Author: Bernadette Pamplin

A woman of many interests, I have three sites, one for my art, one for my poetry, short stories and extracts. The other is for drinks writing, with a focus around gin.
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Greys And Blues Are Beautiful

I’ll write today
not fight today.
I’ll paint, compose, I’ll create today.

I’ll take the gloom and spin it into thread.
Gorgeous hues of greys and blues.
Take my mental loom and weave it
through and through
into something fresh and new.
Something colourful.
Something comfortable
that makes you just feel wonderful
cause greys and blues are beautiful
in another context.

So, what shall we make next?
What sadness shall we take?
What despair shall we remake?
Tears rolling down the cheeks turn to paint as we
dab, dab, dab away at our next work of art.
The numb void of grief becomes full of story
sharing tales of a loved one left
and keeping their memory in the room.
Anger fuels a sound that carries it far away
on the wings of cathartic release.
Then peace, for a while at least.

This poem was just pent up gloom
that started bouncing around the room
then boom
it’s channelled into something new.

And if that’s not magic
I don’t know what is then.
It’s inside each and every one of us
All we have to do is listen.

2025

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Almost

This room
can only hold so many
bright lights

through fear of blinding.

Though we are bound,
our tethers may be destined
to only ever pass through walls,

preventing the collision,
of two sparks so bright

through fear of a flash
that would dim the heavens.

You are too powerful to exist together.

Never fear,
I will be your cord.

This tether will connect you
through story and song
shared memories,
photographs, anecdotes
pushing you so close
you can almost feel each others fingertips.

Almost.

2023

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Put It Out

Dirty, blue bin.
Plastic top mottled by old cigarettes.
Scars left by those who hold their breath,
extinguishing the flame.

Lonely, blue bin.
Abandoned red flowers drop curling leaves.
Browning stems sagging,
time passing,
weighted with someone
pausing,
before stubbing out their love.

2023

Put It Out

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Stickle Bricks

I pick up a pen to write.
Not of lists, or notes
organisational tools
journaling, extracting sentences delicately under aesthetic for careful analysis under a highly focused lens.

No, not today
today I play with words
like a kitten with wool
or drunk lovers with a whole night ahead.

I simply enjoy.
Appreciate.
Take pleasure in experimenting
with structure, rhyme and form.
Breaking and rebuilding
stickle bricks
that save me from the grown up world
and reconnect me to that little girl
who once wrote stories every day.

2023

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Caterpillar

Beautiful butterflies.
I watch you hatch
grow large and fat.
And then you change.

You cocoon
and magic happens within you.
Your body is broken and reformed
into something new.

The process that you go through
reshapes you.
A new birth
becomes your beauty,
a new identity.

You spread your wings and embark on your new life.
Such wonder.
You are now a mother.

Alas,
I may stay a caterpillar.

2023

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Now or Never

They heard the splash and turned from each other to see only ripples racing away from where it had fallen. It sunk underneath the surface; a promise to be made. They looked at each other. It was now or never.

Slipping through his clumsy, clasping fingers, he kept snatching at loose air in panic. The pace of time may slow, but so do we.

Desperately reaching into his damp pocket, moist from their walk in the rain, his stubby fingers delicately traced the elegant curve as she spoke words he would never forget. He took a deep breath.

She had been upset when he arrived and was unsure why they were walking at all. The weather was terrible and she wondered how any good could come from it. He held her close as if to protect her, but as far as she knew, he could never keep her dry.

He had tried to explain as she opened the door. She was so beautiful. Her hair was freshly washed and smelt of vanilla shampoo. It was all too much. Nerves had got the better of him so he suggested a stroll along the river. She reluctantly agreed. It was now or never.

She hated it when they fought over something much smaller than them and had spent almost ten minutes in contemplation of leaving him. She floated in the bath staring at the ceiling. He tried so hard, but she was unsure if they could ever be happy.

He put the phone down and looked at the ring. He thought of all he’d gone without this month to pay for it. She was worth it all. He took a deep breath and grinned in the mirror. Bashful, humble. It was now or never.

2016

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Moths

“I’ve been on the streets for three years”, he said through chipped and blackened teeth. His eyes were blue, his hair matted and yellowing. His skin, grubby and porous, was chapped. It was broken around his bitten fingernails. His brown, stained coat smelt of old bookshops. I’d seen him and taken him a coffee. It was a cold day, it was Christmas Eve. “I can’t say the situation wasn’t my fault”. He lowered his eyes and remembered. He flashed back to when he lost his footing. “It’s just so hard to get back on track”. People scurried past us in their plagues; indifferent to their ignorance. Their arms strained under the weight of bags and boxes; toys and gadgets, perfumes and clothes. All of unnecessary value. I glanced down at his old, woollen hat. It was full. Full of moths, brown, speckled and dusty. Some were alive and still twitching. Some crawled over others to escape. They could not escape; their wings did not work. A child approached, reaching into her pocket. She produced a shiny chocolate coin. She dropped the coin into the hat. The old man nodded and the child ran back. Her mother hugged her, smiling proudly. The moths devoured the chocolate coin almost instantly. All that was left was the twisted scraps of foil. Scraps shining like gold in the bitter, winter sun.

2023

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Volcano

In life, you are a dormant volcano, existing in your basic state. A simmering, melting pot of experience, ebbing and flowing under the surface, heating and cooling; changing form. All of the wonderous possibility of creation and destruction, circulating since the dawn of time, heaving under your thick igneous skin.

Breath out, breathe in.
Cycles end, cycles begin.

This power lies in all of us. We all form from the magical elements of the earth and one day we will all melt back in. Energy is never destroyed; it only changes form. Everything is temporary and these fleeting moments of existence are made all the more glorious for their precious briefness. Everything that exists will eventually return to nothing but fuel for the next rising. You and I are humble to this. Such power as yours must vent. Steam pours from rupturing cracks. I am sorry for all the times that I have made you angry. I am sorry for all the times that I have pushed you to the point of shameful bursts of irritation. Your response is simple, “I love you nonetheless”.

And you must know how much I love you, in your glorious capacity to captivate me, to cultivate the good in all of us. Your wondrous encyclopaedic knowledge of all humanity, of all history, of all time. Your love is felt in the heady waves of heat emanating from your mantle core. I look up to you in all weathers. I look up to the impressive scene of your gargantuan snow topped ridges, orange with the glow of a strong heart. One day I hope to be as impressive as you.

I owe my life to you. Our whole family do. We are yours.

You are sick. Despite our patient and dedicated tending, the tiny tremors that began a year ago grow more forceful. The intermittent rumblings shudder with uncertainty. The breeze picks up, trees lean, hanging in whipping wind, dancing in the face of threat. We dance also, we are hoping for a miracle. You are unsettled, let me help you. You have done so much for us. Your response is quiet “Don’t worry about me, just look after your Mother”.

The ground shakes.
Our home groans.

Pictures from long ago fall from the walls, our happy times haphazard in shattered glass and broken frames. Faces appear distorted, smiles twisting. We were so happy when you were well. We would sacrifice anything to make you well again.

The tremors grow larger every day. I see the fear in my family’s eyes. We’ve grown through you. We rely on you.

The sickly smell of sulphur permeates the pores of people surrounding your base. We do not turn away. You are in decline and we will not leave your side despite dangerous contractions, muscle spasms. And then the contradictions come, you were once so strong. You were formidable, a sublime power of the extraordinary nature of love.

And then, the eruption comes.

Your soul rushes through your mouth with overwhelming force. You are ignited in a pyre of burning base elements, liquefied into a deadly matter that that will inevitably destroy you. Matter, which building into dark hostile clouds, sparking with the blinding cracks of lightening which once animated your physical body, steals your energy back into the earth to sustain new life. Like everything that awes us, we are powerless.

Nothing lasts forever. It is just your time.

The sound, scarring my ears, an atomic boom, races across the land. It tears down trees and buildings, quashing all habitation, undoing all the fields we planted, all the ideas once meant to bloom. I take the time to salvage my favourite seeds. I wish others would think to do the same. I want to run from you. I want to save myself from the sight, I want to save my family, I want to save you, but it is out of my hands. We are feeble creatures overshadowed by the colossal, looming nature of all things.

All I can do is stare at you. Wide eyed, I gorge all my senses on the physical remnants, the sagging, crumbling rock, the glugging hot red heat of pain, the sound of the final murmurs dying away, the feeling of the final twitches. I already know that what remains is no longer you. These remnants are merely tributes to what once was.

Creation is destruction.
Life is death.

We stand together, helpless. We stand and watch you burn. You burn and turn into ash, thick dark ash that falls from the sky, coating our hair, our hands, settling in our eyes and the folds of our skin. The thick dark ash that was once you in all of your glory, now reduced to nothing but flakes of empty, rocky grains that silently coat us in what remains of your physicality.

Your legacy will live on through us. Through the stories we tell others of the joys and hardships that we had, basking in the protection of one of nature’s greatest wonders.

Our family begin to scoop the ash up and fill a brown paper bag.

2023

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Bird Brain

Welcome to my mind. My blessing and my curse, my best and my worst.
This is where the true me hides from you.
It is an aviary of birds diverse, this a passionately adverse colourful verse to the dark hearted dead.
They chatter, squawk and swarm through my head.
Snatching under formed, fetal thoughts before they’re words to be said.
Before they’re comprehendible feelings rather than language that can’t be read.
The starlings swarm the most.
I am the starlings host.
They pull me apart by the threads of my character flaws
Unravel and leave me next to nothing, as nothing’s easier to ignore.
The Phoenix comes in my darkest moments. Eternal, internal, the starling’s opponent
Always almost too late to save my state from a fate that dilapidates all redeeming traits.
Before I am unsalvageable.
I’m simply unmanageable.
A tangible, consumable, notion of all that is unvaluable

The crows collect my bones.
They are the stones that condone any faith I seem to own.
The Magpies steal my eyes, my teeth, my wishes and beliefs
And they set to work reconstructing me in all my concepts
Building narrow, marrow bridges connecting the fleshy islands of my facets.
Creating a new world in which my tenacious consciousness can reside.
Where birds of paradise bask in warm sunshine
Where toucans and puffins smile through painted faces sublime and glorious peacocks dare to flash uncompromising exquisitey.
I love each and every one who ever was and who will ever be.
And everything is beautiful
I inhale hatred and exhale goodwill
If only I could stay here without fear of self sabotage
But my entourage of starlings will return in a few days, to begin the process of self dismantling again
There’s no one I can blame. I have a mind I cannot tame.
A barrage of disdain.
A fear and sense of shame
If only I’d escape the cage that is my bird brain.

2015

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Step Into The Light

I’ve been kidding myself for a while, I think. When I say a while I mean a long time. Life has a marvelous way of shaping you, whittling away through experience. It’s like you’re born a lump of fresh clay and experience shapes you into your final form. Life itself is an artist making a piece.

Life has taught me many valuable lessons, some of them very hard to learn. One of them, is that fear is what holds us back, and it can disguise itself, so you don’t even realise you’re afraid. And you can make decision based on fear and not even know it.

The depths of our decision making and thought processes are much deeper than we realise. There is much at work. Past experience, trauma, emotional ties and reactions not settled. Everything that you experience creates a reaction that we must handle, and how we handle it, what we do, determines our options in our inner and outer worlds. Something you experience years past, can still have an affect on how you perceive the world and what choices you make for years to come.

I’ve come to believe that we have more control in this than we’ve been made to think. That the key to a happy life is one full of love, of curiosity and discovery. Each day is a gift. We wake, alive on a beautiful, dynamic world full of shape and movement and colour. Full of emotion and feeling, full of experience. A walk in the woods, foraging for blackberries, the sweet gift of nature there just for us. Simple, natural things. Our role in all this is to tend, and create. We are inherently creative beings. Our interpretation of experiences serves to channel our own feelings and help others channel theirs. Understanding, evolving, expanding together. One beautiful cloud of consciousness expanding, much like the universe.

Things have been derailed by industrialisation. Money. Wealth. These are things that are taken, stolen, exploited and kept locked away from others when this earth is meant to be shared, enjoyed, experienced and cherished. We spend our hours working to survive, too tired to acknowledge the happenings around us, too tired to create, to process. We are mostly all overflowing bottles, fizzed up and ready to burst. It has been a cruel turn, but I do believe people are starting to wake up to this and things are changing for the better. Look for signs and I think you will see it too.

Our time here, and our legacy will never be determined by how good we looked, or how much money we had. We will never be known for having a nice house, or a big car. These things will turn to dust like everything else. Our real legacy lies in what we take with us when our soul moves on, and what we leave for others, our ideas. They will continue to shape the world. The way we treat each other, our care for the world and for those around us.

I think I was kidding myself when I started Birdy & Bright. I had a good mission in mind, but I went about it all wrong. I wanted to connect with people through art. But doing that via an ecommerce website with a print on demand service with designs I had created on Canva. That wasn’t the way. There is a disconnect there that doesn’t work for me. And I’ll be honest with you. On reflection, I realise I did it because I was scared. Scared to put myself out there as an artist. I’ve had a poetry site for over 10 years called Sonderful World. I didn’t talk about me. I created Birdy & Bright and started talking about me a bit, but I still hid behind a brand I’d created. A disguise, I think in case people didn’t like my ideas. And I didn’t even realise I was hiding.

The truth is I set this site up and it was the right path, and I got scared, and started something else. This is just one example of the many times I’ve done this. It’s ok. It’s ok to reflect and change course. Trying, experimenting is what life is about and it’s how we learn. I think perhaps, our most difficult challenge is being able to accept we’ve made a mistake and change course, but we all have the power to do that, at any moment.

Being your truest self is really, what I think we are all aiming towards. Being at peace with every part of you. Being unabashedly whole and open is us in our most happiest place, with no fear on how others perceive you, or your ideas. And to do that you have to have conviction, and that comes from understanding why you made decisions, make mistakes, took choices, and how you have used that to learn and make changes. It’s all a part of who you are and our journey through experience.

So, now it’s time to step into the the light. To put myself out there for real. Hello. Here I am. A woman with a river of ideas that flows through her day and night to the point it is unbearable. Someone who struggles to process because life is so damn demanding, and scrapes moments at midnight to create a small painting or a short poem whilst my family sleeps, because that’s the only time I can find. A soul who is messy, chaotic, makes mistakes but learns, and is desperate to share those learnings. I am blessed to have experienced a lot, good and bad, and I’ve got much to share that could be helpful to others.

I’ve got work to do. I’ve got lots of ideas to get out to you. I’m going to take down the Birdy & Bright website and move anything of authentic value over to here. I don’t need a business. I don’t want one. I want a space where I can share my art and ideas. There is no ‘buy’ button. If you like something send me a message and let’s talk.

Here I am. Standing in the light. And it feels brilliant.

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Finding time and new work

This week’s been tough. There have been plenty of distractions from painting. My son is teething and has just entered the 4 month sleep regression. Our washing machine and oven both died within days. Life pressed against my patience, and cut off all and any opportunity to be creative.

But then something else happened. I saw my pin officially on the Global map of ARIM artists and that made me feel magic. And, I joined a group called Milan Art and signed up for an online course to improve my acrylic techniques and just like that, I was reinvigorated and have just managed to paint a picture whilst my boy had a nap.

‘Daydreaming while my son sleeps (instead of doing the washing up)’, was a lovely experiment in colour. I’m really enjoying painting with a limited palette and meditating on blue, pink and yellow with accents of black, white and gold. I actually started off with the background as an abstract piece, before deciding that it needed something else, and just like that, a daydreaming mother appeared amongst the colour.

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A list of ideas while my son is sleeping on me

Newly inspired by the ARIM residency, lots of ideas are popping into my head. They seem to have a habit of appearing when my hands are full and disappearing before I can scribble anything down.

My son has just fallen asleep on me. And as much as I could just sit, blissfully listening to his gentle breathing, now is a good time to note down some of these ideas, the ones I can remember, anyway. I’ll add any more as they come to mind. Thank goodness I can update my blog from my phone, it’s a very handy tool to have.

Abstract, set of 3, various themes to explore around love, grief, motherhood, missing my mum, creation, loss

Abstract to song, ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’ – for mum. Listen to the song while painting.

Abstract to song, ‘Daddy Cool’ – for dad. Listen to the song while painting.

Abstract – the cycle. Mum, me, Rufus.

Abstract – life and death.

Abstract – my new identity as a mother.

Portrait of Rufus, acrylic, or water colour.

Pop Art portrait of Rufus smiling

Portrait of a tumbledryer (complete with halo as it both sends my son to sleep and has improved the laundry situation immeasurably).

Portrait of calpol with halo.

Painting – A broken can phone line with ru and me at one end, and the line going into nothing…where mum should be at the other end.

Painting – a child’s wooden picture set. The blocks of nana and Grandad are missing.

Painting – dirty bottles of milk awaiting washing

Painting – bath time. Lots of bubbles

Art made from my sons feet. Paint impressions, bot his actual feet.

Something to do with endless laundry.

Something to show late nights, holding a sleeping baby. It’s in those silences, I miss mum the most.

Something to show me singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ to Rufus, like mum used to sing it to me.