Eye is delighted to introduce readers to the work of poet and writer Sibyl Ruth, a member of Central England Area Meeting, who has just scooped first prize of 1,000 pounds in the 2008 Poetry Competition organised by Mslexia, the magazine for women writers.
Sibyl's entry 'A Song of Jean' was judged by the novelist Carol Ann Duffy to be 'a skilful, beautifully-paced poem... by a writer fully at ease with her own considerable abilities'.
The winning poem, which we are reprinting by kind permission of Mslexia, will immediately resonate with Friends. It is a lyrical portrait of an older member of a Meeting, eccentric but lovable and worthy of praise and blessing.
Sibyl has been writing for twenty years and recently gave up her day job, working for an arts organisation, to concentrate on writing. 'It's lovely to have some confirmation that this decision was the right one', she says. She admitted to Eye that she finds it difficult ('and risky!') to connect being a Quaker with being a poet. 'But so far I have felt encouraged by the way Friends have responded to this piece.'
Sibyl has had collections
of her poetry published by the Iron Press and Five Leaves publishers.

A song of Jean

Let my tongue and keyboard both proclaim the power of Jean.

For in the meeting house, Jean gets to her feet often and ministers
with a voice that is a clanging gong.
She drives away false peace, awakens us.
Teach us not to fear becoming caught in the long diversions of Jean's
thoughts, lost in the ring road of her speech.

When the appointed hour is done, may we engage Jean in conversation
and not run away from her in the lobby for some invented reason.

Let us acknowledge the aging of Jean
who doesn't enjoy being eighty
but wishes to go on as she did at thirty.
Allow us all to accommodate Jean's fury,
listening with tenderness to her shouts and rants
Jean's demands for help. Her refusal of help that's offered.
Those cries of No. No I can do it. I can manage.

May we make time to watch over Jean
for she mislays her spectacles, her watch, her keys, her purse.

Help us to worship the Spirit that shaped the hands of Jean,
hands that once tied knots, hammered tent pegs, peeled thousands of
potatoes.
Jean's hands now in their fleecy gloves, their knobbly, twisted, arthritic
fingers,
hands that can no longer do buttons, whose buttons are done wrong.
frantic hands that keep on searching bags and rattling papers.

Jean has been diminished, yet we shall magnify Jean's name.
Lead us to esteem properly the engine that is Jean's body
the darkness of her teeth.
the hairs of her head, white and coarse as dune grass
her stertorous breath
her bent back
her slumped chest.
Also let us praise Jean's black-handled stick that likes to slip from her grasp and hit the floor with a great clatter.

May we remember always the muchness of Jean's mind
Her mind that carries those seas from which we crawled in the beginning
that holds those caverns which shall open to receive us at our end.

May glory and honour belong to Jean, and every day that remains to her be blessed.

Labels: poetry

this hot day
the sky is far away
- and the space

pink and blue clouds
drifting into harbour
on the evening tide

on the river
brent geese plait water
and winter light

pyracantha bush
loud with berries
and starlings

lifting wheelbarrow down
find bunch of snails
to plant in garden

Eve Jackson

Labels: haiku

Eye chuckled to hear a Bosnian Muslim mufti outlining in a Today (BBC Radio 4) interview the need for Bosnian Muslims to develop a dream for their community now that Radovan Karadzic has been caught. 'Would anyone have listened', he asked, 'if Martin Luther King had said "I have a complaint"?'

Labels: bosnia

We have heard more of the Quaker presence in New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century (Eye 11 July). It is a tragic tale of conflict with the original population around Nelson in which a young Quaker was killed. Meg Hill of Devon Area Meeting has the story.
'John Sylvanus Cotterell was a twenty-two-year-old surveyor from a Bristol Quaker family of long standing. He went to Sidcot School as did many of his relatives. Their family journals The Swallow have recently been given to Sidcot. I think that some of his letters home from New Zealand are reproduced in them.
'New Zealand was being opened up to white settlement in 1842 when Cotterell arrived in Nelson, on South Island. People had been promised farming land before they left Britain but little had been surveyed and allocated, so there was some urgency to proceed. Cotterell and his team explored the territory south of Nelson, and "discovered" the Tophouse Pass into the Wairau valley, and Lake Roto-Iti. They were probably already well known to the Maori inhabitants!
'As the surveying progressed in the Wairau, the Maori calmly pulled up the survey pegs each night in peaceful protest at what they foresaw would be the annexation by the whites of their tribal lands (justified by the government because the land was not being cultivated). They warned the survey team of the violent consequences of continuing the work. Finally, they burnt an empty temporary shelter used by the surveyors. The local magistrate, H A Thompson, arrived at the scene and attempted to arrest the Maori chief, Te Rauparaha, who had come to deal with the problem.
'Things got out of hand and firing began, probably by the men brought out by Thompson. A Maori woman was killed and then the slaughter began. Eventually, twenty-two people died, including Cotterell who, unarmed, seems to have tried to stop what was happening. Some were later tomahawked in retribution (utu) for the woman's death - she was a chief's wife.
'It seems strange that Cotterell was so unaware of the Maori's feelings. He had gone to New Zealand intending to learn the language and with a concern for the spiritual life of the Maori. He was interested in their religious observance, noting that "It is a matter of humiliation that these poor savages evince much more of Christianity by their meetings and lives than their Christian visitors".
'What he did not take account of was his observation that "the Maori are powerful in argument, quick in perception, obstinate in maintenance of supposed rights..."
'After his death, his little house in Nelson eventually became the first Friends Meeting House in New Zealand. It is now the site of "Quaker Acre".
'As an afterword, in the 1970s, a Cotterell descendant married Niwa, a descendant of the chief, Te Rauparaha. She is a lawyer specialising in Maori land rights.'

Labels: history, maori, new zealand