JUST ANOTHER MOURNING

JUST ANOTHER MOURNING

by Norman Warwick

It occurs, really, like a rare phenomenon and I have always been at a loss to explain how it happens, or even why it happens or what the end product might ´mean´. The completed piece never makes sense to me on first reading and rarely makes sense to anyone else on the hundred and first reading! Today, though. in uploading today´s work I might just have learned what the end product is for. Written after first hearing the Nanci Griffith song, Just Another Morning, some thirty odd years ago, I realise on reading this text again for the first time in decades that it is seeking to contextualise, to re-settle what has been disturbed by shoving another new song on to the juke box. This is a very personal work, and never really intended for publication but you might nevertheless find some reference points you recognise. I include it today simply because, for me, writing in this (lack of) style leads me down the kind of sidetracks & detours I love to explore. So, come join me to follow your art through unspecified time and place

Iere in an endless sky of early-mourning blue fancy takes flight to the faraway to the rising son in South Korea (Andrew Warwick left) where new strings pull the heart back to Alabama with a banjo on my knee (but Oh Susannah with an H don’t you cry for me)

of an angel that flies from Montgomery delivering messages of bullets in the kerbstones and of a dream of a King leading his people from Boulder to Birmingham all the way to the promised land

from here in this unending sky of blue-train blue I can see the pyramids along the Nile and somewhere through the heat haze down that crazy river of thought I can hear birds of luxuriant rain forests though I cannot see wood for trees and I want to know have you ever seen the rain old soldiers are buried beside the sea and wave after wave after wave never came back from the war to end all wars fought for freedom and the freedom they won we abuse else what is freedom for? 

long live god needlessly said for we have all been told that god is dead but if that is so then to whom was she speaking last night in that meeting on the mountain top when looking down no allusion to aloofness intended on the promised land where now there is no black or white but merely shades of grey and elegies in churchyards where inside Alice is singing hymns out of tune having seen the glory of the coming of the lord hear my prayer for I have sinned here in a square-peg sky of blue moons in round holes are black holes and who has ever seen the whole of the moon that god slipped through when Man first took that giant step since then everyone’s gone to the moon and that King has been released to prowl the streets of Paedophilia suffer little children for they shall become weary with recollection so stricken with sadness and delirious with delight that all those visions happy and sad sad and happy and sad roll in and out and out and out with the tide re-shaping landscapes and horizons from fact to fiction as wave upon wave upon wave upon wave of story rolls in from once upon a time in the west we discussed Billy The Kid

and frames containing no pictures save one of an unrelenting sky and of blue velvet curtains surely opening soon to show us that all this thing we call life is but a film and the credits the year in Latin numerals beneath them will soon appear saying the part of this writer was played at by everyone who ever had a dream from which he could not escape in which Aunty Joyce in all her sorrow could once again stand beside an old soldier on guard against social opprobrium resisting the attempts of the storyteller to relocate her, misappropriate her or re-instate her in that house in Lowry land with its three steps to the front door and next door’s child sitting there waiting to be told she is special

now to more than one here in this Oasis where Liam and Noel are cartoon characters in an artist’s eye reminding us to not look back in anger for Sally can wait

having been warned not to wander she now graces fields of tall red poppies in black and white films shot on an exotic island that could be a past or could be memory or could be the inevitable outcome of meeting a grieving widow on a day beneath a sky Picasso-blue rolling away with the ocean in wave after wave after wave of barely controlled emotion

on bad mornings and good mournings and though Nanci thinks its just another morning here, it ain’t

it’s these times we’re living in