Arthur, a poem written to a loved one
on the death of her husband
I wrote this prose poem just under a year ago, on the death of a lovely man. He and his wife were close friends of my parents and, accordingly, he was part of my life for as long as I can remember. His widow asked me to write the poem out in italics and it has taken me a while before I was able to do this. I tried before and just failed miserably. I couldn't face it. Also, I am just not good at calligraphy. I find it very hard and my results are anything but perfect, especially if, as here, the work requires more than a few words or phrases. Just in case you are interested in the words, I repeat them below, to save you struggling through my writing. I wrote using my Parker 51 on a Daler Rowney Manga Pad.
ARTHUR
'You can touch it, you know', he says and I reach forward with cupped hands to hold the stone. He smiles as I marvel at the diamond, splashing my hands with miniature rainbow tears, sunlight caught and scattered across my palms. Then, once again, he takes up the gem in small tweezers, studying it through a magnifying contraption he is wearing, cyborg-like, across one eye.
'I always match the stone to the person' he tells me. This one does not have such a wide surface area as the other. Although they are the same weight, this one looks smaller.' He pauses, glancing up at me. Although his mouth and the set of his jaw look serious, the eye not hidden by the magnifying lens is laughing at me. I smile back, nervous, waiting. Have I made a poor choice? 'But...it is...deeper,' he says. 'That is why it is so bright. It throws out a lot of light. I am glad you prefer this one.' The diamond merchant smiles once more.
This man, Arthur, was somone I knew and loved all my life. He was tall, so very tall. But despite the fact he towered over me, as a child he was one of the few men who neither ignored you, nor treated you as one. He was generous and patient. How must my brothers and I have aggravated his hearing aid with our squeals and our cries? Unrepentant, I would later return to his home with my own small sons, the better to set his hearing aid to whistle and squeak mode again. Did he long to retreat into his world of fine details and perfect clarity? Perhaps. Instead, he stayed, so that he might seek out our qualities, seeing beyond our cloudy surfaces and whatever painful imperfections we might be trying to disguise. Seeing us for what we are, and yet being satisfied.
I will not see Arthur in life again, and this thought weighs heavily at present. Better to imagine Arthur doing what he loved, donning his magnifying lens and examining the beauty of all the stars in heaven, as they splash his face with rainbow tears.
How do you keep a perfectly straight line?
Even with lots of pencil lines to guide you, keeping a straight line when writing large sections of text is tricky. I think having lines underneath would help, but when I tried, I couldn't see through the paper. Perhaps I should have measured every line out and drawn it in pencil on the paper.
Attempt 2 was complete, but I managed to splash a drop of water on it when I was erasing the pencil marks
Here is my desk with completed work
Recycle failed attempts card
Rather than waste the failed attempts, I stamped leaves all over them and turned them into a card to accompany the caligraphy.
Ingredients for calligraphy prose poem
Parker 51
Quink blue black ink
Daler Rowney Manga Pad paper
Ingredients for calligraphy card
Santa Rosa leaf stamped on failed calligraphy attempts
Distress Ink "spiced marmalade" ink pad
Copper card stock
Letraset Metallic Marker in "red gold"
Letraset Tria Markers: green (G136), orange (O567), yellow (Y337)
