Biography
Originally from Co Durham near Newcastle now in North Yorkshire Dales. I have a love of language(s),nature,herbalism,spirituality,music and art. Have written all my life but poetry began to emerge mainly from journaling and therapy, one of the reasons I aim to train as an art therapist.
I plan to continue to write poetry, prose and short stories and create images,alone or in collaboration with others as I have been doing.
I no longer try poetry performance and am more at home on the page(because of this I am not going to post here any longer)
Thank you so much to all who have so generously commented on my work, it has given me so much more confidence in my writing and means a lot to me.
Please find me for now at;
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Deborah-R-Jordan/146895059824?ref=ts
and here;
http://www.dezbarjordan.blogspot.com/
Website coming soon.
thanks, Debz x
Samples
Oyster
Take this ticking grain of sand
from me.
This tiny thing,
friction, burning,
corroding my soul.
Never becoming
The pearl it promised.
Take this ticking grain of sand
before
I implode.
© Deborah Jordan. 2009
I went to look for the moon but all I saw were stars, one brighter than the rest
But then, the trees sighed, the wind gently exhaled the cool Northern air
and I heard the heart- beat of the earth.
I turned to where the sound came from
the wind brushed the trees just enough aside,
And there, like a sliver of opal, the moon cut an arc in the blue sky.
© Deborah Jordan. 2009
The Pebble Man
He held the pebble up to the light. It fitted inside his palm like some small mute, limbless creature of the sea. He held it under the stream of water and dull browns became lush glistening sables, matt greys became infused with silver tones and subtle blues. Colours came alive again, as they were when he had taken the pebble from the stream bed. He had never found such a beautiful stone. He replaced it on the ornate shelf on the corner wall with the shells and the other pebbles he had picked up on his solitary walks.
The water fell onto the grey curled hairs on his chest and from there into rivulets down his torso. Tilting his head he allowed the gentle force of the warm shower fall onto his face and he hummed a tune filling the small bathroom with sound.
Music filled many gaps in his life. Sounds seeped into the corners of his house and his mind. Sounds of his recordings, sounds of his own voice and his restless fingers drumming on the kitchen table. Sounds of his melodeon, as he sat in the wide window seat letting his mind and his eyes wander across his wild garden as his fingers wandered across the keys. Music filled spaces where other noises might have been. Music lived in the room that might have surrounded the sound of children. The muted colours of old cassette tapes lined the walls where pastel spines of books might once have been. Plastic CD boxes were racked up neatly in spaces where gaudy coloured toys may have occupied. That was not to be. Somehow his life had not offered up the chance for a family, or if it had, he had been looking the other way and missed it. Looking down at the ground stooping to pick up some crystal on the path or so lost in his own thoughts that whatever chance there may have been completely passed him by.
He was not even sure where his own thoughts led him. He seemed to just be a passenger on a slow train ride through long dark tunnels and the vast, dusky yellow arable fields of his home county. Now and again he took another train, a train into the hills. The air was fresher and the stones were sharper. His mind wandered different paths as did his tired feet but he was no more sure of where he was headed than he had been in the place he called home.
The bleak day came when he had to leave that place he called home. He thought it would always be like this, this house, him. He wandered the fields and the woods, walked alone in the rain and snow, walked in the gentle light of spring and the heat of the long summers of the past and had always turned around, walked backwards for a few paces to see the house in all its changing lights. The stones and the red curved roof tiles absorbed colour from the tones of the day and the paintbrush of the weather.
The house had wrapped itself around him for forty years and he knew every stone, but now he was losing it. Reality had crept in like the mould that had slowly spread across the window frames and this reality was just as unwelcome. He had somehow forgotten to pay bills and even if he had remembered he did not have the money to do so. He had barely noticed the decay which had been living its own life around him. As the paper peeled from the walls and the doors fell from their hinges, he had just sighed and rearranged his precious things on their shelves and dark wooden tables as if he and they lived three feet away from the walls of the house. Three feet away from reality. Shells inside shells.
He was a shell and as he held his hand up to his ear he heard music. It was her favourite tune, a Breton tune he played for her on his melodeon. For he had met a woman once. He allowed her to slowly enter his thoughts and to a lesser extent, his life. He both welcomed and resented her presence in his house. He had not had to consider anyone else for so long. His small home was indeed his castle and he had long ago raised the drawbridge. He began to doubt himself in her presence and was haunted by deep scars and bad memories. His habits were his own now, not for any other eyes, not for anyone else to judge him. He began to see his life through her eyes and it unsettled him. It unsettled him so much that he usually arranged to meet her somewhere else, anywhere else, anywhere other than his small home with his music and books, his collections of precious things he had gathered on his travels.
If he had only known how much she wanted to be one of those precious things. She wanted to be held close, to feel as treasured and caressed as his unique finds, wanted him to see her hidden light, see the way the light and sable shades shone from her warm brown eyes. She wanted him to see her uniqueness. She wanted to be a pebble.
© Deborah Jordan. 2009
Published in Mudluscious. Autumn 2009
An Gaoth
I am the air that brings the snow
on seven peaks.
I am the chill that sends a shiver.
I am the force that lifts the wings
of eagles and merlins.
I am the hurricane that
sends you wheeling.
I am the hand beneath the waves
that rise to mountains and turn the boats.
I am the gentle violet breath of spring.
I am the warm breeze of heather
across the moor.
I am the one
who whispers and the curtain moves.
I am the wind.
© D.E.Jordan 2009
Published in Mudluscious Autumn 2009
Anesidora and the Jar
Which one is it?
That one on the shelf, in the pantry, the one with the strange patterns.
Oh, right, I have it so.
Anesidora slowly unscrewed the smooth round lid which was almost bigger than her hand. As she turned the lid, she heard a rough grating noise, like sand against stone. The lid turned around as the sand ground a little more of the surface away, one more turn and she had the jar open...
..and Anesidora just stood….her heart shaped mouth wide and her big blue eyes wider still, the jar in her hands pointing down to the tiled floor..
…as out crawled serpents….out crawled a million scorpions followed by a thousand million biting ants.. then came the ticking, sickening, drone of not one, but two swarms of locusts. Out drifted plague, pestilence in its wake. Temptation, envy then sloth rolled out across the floor. Scents of forbidden desire floated out upon the breeze. Phials of the rarest, most alluring perfumes from the farthermost ends of the world, tiny clay pots of kohl and glass capsules of the most luscious, most moisture-soaked-lip-red, the reddest of red colour made from the blood of the most endangered of endangered beetles, came tumbling out of the jar and opened with a discord, into a thousand broken pieces. The patter of falling doves-tears and the last, haunting beats of broken hearts echoed like drums around the pantry walls but last of all came darkness itself. All that ever was once alive, now black, morbid and glutinous came pouring out from the lip of the stone jar. Darkness, cold and heartless, cut its merciless path across her pale hand and down her narrow fingers to slowly drip, drip, drip, upon the floor…
Ooops, thought Anesidora, I think I got the wrong one there……
©Deborah Jordan 23.06.10.
Anesidora was another name for Pandora..who by some accounts only opened the jar(as it was in many tales) from innocent curiosity….
All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.
Last blog entry
Posted on Saturday 19th June 2010 9:29 pm
She thinks she knows
the way the land lies.
She thinks she reads
patterns in the sand,
upturned palms
and the flight of birds,
but she sees life,
widdershins.
Moon-side.
Scrying into crystal water
all is reflected
through her own lens,
camera obscura,
upside down
and downside up,
she sucks life
through her own straw,
spitting out the chaff
as circus knives fly,
into turned backs
as round they spin.
And he? he?
There never was
such a he,
and if there were
(s)he’d have
strong lungs
and a dragon tattoo.
And if there was,
they’d walk
side by side
neither leading
nor following.
And if there was,
there’d be
only bare feet,
touching,
from the backs of
grey horses.
debJ 06.2010
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View or make comments. (4 comments)
stefan wilde
Sun 13th Jun 2010 15:25
Good afternoon Deborah.My first look at your work,and love it all-thank you for comment on'Tainting'and the info therein-yes indeed,food for thought-however bitter tasting-ta lots-Stefan.