"Frieda Hughes is thumbing through her first book of poetry, trying to find the poem she wrote about the poems her father, Ted Hughes, wrote about her mother, Sylvia Plath.
“It’s called Birds.
It describes the poet as a penguin, nursing the egg his wife has left him, and the skuas that kill and feed on baby penguins.
I wrote it about my father and Birthday Letters [the collection of poems Hughes wrote in response to Plath’s suicide].
But when my father read it, he said he thought it was a poem about me.
She gassed herself in an oven in the middle of the night, leaving out bread and milk as breakfast for the sleeping Frieda and her one-year-old brother. Frieda was almost three at the time. She is 56 now and we are sitting by the fire in the lounge of her old Welsh farmhouse, eating delicious homemade banana cake and drinking tea.
Every inch of every wall is covered with her dramatic, large oil paintings of birds and abstract shapes. Her father loved her paintings, she says.
He also liked her poetry and encouraged her to write, although she didn’t allow him to read any of her poems until she was 34.
By then, she had been secretly writing poetry for a decade, filing it away in a shoebox.
“I came to him with a stack of my poetry that was several inches high and asked him to put them into three piles: good, bad and indifferent.
And he did – he put several into each category.
He was quite good at being impartial and, with poetry, he was supremely impartial."
I find Frieda's artwork very shamanic and coming from a place beyond her and through her, not that I'm saying Frieda is incapable of creating work like this herself, I'm saying that Frieda is tapping into something deep within her (and our souls) soul.
I only came across Pete Townshend's book'Who I Am'by a shear act of synchronicity when I was passing through the town of Coomaon my first of three road-trips down the east coast of Australia this year -
The weird thing about rabbits is that in my home state of Queensland, it is illegal to to keep rabbits as pets, because they are considered pests and you can receive a $5000 fine if you are caught owning one. It wasn't until my second and third road-trips last year that I would keep running into real live rabbits in some very bizarre places. A Cascade of Rabbits?
Rabbits and rabbit-holes running along the rivulet park-lands in Tasmania
A white rabbit at a black swan event in Canberra on my 3rd road-trip
A young woman I met in the town of Grafton who had a rabbit with her
I even ran into a young woman in the town of Grafton on my last day on the road of my last road-trip who was on a road-trip also with her father and they had just driven from Western Australia and were heading for my hometown of Brisbane (as was I).
The park above is where I met the young lady with the rabbit, as I was looking to get a photo of the old bridge I had just driven across, which is the photo you see above. Graftonis the town'Cold Chisel' wrote about in their song 'Flame Trees'.
There are many more things I could write about Frieda's paintings, but the one that really hit home for me was the above painting called 'Australian Christmas Tree'.
An Australian Christmas Tree?
Because in my parents backyard is a poinciana treethat my father planted from a seed pod he found outside my mother's auntie's house in Cleveland, Queensland.
My father's ashes were scattered under this tree in 2016
My father passed away in September 2016 and my mother and sister scattered his ashes under this tree.
The tree's red flowers where really showing on Christmas when I was over there on Christmas Day, but I didn't have a camera on me, not even a phone with a camera on me that day, but I went back and took the above photos a few days after Christmas Day and while some flowers are showing in the above photos, it was nothing compared to Christmas Day, for some reason.
True North (Star)?
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