I enjoyed Gareth Cliff on Monday last [28 May]and was going to post this blog [then] when I would have been saying that I enjoyed him today… only as we all know our blogspot vanished and has now been replaced with something
less vulnerable to the new publications act, presumably …
In fact I enjoy Gareth Cliff every day and wish there were more of him, sharp, witty and irreverent. He reminded me then that it was ten years ago that we heard the terrible news of the death of a dilettante supreme… the awful end of the lovely Lady Diana Spencer, who, like Marilyn, had the good sense to die young and and while still loved by her admirers.
He asked us [the listeners] to phone in with our thoughts on the event and it’s ever undiminished mystery… I couldn’t do that because I was driving across town and for a change was not stuck in a single traffic jam. But I remembered that day and for those who loved her this piece of poetry below is what I wrote then.
[If you didn’t think much of her and considered her a silly dabbler then read no more. I always considered her a spunky ‘wench’ and had great regard for her courage in the face of some pretty brutal treatment.].
Blogmark was down en route to Amagama.com so this couldn’t be said at that moment and had to wait for now.
It was not entirely mine, this “conversation with Diana” that you are about to read in poetic form. The class of young eighth grade ladies who wrote with me that morning would all now be circa twenty-four year old women, many married and with children of their own… So this is in memory of her and of them.
Conversation with Diana. From a classroom exercise in deconstructive poetry with forty-seven grade eight girls on the morning that we all heard the news of the tragic death of ‘Lady Di’.
1
Were you making love
then
happy again;
indiscreet in the arms of a man you would meet in the fast flowing flood of eternity’s beat.Were you rocking to the rhythm
of Freddie’s
“Friends will be friends”,
or was it Frankie’s “Stranger’s in the night”?
2
Your people now say
you were maligned; that
they didn’t treat you right.
They say
they’ll make amends,
call you: “… a
beacon of light”.
3
Better to be
alive in the sea,
said the Indian guide
to the ingenue,
than a bloated dead dolphin
adrift
on the shore.
4
“We were always strangers
playing at the table;
then i was sent away
vaporised upon a cradle:
given far too many kisses
and no hugs
anymore.
5
Don’t ask me what the ‘sounds’ were
when i went to stay.
It could never have been Queen,
i did it, my way”.
.NiK(1997)
From the collection: “Random Notes” by .NiK [2000]