that morning clarity to write for by the afternoon freshness is fading, sagging or mellowing into teatime.
I love evenings in pleasant company or dreamily drowsing at home.
My son, a musician, prefers to sleep till noon, then dawdle over the paper and a huge bowl of luxury muesli.
By evening he really gets going, off out and can keep playing into the small hours all night if necessary. When he comes to stay, sometimes our waking hardly coincides.
Both rely on a night-and-day rhythm but differently.
Cycle of seasons. Now this January morning is damp and grey. Wind is soughing drearily rocking the bare black branches and twiggy tips of the plane trees.
I endure that blankness of wintering, half dormant through dull coughing weather.
But who said there is no spring in London?
They were wrong. At last these Lenten days lengthen and lustily everything rises, desires and spirits with the yellow daffodils unfolding in young green grass.
Leaves kept fast in trees’ tightness burst free, birds raise their carolling.
He wants her. She wants him.
Warmth and London lunchtime parks brighten with girls in summer dresses and little bikinis. Fluffy ducklings grow feathered. They follow their mothers, to become familiar with their brown pond.
Willow leaves whipple the water and we swim, bring home a bottle for wine in the evening garden, lighting a candle when it gets late.
Workers who have baked in offices ache for the sea or moor, wide skies over harvested fields.
Autumn tastes of Worcester apples, Michaelmas daisies, school again.
Some October apricot afternoons the brilliant blue has an edge of chill.
Fog. Sweeping up. Bonfires.
Will catherine wheels fizzle dismally out?
Darker each day till solstice and the barely believable birth, as earth turns sunwards, of another year.
Back in January, dumbly I wander the sodden wood. Suddenly that silvery disquisition thrills: with his feathers puffed up on a flimsy naked branch, I glimpse the red robin overwintering.
A story’s attached to the seasons: new sun in December becomes Christmas birthday of God as a human baby, mortal embodied word, our own.
Forty days and nights in the wilderness through February and March.
Spring passion, sacrifice, resurrection.
I have risen and am still with you, alleluia.
The exploited, the crucified by the powers that rule the world, burst free. The human form divine rises again and blossoms into glory of May.
But lovers who lie together in paradisal fields are mothers and fathers of the future, because that Easter assertion: ‘See, I am alive’, agon of humanity’s eponymous hero, cry of liberation won, is allegory, poem of what people on earth have done, are doing, still need to do.
May Day savours the earth’s renewal but also sings the struggle that is not yet over.
It is distress signal as well as foretaste of a fairer time.
And each year has special days for remembering.
I honour St Pancras on the Nones of May - the 12th - and when I pass his church and station on the 214 bus. Boy who would not bow down to state idols in Rome under Diocletian.
Semi-mythical spring sacrifice about whom little else is known, but I try to imagine the real youth ‘offering his neck’ to the sword.
Long ago. And far away ‘the triumph of the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979 was on my birthday, 19th July, so each year I get older I am cheered by that day in Managua. One step by a population much smaller than London that was a leap for humanklnd. (And now, Rugama, it’s beginning to belong to the poor, the earth is, with its moon.’) Though round the year I acknowledge anniversaries of uprisings, significant battles, birthdays and deathdays and remember them in particular places, the second calendar, of history, is linear and so is my lifetime.
I feel the past pressing up to the present so many struggles, so many impassioned lives.
In my own tradition, I remember the Peasants’ Revolt — Wat Tyler leading them into London.
On June 13 (Corpus Christi) 1381 they took the Fleet Prison and set the captives free.
I cannot pass Smithfield without recalling how there you demanded freedom for all and were cunningly killed. Resurrected - how I wish you could have foreseen it - on placards and T-shirts in poll tax riots six hundred years on.
Greatest translator, Tyndale, you so loved the English language and wrote how it suited the Hebrew better than Latin. Banned by the bishop of London, you went abroad, were burnt on a bonfire like the leaves of your works, near Brussels on 6th October 1536.
Your linguistic music was much more intricate than tinkling cymbals...
Your work of love (not charity) reaches out even to me, late in the 20th century.
Shakespeare, your birthday in April after daffodils that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty, reminds me your lines are in my head and colour my thinking constantly.
Donne in his shroud in St Paul’s reclaims his love-making poems.
How can I name all the poets?
That great company of those whose words . become lenses I look at the world through, the purl and cable of my thought coat.
Gerrard Winstanley: ‘Being quiet in my work my heart was filled with sweet thoughts... and amongst these revelations was this one: that the earth shall be made a common treasury of livelihood to whole mankind without respect of persons ...
Yet my mind was not at rest because nothing was acted and thoughts run in me that words and writings were all nothing and must die, for action is the life of all and if thou dost not act thou dost nothing.
I took my spade and went and broke the ground upon George Hill in Surrey.’ That was on April Fools’ Day 1649 with about twenty other poor diggers.
Lately the Land is Ours, having occupied the derelict Guinness site in Wandsworth, kindly invited us to entertain them with poems.
Their action re-enacted Winstanley’s words.
The diggers were present - communion we hoped the poetry took part in, notwithstanding, on that warm Sunday afternoon: ‘The truth is, experience shows us, that in this work of Community in the earth, and in the fruits of the earth, is seen plainly a pitched battle between the Lamb and the Dragon.’ Wollstonecraft, fellow-citizen finally of St Pancras, at the time of the French Revolution you vindicated in English the Rights of Woman as well as the Rights of Man and excoriated Woman’s Wrongs (‘confined in cages like the feathered race. . .’) Echoing Blake, who made engravings for some of your work: ‘A robin redbreast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage.’ Emma Martin, once bible basher of a christianity especially oppressive to women, studied and struggled until by 1839 your ‘native love of truth prevailed’ and you escaped from marriage and ‘thraldom of patriarchal religion’ to preach socialism, joined those on the same platform you once opposed.
And ‘no one who ever offered us alliance rendered us greater service, or did it at greater cost.’ When I go each week to the Working Men’s College, I think of William Morris who lectured there after he too had crossed his river of fire.
His portrait in bas relief looks down and sometimes, I hope, nods when I give a talk in the Conway Hall.
Wednesdays and Fridays when I pass Holloway Prison I wince at what the suffragettes suffered on hunger strike. I likewise remember visiting someone I loved, through those bewildering, double, sliding glass doors.
Last year in April we marched with the Liverpool Dockers from Kennington as the Chartists did, and the embroidered trade union banners swayed with the flaunting spring flags of Reclaim the Streets that rippled their rainbow colours.
I laughed and danced with my daughter under that iron bridge and as we passed Parliament workers inside waved from high windows, everyone glad as we knew the Tories had had it.
With the May Day landslide we told them just that.
Nine months later how many are disappointed.
The struggle continues...
I live by two calendars. History is not over but goes on into the future.
It is not pick-and-mix toy lego bricks for ludic postmodernist academics.
This cannot be it, the whole story, a small depression where the line just stops, the tradition evaporating into sand, in a fiction and a dream of passion.
Even if we never reach utopia, even if the world ends, as one day it will, before we get there, before we manage to fill up what is wanting in the body politic, yet all that anger energy urges us on a journey which is essential to what we are, is itself human life and dignity.
The calendar of years is cyclical.
History is linear, round the years: it is a spiral. So is my lifetime in little.
That was the year my son was born in freezing January in Leeds, who later sang like a robin, a choirboy in Hampstead Parish Church. ‘I promise you, mum, it’s the music.
I have not got religion.’ That was the hot summer I sat in a London garden, where the roses were so abundant they scented and tinted my balmy dream of him with whom I was so much in love, who was coming soon.
That was the year we went to Greenham with our eleven-year-old girls and were amused when they kept singing: ‘We are women, we are strong’ and a round of ‘renewable resources’ in a frightful doggerel to the tune of Frére Jacques.
Other people as well as my secret garden make me myself. Private and public occasions continually mesh in a thick fast texture, out of which some poems come, and the years go by and I get older.
As my body changes and eventually disintegrates, Id like my poems to knit into a body but of work, which joins in the tradition’s conversation in communion, not just a jumble of indulgences.
The social spiral of the years I live through twists round and interacts in sense and consciousness with the spiral of my intimate nights and days.
The stuff of life is a double helix, material with which the individual and the body politic must make what we can.
Dinah Livingstone has published several collections of poetry, the latest being May Day (1997). “Time on Earth” is the title poem of her New and Selected Poems 1967-98, forthcoming from Rockingham Press later this year. She is also a translator with a special interest in Latin American poetry and liberation theology. She runs the small press Katabasis and the Camden Voices Poetry Group at the Working Men’s College in London.