Alistair, nice job on the poem, sometimes words can flow easily, other times its like pulling teeth. I've been married 47 years now, relationships get complicated over time, so maybe, I just need to simplify my thoughts on love. I've written a number of poems and songs over the years, and even self published a collection of them 25 years ago to raise money for a fishermens memorial statue in my town. It was called "Fillet of soul", and it captures the process of writing pretty well.
"Fillet of soul"
The page lay on the table, barren and white,
It's virgin innocence, an open invite.
I sat down on my seat, and picked up my pen,
The door to my mind, I pried open.
Slowly at first, a lone thought crept out,
Have I escaped? It asked, with some doubt.
The thought ran and hid, on a little blue line,
Soon others followed, not far behind.
Frustrated emotions, festering from time,
Questions and answers, and words that would rhyme.
John, a lot has gotten out, just not to a very big audience. I have finished my book on the fisherman's dock co-op, but am having a hard time finding a publisher for a book with a limited audience. I have prepared a revised edition of Fillet of Soul, but haven't made up my mind what to do with it. So I am trying to get back to work on a previous book I was working on, before I got sidetracked by windmills, and the co-op book.
My Chinese wife Amei Li died of lung cancer two years ago, but not before we finished her beautiful/ghastly story of her time in the Cultural Revolution.
I challenge you to read the 30 page sample on Amazon without wanting to complete the story)
Thank you for your appreciation and enjoyment of our impossibly unlikely story.
What are the chances that in the six weeks before the whole country collapsed a postman finds that Maria (aka Phan Thi Huyen Thu) had moved several times over the years. But as the mail must get through, he follows the trail from address to address and delivers my letter. What are the chances that the postal service is still functional and the reply Maria posts reaches me in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea?
And that is just the beginning of the Herculean challenges to be overcome ...
I will add notes under each post recounting more of our story.
The element of incredible luck in the connecting the dots of this incredibly fragile chain must be vanishingly small, but as Maria seriously said to me: "it was fate and meant to be - and nothing on Earth can stop that." I am much more of a sceptic, but my brain freezes when I try to calculate the odds ...
Our marriage could have been a disaster as we are completely incompatible: Maria likes the beach, I like mountains. She came from a hot country, but likes cool weather, I come from a cold country, but like hot weather, etc, etc. yet as I wrote:
Many think we are so different, such an unlikely pair,
But I think that is neither here nor there.
We are always together and bonded as one,
We are friends and lovers and as a team we have fun.
We are there for each other as ours is a lifelong love,
Wonderful love story that I can relate to. But I married a German girl who came here as a child with her mother and Army father after WWII. Mom thought daughter was naturalized with her. Not so so I became
her sponsor to become a U.S. citizen and later my wife. Now of 60 plus years’
Although an officer, I was an aggressive and self-centred 'troublemaker', yet I loved her from the first time I saw her and still love her today.
She crossed the world once more to another land far away,
One small matter was my fighting with ‘raskols’ just yesterday.
I was in hospital with blood poisoning the day that she came,
Although fevered and ill, I would be there to meet her all the same.
The advice to me was:
"One told me he believed we were superior;
“You can’t marry ‘one of them” they are inferior!”
There were many who felt that I should think twice,
I listened to them all, then ignored their advice."
and the Advice to Maria was:
"So, Colonel Hall was appointed to meet Maria, assess her and see.
He was impressed by Maria and gave her the highest rating;
“As for you” he confided “It’s a mistake she is making!”
and, from the Pastor who married us ....
On 1st May ‘76, we were married by Pastor Lloyd Spike:
“You’re a lost cause,” he told me “but Maria my God would like”.
One piece of black humour from a friend was that Maria dies and meets St Peter at the Pearly Gates: he asks "What brings you here?" "I killed my husband". "You know that means you will go to Hell?" "It was Alistair ..." "Come right in to Heaven ...."
What a lovely story. Thanks for sharing it. My wife Mac Thuy Thi was born in Ba Ria, a few miles up the road from Vung Tau, after her parents had fled Haiphong. We met in a supermarket in Altadena in 1976 after she and her parents and brother and five sisters had lived in Camp Pendleton for several months. Her older sister had worked for a US Army Colonel in Saigon, I think Al Haig, who gave the family a pass onto Ton Son Nhut air base. The next C5 to leave for the Philippines was the one carrying 500 babies that the Viet Cong shot down. After changing planes at Subic Bay they stayed in Guam as guests of the US Navy for several weeks. She described it as a dusty desert island where everybody has eye infections. But she said the Navy had much better food than the Marines. We were married in 1977.
I was never in military service. I don't know why. After I dropped out from Caltech in early 1966 in the middle of my sophomore year, I got a notice from my draft board to take a physical exam. I spend the day wandering around a building in downtown LA in my underwear while they listened to my heart, looked in my eyes and ears, took my blood pressure, checked for a heriia, …. Then I got a notice that my status was changed from 1A to 1H (I have no idea what that meant), including "keep in touch; you haven't heard the last from us." That's the last I heard from my draft board.
I did visit Vietnam in 2012 — Saigon, Ba Ria, Vung Tau, My Tho, the "Nine Dragons" of the Mekong Delta ($US 7.95 for the bus ride from Saigon, all day cruising on the river, and lunch), Da Nang, Haiphong, Cat Ba, Halong Bay. Thoroughly enjoyed the visit, especially Da Nang. Typhoon Haiyan had sneaked through between the Philippines and Indonesia and was heading for Da Nang so we sat standby at the airport to fly to Haiphong a day earlier than planned. Then the remains of the storm turned north and arrived in Haiphong during the night instead of closing the Da Nang airport. Haiphong is an attractive city. When we got up in the morning we saw women dressed in green denim overalls pushing giant carts — bigger than a pickup truck — collecting downed plant debris. By noon everything was cleaned up. We flew out from Hanoi, but didn't see anything there. As we approached the airport, even from a mile away, I said "The Russians built that." My wife asked "how would you know that." I remarked "well, at least it's Russian architecture."
But here's an interesting Saigon story. In the building where our mainframe computers were at JPL, Andre Cattecchio and Wolfgang Kneidel were always being paged. I never knew them or even met them. There was a Univac engineer named Joe Money working with us. He got transferred to Saigon. Some other Univac guys who had been working at JPL had been transferred to Saigon earlier. When his friends saw him entering the terminal in Ton Son Nhut, they paged Andre Cattecchio and Wolfgang Kneidel, just to make him feel at home.
There are good people everywhere. They just have to find each other. But first they have to overcome the barriers erected by people who profit from dividing us.
My grandmother married a Menominee Indian after my grandfather died. She was a civil-rights activist before the term existed, or the work was profitable. She instructed us on the evils of racism. I spent my young summers with her and her neighbors on the Menominee reservation. Then I attended a well-mixed school with black kids, Japanese kids, Mexican kids, … and an equally well-mixed faculty. Caltech hired away my favorite chemistry teacher, a wonderful black man named Lee Franke Browne, to be their director of secondary relations. They named a building for him after he died. I didn't realize it was unusual until I got exposed to the wider world.
I consider that 'racism' only occurred to us on two occasions (perhaps because I liked to occasionally practice my martial skills on deserving people), but ignorance was more common. One woman innocently asked Maria did she have difficultly learning to use kitchen appliances ... Maria innocently answered "Yes, because the housemaid did all the cooking and cleaning ..." Touche!
Beautiful story. Please give Alistair and Phan Pope our thanks. Their story will inspire many who are trying to figure out life in today's fractured world.
Please ask them if we can re-post their poem here:
Alistair, please send your email address to John Shanahan email acorncreek2006@gmail.com. I would like you and Phan to review the posting before it is announced. Thanks.
I cannot imagine what my life would have been like if any of the incredibly small, fragile links in this chain had broken and we had never met again ....
This is a fabulous message of courage of love persistence and faith - a great way to celebrate the beginning of a new year - thank you for sharing this
This touched me so much….the love that transcends everything! Alistair, thanks so much for allowing John to share your beautiful love poem. My own parents were from seemingly worlds apart: Mom from Japan, Dad originally from Ireland. They met quite young when Dad was in the USAF.💘
Alistair I want to share something Mom said to me in 2019 while visiting beautiful Japan and the gorgeous Hiroshima Bay area where she grew up. I said Mom how could you ever leave here, it’s so beautiful. She said if I never left, I would not have had you! 💕🥰
John, thanks for sharing this beautiful well written poem, its great to see a writer take the time to effectively rhyme words. I can't show this to my wife, because she will point out that I have never written her one.
I had a burst of poetic creativity after reading a highly acclaimed 'Remembrance Day poem written by a 14-year-old in an hour. I commented it was not great so I was challenged to emulate his effort - the prize being a $10 bet ... Here is my $10 winning poem written in 45-Minutes!
'Ode to a Thousand Men …
A thousand men are marching by
A glassy stare in every eye
As we pass the sky grows red
We are not the living, but the dead.
Our lives were lost, taken away
Yet we all wanted to live another day
Then guns and bullets toll’d our bell
And we were the ones they sent to Hell.
Far away, our loved ones grieve
Told by ‘patriots’ they must believe
Our sacrifice was for the cause
And the reason they’re given is ‘just because …’.
Our ghosts still dream of skies of blue
For me, “Dear wife, I think of you”
T’was hard to leave you for fields of battle
But you were spared the rasp of my death’s rattle.
As the Sun sets o’er this land once more
Silence, where loud there was the cannons roar
All is peace, where there was endless noise
The guns are quiet, so let’s all rejoice.
What’s done is done for evermore
So never again will you open the door
To greet me with a smile as we kiss again
Because my love, you sleep alone, but with me there are a thousand men.
Alistair Pope 16th April 2020
I wrote seven more poems in 2020 - and nothing since ...
Alistair, nice job on the poem, sometimes words can flow easily, other times its like pulling teeth. I've been married 47 years now, relationships get complicated over time, so maybe, I just need to simplify my thoughts on love. I've written a number of poems and songs over the years, and even self published a collection of them 25 years ago to raise money for a fishermens memorial statue in my town. It was called "Fillet of soul", and it captures the process of writing pretty well.
"Fillet of soul"
The page lay on the table, barren and white,
It's virgin innocence, an open invite.
I sat down on my seat, and picked up my pen,
The door to my mind, I pried open.
Slowly at first, a lone thought crept out,
Have I escaped? It asked, with some doubt.
The thought ran and hid, on a little blue line,
Soon others followed, not far behind.
Frustrated emotions, festering from time,
Questions and answers, and words that would rhyme.
Filling the page, from my bottomless hole,
My page runneth over, with fillet of soul.
Now I was finished, and what did I see?
The words on the page, they were me.
Jim: Sounds like some good stuff is fighting to get out! Now one for your wife!
John, a lot has gotten out, just not to a very big audience. I have finished my book on the fisherman's dock co-op, but am having a hard time finding a publisher for a book with a limited audience. I have prepared a revised edition of Fillet of Soul, but haven't made up my mind what to do with it. So I am trying to get back to work on a previous book I was working on, before I got sidetracked by windmills, and the co-op book.
Thanks John and Alistair!
My Chinese wife Amei Li died of lung cancer two years ago, but not before we finished her beautiful/ghastly story of her time in the Cultural Revolution.
I challenge you to read the 30 page sample on Amazon without wanting to complete the story)
https://www.amazon.com.au/Pink-Flower-Growing-Maos-China-ebook/dp/B09RWVW5FN/ref=sr_1_1?
She came to Australia in 1992 and became a maths teacher. In retirement she yearned for a soulmate and this is how she found me.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/amy-li-in-sydney-starting-a-new-life
Review https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/growing-up-under-mao-a-review-by
Everyone,
Thank you for your appreciation and enjoyment of our impossibly unlikely story.
What are the chances that in the six weeks before the whole country collapsed a postman finds that Maria (aka Phan Thi Huyen Thu) had moved several times over the years. But as the mail must get through, he follows the trail from address to address and delivers my letter. What are the chances that the postal service is still functional and the reply Maria posts reaches me in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea?
And that is just the beginning of the Herculean challenges to be overcome ...
I will add notes under each post recounting more of our story.
John, Excellent poem! Uplifting, interesting, worth sharing. And yes, Vision and Persistence were important elements in the story.
Richard,
The element of incredible luck in the connecting the dots of this incredibly fragile chain must be vanishingly small, but as Maria seriously said to me: "it was fate and meant to be - and nothing on Earth can stop that." I am much more of a sceptic, but my brain freezes when I try to calculate the odds ...
Our marriage could have been a disaster as we are completely incompatible: Maria likes the beach, I like mountains. She came from a hot country, but likes cool weather, I come from a cold country, but like hot weather, etc, etc. yet as I wrote:
Many think we are so different, such an unlikely pair,
But I think that is neither here nor there.
We are always together and bonded as one,
We are friends and lovers and as a team we have fun.
We are there for each other as ours is a lifelong love,
We fit like together like a hand and a glove.
Richard: We are on the same page...
Wonderful love story that I can relate to. But I married a German girl who came here as a child with her mother and Army father after WWII. Mom thought daughter was naturalized with her. Not so so I became
her sponsor to become a U.S. citizen and later my wife. Now of 60 plus years’
Daniel,
Although an officer, I was an aggressive and self-centred 'troublemaker', yet I loved her from the first time I saw her and still love her today.
She crossed the world once more to another land far away,
One small matter was my fighting with ‘raskols’ just yesterday.
I was in hospital with blood poisoning the day that she came,
Although fevered and ill, I would be there to meet her all the same.
The advice to me was:
"One told me he believed we were superior;
“You can’t marry ‘one of them” they are inferior!”
There were many who felt that I should think twice,
I listened to them all, then ignored their advice."
and the Advice to Maria was:
"So, Colonel Hall was appointed to meet Maria, assess her and see.
He was impressed by Maria and gave her the highest rating;
“As for you” he confided “It’s a mistake she is making!”
and, from the Pastor who married us ....
On 1st May ‘76, we were married by Pastor Lloyd Spike:
“You’re a lost cause,” he told me “but Maria my God would like”.
One piece of black humour from a friend was that Maria dies and meets St Peter at the Pearly Gates: he asks "What brings you here?" "I killed my husband". "You know that means you will go to Hell?" "It was Alistair ..." "Come right in to Heaven ...."
Dan: Sounds like an interesting story hidden there...
True!
What a lovely story. Thanks for sharing it. My wife Mac Thuy Thi was born in Ba Ria, a few miles up the road from Vung Tau, after her parents had fled Haiphong. We met in a supermarket in Altadena in 1976 after she and her parents and brother and five sisters had lived in Camp Pendleton for several months. Her older sister had worked for a US Army Colonel in Saigon, I think Al Haig, who gave the family a pass onto Ton Son Nhut air base. The next C5 to leave for the Philippines was the one carrying 500 babies that the Viet Cong shot down. After changing planes at Subic Bay they stayed in Guam as guests of the US Navy for several weeks. She described it as a dusty desert island where everybody has eye infections. But she said the Navy had much better food than the Marines. We were married in 1977.
Van: Sounds like you have the basis for an interesting story...
I was never in military service. I don't know why. After I dropped out from Caltech in early 1966 in the middle of my sophomore year, I got a notice from my draft board to take a physical exam. I spend the day wandering around a building in downtown LA in my underwear while they listened to my heart, looked in my eyes and ears, took my blood pressure, checked for a heriia, …. Then I got a notice that my status was changed from 1A to 1H (I have no idea what that meant), including "keep in touch; you haven't heard the last from us." That's the last I heard from my draft board.
I did visit Vietnam in 2012 — Saigon, Ba Ria, Vung Tau, My Tho, the "Nine Dragons" of the Mekong Delta ($US 7.95 for the bus ride from Saigon, all day cruising on the river, and lunch), Da Nang, Haiphong, Cat Ba, Halong Bay. Thoroughly enjoyed the visit, especially Da Nang. Typhoon Haiyan had sneaked through between the Philippines and Indonesia and was heading for Da Nang so we sat standby at the airport to fly to Haiphong a day earlier than planned. Then the remains of the storm turned north and arrived in Haiphong during the night instead of closing the Da Nang airport. Haiphong is an attractive city. When we got up in the morning we saw women dressed in green denim overalls pushing giant carts — bigger than a pickup truck — collecting downed plant debris. By noon everything was cleaned up. We flew out from Hanoi, but didn't see anything there. As we approached the airport, even from a mile away, I said "The Russians built that." My wife asked "how would you know that." I remarked "well, at least it's Russian architecture."
But here's an interesting Saigon story. In the building where our mainframe computers were at JPL, Andre Cattecchio and Wolfgang Kneidel were always being paged. I never knew them or even met them. There was a Univac engineer named Joe Money working with us. He got transferred to Saigon. Some other Univac guys who had been working at JPL had been transferred to Saigon earlier. When his friends saw him entering the terminal in Ton Son Nhut, they paged Andre Cattecchio and Wolfgang Kneidel, just to make him feel at home.
As I said, you have a story in there...
Van,
Isn't it curious how so many inter-racial marriages seem to succeed?
Thanks for the beautiful story.
There are good people everywhere. They just have to find each other. But first they have to overcome the barriers erected by people who profit from dividing us.
My grandmother married a Menominee Indian after my grandfather died. She was a civil-rights activist before the term existed, or the work was profitable. She instructed us on the evils of racism. I spent my young summers with her and her neighbors on the Menominee reservation. Then I attended a well-mixed school with black kids, Japanese kids, Mexican kids, … and an equally well-mixed faculty. Caltech hired away my favorite chemistry teacher, a wonderful black man named Lee Franke Browne, to be their director of secondary relations. They named a building for him after he died. I didn't realize it was unusual until I got exposed to the wider world.
I consider that 'racism' only occurred to us on two occasions (perhaps because I liked to occasionally practice my martial skills on deserving people), but ignorance was more common. One woman innocently asked Maria did she have difficultly learning to use kitchen appliances ... Maria innocently answered "Yes, because the housemaid did all the cooking and cleaning ..." Touche!
Beautiful story. Please give Alistair and Phan Pope our thanks. Their story will inspire many who are trying to figure out life in today's fractured world.
Please ask them if we can re-post their poem here:
https://www.allaboutenergy.net/people-australia-oceania
or here
https://www.allaboutenergy.net/people-asia
They can decide where it is posted. (Asia or Australia).
John,
I know David Archibald well, so by all means post it, but reference this website.
I am currently in Melbourne
Alistair, please send your email address to John Shanahan email acorncreek2006@gmail.com. I would like you and Phan to review the posting before it is announced. Thanks.
Epic! What a beautiful love story and a great poem. Love conquers all. Thank you for sharing!
Nadia,
I cannot imagine what my life would have been like if any of the incredibly small, fragile links in this chain had broken and we had never met again ....
SM: I thought it was great, but I'm a romantic at heart...
Perfect time for this beautiful, universal message of love, vision, and persistence. Thank you for sharing.
It was meant to be ...
John: You're welcome but the thanks goes to Alistair...
This is a fabulous message of courage of love persistence and faith - a great way to celebrate the beginning of a new year - thank you for sharing this
My pleasure. If it inspired and uplifted you, then my work for 2026 is already done.
Thomas: Glad it resonated with you, as it certainly did with me.
This touched me so much….the love that transcends everything! Alistair, thanks so much for allowing John to share your beautiful love poem. My own parents were from seemingly worlds apart: Mom from Japan, Dad originally from Ireland. They met quite young when Dad was in the USAF.💘
As a Nissei you are living proof that love can cross all boundaries
Alistair I want to share something Mom said to me in 2019 while visiting beautiful Japan and the gorgeous Hiroshima Bay area where she grew up. I said Mom how could you ever leave here, it’s so beautiful. She said if I never left, I would not have had you! 💕🥰
Tina: Sounds like you have a story to tell...
John, thanks for sharing this beautiful well written poem, its great to see a writer take the time to effectively rhyme words. I can't show this to my wife, because she will point out that I have never written her one.
I had a burst of poetic creativity after reading a highly acclaimed 'Remembrance Day poem written by a 14-year-old in an hour. I commented it was not great so I was challenged to emulate his effort - the prize being a $10 bet ... Here is my $10 winning poem written in 45-Minutes!
'Ode to a Thousand Men …
A thousand men are marching by
A glassy stare in every eye
As we pass the sky grows red
We are not the living, but the dead.
Our lives were lost, taken away
Yet we all wanted to live another day
Then guns and bullets toll’d our bell
And we were the ones they sent to Hell.
Far away, our loved ones grieve
Told by ‘patriots’ they must believe
Our sacrifice was for the cause
And the reason they’re given is ‘just because …’.
Our ghosts still dream of skies of blue
For me, “Dear wife, I think of you”
T’was hard to leave you for fields of battle
But you were spared the rasp of my death’s rattle.
As the Sun sets o’er this land once more
Silence, where loud there was the cannons roar
All is peace, where there was endless noise
The guns are quiet, so let’s all rejoice.
What’s done is done for evermore
So never again will you open the door
To greet me with a smile as we kiss again
Because my love, you sleep alone, but with me there are a thousand men.
Alistair Pope 16th April 2020
I wrote seven more poems in 2020 - and nothing since ...
Jim: Why not write one for your wife now?