To celebrate the launch of this FIRST EDITION of a self-published pamphlet containing all 11 poems in the Complete Collection of BALADIN’S DREAM and OTHER TALES by edenbray, along with full Authors Notes, I am offering a signed, printed hard-copy for just £5 inc. post/packing for orders within the United Kingdom and £6.50 inc. shipping for orders outside the UK ~ This is a limited time offer!

#NOTE ~ please email ME ;~ stepheneede689@btinternet.com or post a comment in the comments box at the foot of this page and request details of how to make payment ~ including your name and the address where you would like the printed copy to be sent ~ PLEASE indicate if it is to be a gift.                      Many thanks ~ edenbraytoday

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TO Celebrate the occasion I am re-posting all eleven parts  –  Today it is BALADINS DREAM  ~ Part VI ~ HAPOELLE

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BALADIN’S DREAM

and OTHER TALES

by edenbray

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BALADIN’S DREAM ~ VI

Authors Note ~

I have to acknowledge that this piece probably owes much to fifties filmmaking which I grew up with and great literature like Treasure Island, Gulliver’s Travels etc. It references epics like Moby Dick, Mutiny On The Bounty and other less well-known films of that time, many shot in black and white and shown on our tiny TV screens allowing the magic of cinema to transport post-war Britain to different cultures and circumstances and join in with adventures of excitement and derring-do.

Baladin is once again the central character at another stage of his enormous life and who now recalls his time as a whaler, who found himself briefly ~ a bit like Fletcher Christian ~ catapulted into a world of tropical delights in an acceptance-culture where anything goes as long as it’s love-based. John Lennon would surely have approved. The freedom of this imaginary setting allows for a mildly sensuous and wistful story to unfold in a Utopian society where  our moral compass and human values may be challenged.

Baladin, like an earlier, more cultured Forest Gump steps through the pages of early modern history and in this piece reminds us of the origins of much of America’s earliest wealth in more poetic times before global-warming and the industrial excesses of the modern world have made it our central focus.

Hapoelle is basically a slice of harmless descriptive novelette, it is a cracking good tale based around hard-edged facts. Hopefully it is also a bit of fun!     

~ edenbraytoday   

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BALADIN’S DREAM

VI

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HAPOELLE

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She was the youngest daughter of a Polynesian chieftain

Her soft flesh wore the colour of sun-blushed, dried cinnamon 

She could sway her hips like Guava trees in a high wind

Or pandanus which she loved and whose fruit she carried  

home to her father, those hairy, hard shells so heavy

Hapoelle’s breasts hung like two mountain apples

All these island girls, capricious, still went semi-naked in 1845

The year Baladin’s boat came to rest on the coral sand dunes

and the ships crew put up, to take comfort in the local nation

Whose manners chipper ~ wore a plaited & flowered

welcome garland!

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And Bellannea, Hapoelle’s friend with bosoms he likened to lilikoi

For they were round, ripe and generous, she slept with John Dray

For all the long while they encamped upon that sunny island

Dray drew pictures of her every day, with a stick of

sketchers’ sanguine

He had bought for a penny in an artist’s shop near the

Kennington Oval in London

Baladins’ fondness for the chieftains maiden served only

To leave him melancholic for a woman he had promised to

back home in Sussex

She of fairer skin and lighter sympathy would not have dallied so

Or made almond eyes at an honest gentleman, half betroth to wife

He was caught now in a honey trap and only drank the

hummingbirds sap

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He rolled with Hapoelle, his native lover and learned to

speak of intimacy with her

While his deeper heart settled on a corner of Albion,

where oak-lined villages wait

A gamble of ‘little lambs’ standing on the wide horizon

in the heat of a July sun 

Children watching masted, trawler boats return to this

Britains shore to make her great

Baladin’s eyes heavy, his jaw firm set at the memory of the

pinkest salmon in Britains rivers

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The masters of regret, caught this one failed mission in

an ocean ranger’s eye

Those purple mists of time ~ ragged, bloody and faded,

cannot rob the man that moment

Nor his sight, long in the maze of memory which causes

him to smile and mimic sense

He, recalling the freshness of her breath, the lightness

of her girth and quiver

The many gentle moments and pleasure she loaned him

in that strangest summer

If summer she be when settled on a Polynesian Island

in the years when the whale,

Both giant and gentle, was still birthing a nation at the

heart of the Western Isles

Those morbid midwives who sing wistful tales, arctic

and northern narwhals

Not sperm or humpback that the soulful Baladin,

his captain and his crew knew

Courted, chased and lauded with folk songs of wistful

reason and lament

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Baladin has been riding these waves of histories choices

for more than the years of one hundred and three

His dream has lived through longer than the pale

afternoon of those sunnier days

When those sweetest companions of lust and beauty,

soft sirens in warm, tropic seas

Were moist moments adorned with the heat of young

and ardent pleasure

Yet still worn of a season of pride where captains of the past

salute future’s ambassadors.

written 09.03.2012

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Dostoeedsky

thanks for listening …