OPEN MIC POEMS
POET OF THE MONTH: PRATIBHA CASTLE
SPRING 2022
Born in Dublin, Pratibha Castle now lives in West Sussex. She had childhood successes as a writer - won a national Cadbury’s essay competition at the age of nine; wrote, directed, and took part in a play presented at her current school. But her confidence was shattered by an incident with her father who made her rip up a school essay revealing her parents’ employment as live-in cook and butler. It was only on her mother’s death that she returned to writing at the age of almost sixty, studying on a BA in English and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester. In 2011 she graduated with a first-class honours degree and continued studying on the Creative Writing MA.
Pratibha says, 'Though early on, I had a passing love-affair with poetry through the works of T. S. Eliot, poets of WW1 and E. E. Cummings, I only rediscovered poetry on the BA, although at that point, and on a subsequent Creative Writing MA, my priority was prose (a novel set in 1960s Notting Hill and India). It was 2019 before Mary Oliver’s passing redirected my back to poetry, both the reading and the writing of it.
Music, dance, writing, art, drama, crafts, cooking, gardening. My life has been filled with creative endeavour of one sort or another. My work as an holistic therapist and facilitator of meditation and healing retreats for women sensitised my to the emotional life, a quality that finds an outlet in poetry described as being ‘of the heart’. Music has been my love since the age of six when my mother took me to a performance of Swan Lake. I played piano, guitar, auto-harp, trained as a classical singer at the now defunct Trinity College of Music, all of which I feel influences how I hear the flow of words.
Joint winner of the Hedgehog Press Competition Nicely Folded Paper 2019, my work appears in Agenda, Dreich, HU, Raceme, London Grip, Saraswati, Reach, Dawn Treader, Blue Nib, Panoply, amongst others. Winner of the NADFAS poetry competition 2009 (age range 13 - 17), long-listed in The Bridport, and Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize 2021, and the Gloucestershire Poetry Society Competition, she received special mention in both Welsh Poetry and Binsted Arts Competitions, my work was Highly Commended in Sentinel Literary Journal and Storytown 2019 Poetry Competitions, short-listed in Hedgehog Poetry Press Postcards from the Hedge: A Bestiary of the Night. A regular reader on Wilts Radio, The Poetry Place, my poems appear in a number of anthologies. My second pamphlet is seeking publication while I work on a full collection. I often wonder, will I ever complete the novel?
I relish period dramas, spicy food, long walks in nature, the ocean. Sweetly scented blossom. Tchaikovsky, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash. I also loves to converse with animals and birds, but have a hard time with the heron who swoops out of the dawn, hopeful for a snack ofcarp. Most of all, I love poetry.'
Sparrow Love
The female flirts her tail,
flamenco flounce
of a doyenne cute
at charm. Thumbs
up for the male, a coy
first timer, by the looks
of his several efforts
till the deed is done.
When she whisks
into the nest to sort,
I presume, the housekeeping,
he is quick to follow, now
he’s got the hang of things,
no doubt eager to improve.
A flutter, till he arrows
from beneath the eaves
to return in a tail’s flicker
to the drain. Where he struts,
the bon mot of a small white
feather in his beak, proof
to the Beloved how fine
a catch he is. As I dream
of its kiss against my
cheek, the cot this snowy boon
will fashion for its prize of eggs,
brown speckle glazed
with the suspicion of a sheen,
an image drowns my heart.
My father, his eyes behind
black rimmed glasses shiny
with incipient grief. Tears I caught
the hint of once, the day my mother
bundled me into a taxi, scrambled after.
Not a mention of it, ever, in the access hours
I idled with him at the flicks, over
milk shakes in the Wimpy Bar,
doughnuts, ice-cream cones. Apart
from that last day in St. Michael’s hospital.
Two weeks and not a word.
His eyes opened. Vron, I’ve missed you,
an ocean streaming down his cheeks.
Padraig – Who Drove the Snakes Out of Ireland
At the allotment, daddy
forked the crumbly black earth
till the air quaked
with anticipation of excess,
me sifting stones
in search of treasure;
the robin sat, pert,
on the lip of the bucket meant
to carry spuds or cabbages,
the occasional giggle-tickle carrot
back to placate the mammy.
The bird’s eye bright
with a lust for worms,
his song a crystal cataract
of merry; though none
of the seeds we sowed
ever showed head
out of the sly earth
and we saw nothing
of the slow worm
daddy promised so that,
his name being Padraig too,
I guessed he must be a saint, especially
when he himself vanished.
Though he turned up
months later
at the end of school
again and again and again
till I had to tell the mammy
where the books and toys came from
and that got me sent off
to board at St. Bridget’s convent
where the head nun was nice to you
if your mammy gave her fruit cake
in a tin, bottles of orange linctus sherry,
a crocheted shawl like frothy cobwebs,
none of which my mammy could afford,
Padraig having banished more than snakes.
Exodus
In the Confessional at school’s end
the priest’s face has the sheen
of the girl’s Mary Quant
nude lipstick.
She fidgets on the hassock.
Incense thralls her, and a fantasy
of hands milking themselves
behind the grille.
Words hiss. Tell me, my child,
tongue-click over cracked lips,
flicker in the priest’s groin:
exactly what did yous do with him?
Three times the question.
Three times her reply.
A Judas crow.
I slept with him.
Shegabbles through the penance,
Hail Mary twenty times,
seethes down the nave,
through a sea of sleepy motes,
scents of lilies, unctuous echoes.
Candles in the Mary chapel
gutter, flare; Our Lady
tails her from under
lidded eyes. Mute. Cold stone.
The church door groans, clangs shut
as she steps out into the yard,
out of her flaunt of piety,
out of Mother Church.
A crow on a grave stone
ruffles its wings, cackles
applause. Breeze tousles her hair.
Baptism of apple blossom, absolution.
Wild Lass of Kells
She shuffles on the kerb outside O’Shaunessy’s, corner of Kelly and Dunleven Road. Her eyes the colour of Our Lady’sveil, scorched bluer by her copper curls. On the lookout for the Da. Her task of a Friday night to wheedle the wages off of him before he sets out on the lash.Glad of a break from the chores. Socks like a flock of crows, forever jostling, hand me down frocks in need of hems, pantssnagged on barbed wire, nails, atop of farmer’s walls and fences. Herself, the firstborn of a baker’s dozen; endless mopping up of spats, snail snots, scabby porridge pots.
Licks of laughter, yellow light, sidle out the gaping door into the night, let out by culchies on their shuffle to the bar. Eejits with purple slurs for eyes, glances tossed her way
collection plate
clink of small change at
Sunday mass
The odd time, a flash of lust; the most times, shame. A rare smile to build her up, Sure aren’t you a dote now, Delia, looking out for yer Mammy. God bless yourself.
Eyes cast down, pious daughter of The Virgin, Lord luv the child, in her wilting dress, miraculous blue medal clipped to the chest of her tatty cardigan. An occasion of sin, to be sure, sleveens might take advantage of. Till she glances up. That glare, brazen as hell’s fires, from the child of Maire of the Scry Eye, seventh daughter of a seventh son.
flame hex
of a
wild blood tinker
Skipping off home to a last scald of the pot, wedge of soda farl thick with dripping, her pocket is a clatter of coins, only the lighter by a bleary-eyed pint.
The Only One Who Loves You
Spurning words that echoed like a curse,
I stuffed a duffel bag with blister packs of pills,
Mary Quant minis, fantasies of girls
threading daisies in the muzzles of guns;
fled to the Big Smoke. In a bedsit
by Kensington Gardens, I massacred steak
with the mallet of hate, a year on, turned vegan;
pioneer in ’68 of pity for pool-eyed cows,
sheep, slate stare plaice.
Feigned compassion.
Strove to prove to myself
that I was worthy of love.
Strutted the nights away
with flautists, a harpist
whose healer’s hands
strummed my strings;
drummer, his silk tipped stroke
nimble on the snare; callous guitarists
plucking tunes from out of smoke drifts.
Chanted mantras with Ram Dass
in a basement in Notting Hill,
dossed in a Maida Vale squat;
candles, calor gas stove, the one tap
drip drip in the bog beside the back door.
Made out, off my head, with a sweetheart
leaf Philodendron, burnt joss sticks
to placate Kali’s horde of swords,
sweeten the vibes, man,
stench of cat lit no-one
from the Highgate commune
I crashed in next, ever emptied;
spooned marmalade from a jar half-full,
recycled from a skip.
Almost believed myself deserving of love,
till come the morning, I forgot. My heart
tenderised with grief discovering
the night my mother died,
love is an ether you can choke or float in.
On Reaching Heaven
Your eyes the bubble sparkle
of a Moet sláinte,
you’ll float across
in that cherry cardigan
you favoured towards the end.
Stuck at home, you
toasted the hours with
a click of needles knitting
socksfor friends. I dropped by,
or phoned, less often than I later
wished though that last time I brought
the cake. A treat we’d baked together years
before; your strong hand on mine steering
the heart beat symmetry of the wooden
spoon through an anarchy of icing
sugar, butter, splash - or more,
dependant on the mood -
of Bewley’s coffee.
The spill of your
song fizzing
the shadows
of the basement
kitchen as I jammed
together sponges open
hearted as your love.
The glory of walnut halves tallied
one to ten onto my palm
to be set with caution
on the buttercream
glaze. Baked
in honour
of the day,
the sun with its
celebratory gleam,
unseasonable. Tenth
of the tenth. The date
you and I each entered
this world and that you
even with your sixth
sense never guessed
would be the day
you’d leave.
OPEN MIC POEMS
SPRING 2022: We are resuming live open mic events in 2022. Please see our What's On page for up to date listings. Meanwhile, scroll down to enjoy our archive of monthly listings by guest poets.
WELCOME to our new virtual open mic poetry! While public gatherings remain difficult because of covid precautions, we plan to continue our monthly open mic sessions online. Each month we will have a featured guest poet who will start things moving with a couple of poems. This will be followed by one poem for each open mic contributor. The plan is to post the Open Mic Poems on the last Wednesday of each month when we would normally be meeting at either New Park Centre, the Library in Chichester or elsewhere in the South Downs.
POET OF THE MONTH: MANDY PANNETT
Mandy says: I'm often asked how I first started writing poetry. I think one way I came to it was by writing song lyrics, something I enjoyed doing many years ago when I lived in south-east London and musician
friends were keen to have words for their melodies that they could perform in folk clubs. Through this I came to appreciate the sounds of words - hard sounds, soft sounds, words as images to create associations and trigger memories. I still find this fascinating.
Recently I heard someone talking about the importance of pitch in poetry and describing, as an illustration, Dylan Thomas' wonderful poem about his father where the power of the line 'Do not go gentle into that good night' is emphasised by the DGNGN sounds.
I'm very lucky, for a number of reasons, to live in Sussex, by the South Downs and near the sea as well. Either as a cause or a consequence I find the setting of a poem or a story is important to me. I have a strong sense of place and enjoy trying
to create that in my writing. I also like experimenting with the layout of a poem, using white space to suggest not only a pause but an atmosphere. I I have tried this, I hope effectively, with several of my poems in The Daedalus Files.
It's good to have the opportunity to include some of the Daedalus poems. I didn't know I could write 22 poems around one theme until I tried. Neither did I realise how deeper meanings and contemporary relevancies in a myth would reveal themselves as I
gradually explored the ideas through many drafts and edits.
MANDY PANNETT: POEMS
I’m including four poems from my poetry pamphlet ‘The Daedalus Files’ (SPM Publications. March 2021). This is a sequence I’ve been writing on and off for a few years with growing fascination. I’ve always been intrigued by the story of Daedalus, inventor, craftsman and designer of the labyrinth which held the minotaur and where teenagers from Athens were brought as sacrifices until the monster was slain by Theseus with the guidance of the king’s daughter, Ariadne. After this, Daedalus and his son Icarus were imprisoned in a tower by the king but Daedalus designed wings made from feathers so they could escape. Both managed to fly for a considerable distance but Icarus went too close to the sun, his wings melted and he fell, drowning in the sea.
So much for the story. I first became interested – later obsessed – by Daedalus a few years ago when we were staying with friends on the beautiful Greek island of Tilos. Somehow we started talking about Icarus and the Icarian Sea named after him and maybe it was because we were so close to the blue, shimmering water that the sad tale began to feel real. While we were there a boatload of refugees from Syria tried to land on the rocks but was intercepted and scores of men, women and children were later brought down to the harbour to wait for a ship that would take them to a holding centre in Athens. It was tragic to see and to think about. Daedalus and Icarus were trying to escape, these refugees had wanted to escape. The two things connected in my imagination and that same day I began the sequence.
Over the years I have explored the myth of Daedalus, discovering threads of loss, betrayal and abandonment, the nature of monstrosity, how scientific invention can be used for good and ill, the down-treading of women, the need for refuge and the desire for flight. A myth is more than an ancient, half-forgotten tale; themes in the story of Daedalus feel as relevant today as they ever were.
Monologue in a Labyrinth
this is a dangerous place
but nothing
to be scared of stop trembling
monsters are pure myth
a dead end we’re in a mine the mine’s heart
or the dead zone of a tunnel
we need to crawl this bit
is like a drainpipe smelly as a sewer
you can wander underground in a sewer so they say if there’s a grating
and people squat down they’ll see you
easy to peer into hades
through a crack in the upper earth
can you hear birds we must be somewhere
near daylight or dusk this low roof is like a pier
the underside where starlings fly out and there’s
seaweed on your face and cold wet sand in your shoe
somewhere there’s a way out
Daedalus in the Edgelands
He improvises his steps like a line
from Bye Bye Blackbird, or a long loose
thread from a ball of wool. Content
to be lost he turns left, right, strides
to the south; one measure north brings
a feeling for soil, strata, ancient
dances and rain. He is glad to stroll
among the unkempt and dingy, the rubble,
the trash and unclaimed, and relieved, now,
for the moment at least, of voices that growl
do this, do that, invent an animation, befuddle
the lusty queen with a wooden cow.
A pause in time, an empty space which is never
really empty, a break from the outer
clamorous world – he thinks of his quiet
hideaway, his den in the cliffs, his haven
where he can study the king’s ships without
fuss. The blackbird sings in the tree; one last note.
An Athenian Mother
They are born to be hostages, our children, hostages to fortune
from the quickening day. Always the joy, and always
the terror of loss.
Often I’d get up at night to check my daughter breathed,
touching her cheek with my finger until she whimpered in her sleep
and stirred.
And many times I called her in from play, too early
and unfairly. But I needed to know she was safe from danger
and under my roof.
We celebrated with a feast the day she left childhood behind.
Green olives, figs, a scatter of herbs and warm baked bread,
wine for the blessing –
wine that soured with the taint of a curse as ten days later
they took her away, left me screaming on the quayside, and her,
trying to be brave
but crying for me as they were led, our young hostages,
onto a ship with a sail of despair, a tall mast ripping the sky
and my heart with it.
For Those Who Are Falling
for you are falling winglessfrom a high tree
into the space between air
and the soil
which is nothing but space
a headlong drop
to plummet through in darkness
and be hurt by
unless
you find yourself caught on a branch
budding and green
which holds you as if with a prayer
for the coiling and binding of leaves or twigs of grace
while above you a small bird rises
with a song cool as raindrops
un-parching your earth and offering such stillness
you do not need to fall into the dark
wingless and hurt
Open Mic Poetry – May 2021
Please scroll down to read this month's poems by Denise Bennett, Kevin Maynard, David Cooke, Timothy Ades, Richard Davies, Tina Cathleen MacNaughton, Tony Wheatley, Geoffrey Winch, Christine Rowlands, David Slade and Piers Rowlandson.
Denise Bennett
Prometheus Plays with Clay
Put down yourfire Prometheus
and make a maquette of man.
First bend some thin wire
to shape the skeleton;
rib-cage, knee-caps, pelvis.
Then take your warm clay,
remember to let your hands dance
as you cover the bones.
Put down your fire Prometheus
and make a maquette of man.
Feel the texture beneath
your fingers, the soft slip
as you twist the limbs;
use your spatula and rake
to create the head – make it
more beautiful than your own.
Put down your fire Prometheus
and make a maquette of man.
Fashion a model of life
and energy – make his shoulders
strong enough to bare
the weight of the world.
Give him joy, sorrow and hope,
arms to embrace love.
Put down your fire Prometheus
and make a maquette of man.
Kevin Maynard
Bean Patch
“I planted beans below the southern hill;
Weeds flourish; bean sprouts are few.”
Tao Qian (tr. Ronald Egan)
if you could tot up all your borrowed time
a hill of beans is all it would amount to
three score and ten the Good Book’s paradigm
barely as much as this small child can count to
children, like dogs, live mainly in the present
while those consumed by age haunt their own past
what this one has is what this other hasn’t
but all haves vanish, though our losses last
how few these beansprouts, tiny flags of green
the fragile pennants of some future meal
smothered by weeds of sorrow and defeat
from feast to fast the mouths that crave to eat
from bliss to numbness flesh that craves to feel
from Must-Be to Perhaps to Might-Have-Been
David Cooke
Trystesse
Her perfume lingers
-Memoir of comfort,
An aftermath of fire.
She’s gone;
Design of his desire,
Clattering down the stairs,
Blowing single kisses
At his goodbye door,
Hurling a happy
Fond farewell
Over her carefree shoulder.
His face feels empty;
The consequence
Of unused laughter.
He is replete,
Togetherness
He thinks,
Makes him complete.
Now he perceives
A change of mood
In equilibrium of desire
And solitude.
He savours the minute,
Inhales the memory,
Excludes all thought,
Exhales his happiness.
She skips away,
Dancing on feathered feet.
Older, he stays, and prays;
To freeze the time
Where all true lovers meet.
Timothy Adès
Violet calls on me to compose a sonnet
a translation of Lope de Vega 1562-1635
I’m keeping busy! Now, I have to frame
a sonnet, by command of Violet.
In sonnets, fourteen lines are what you get:
the first three make it look an easy game.
I thought I’d find no word that ends the same!
And now I’m halfway through the second set:
but, thinking forward to the first tercet,
the quatrains are comparatively tame.
The first tercet is starting, I’ve just spotted!
Off on the right foot first I entered on it,
so in this line the same is duly slotted.
I’m on the second tercet of my sonnet:
already thirteen lines are crossed and dotted.
Count up – fourteen, I fancy – yes, I’ve done it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgyrO9Eb0ao
Richard Davies
Blind Light
Light is blind and cannot see
the beauty it creates,
existing merely to display,
for our enquiring eyes,
and for our pleasure too,
the intricate constructions
from which our world is made -
the lines, the curves,
the shining sun,
the shadows of the moon.
and the sanctity of shade,
How sad it is that light
can never know
the love that it bestows.
Tina Cathleen MacNaughton
Paint the sky red
Just when I was fed up
with the lack of joy and colour
in my world, I glanced
out of the window
and saw You had painted the sky
with red, a brushstroke of promise
and hope, a reminder that
tomorrow may be magical.
Tony Wheatley
Downland Dowsing
From soil through foot to heart, mind, soul,
Earth shifts her latent spore.
In touch with grounded mysteries,
We root into her lore.
Ancient tracks, primeval force,
Copse, spinney, rife, sea-lace,
Myriad greens pierce weaving mists,
Chalk-white’s a holy place.
Sheep-shorn hills boast sacred rings,
Tumuli ten-fold.
Past toat and limmer ponds we tramp
To relics of the wold.
Fertile, sensuous legacies
Find elemental course,
Invisible, umbilical,
In ley lines, lavant source,
Dense, dark woods on sloping trails,
Dry clods next marshy ways,
Signs, homing energies perforce -
Mystic, vibrant rays.
Clay-flint stodge spawns musheroons,
In circled, sanctus field.
Hallowed paths by knuckerholes
Vibrating magic yield.
Polarities of tingling art
Pulse secret empathy
To children of the Downs made whole
Through downland mammary.
Geoffrey Winch
Engaging
Canon in D: Johann Pachelbel, c1694
The Rose Hip: Ric Sanders, 1988
So captivating this canon: a hit
originally at wedding feasts
when starry-eyed guests loved
to gigue to violins engaging
with its variant repeated chords.
But eventually all dancing to
its refrains and basso-continuo
ceased,
and its counterpointed
melodies slept for centuries
until aroused
by Aphrodite’s Child whose
tears and rain precipitated through
those counterculture mists, so
regaining it a place in repertoire,
albeit at a moderated pace.
Timely too, for at a wedding
it would meet a modern melody –
offspring of a jazz and slip-jig
virtuoso fiddle-player –
a measured tune evoking romance
of summer-gone, yet glowing still
rich with colour
and they slow-
danced so well together.
(Aphrodite’s Child = Vangelis, Demis Roussos etc.
Ric Sanders: member of Fairport Convention)
Christine Rowlands
Dancing on Zoom.
Lucy, our Yoga teacher suggests we dance
in our class today.
“Some of you tell me you never dance!
Choose some music, something you like!
I’ll mute
you all.
Let’s dance!”
We shimmy and stretch/shake our shoulders/
wriggle and wobble and wave our arms.
Later we share our choices-
Cathy wafted to an American folk song.
The two sisters played
an Indian raga.
Caroline Zoomed in from a Greek island,
twirling to Nana Mouskouri.
Lucy grooved to Fairport Convention.
Mary swayed with Bob Dylan.
I hummed the Locomotion with its easy beat.
We -move-to-our-own-inner-rhythm
and...
It’s FUN .....Zoom dancing
David Slade
Tommy Brettall’s New Ritz Revels 1938
The white jackets with the red facings
were as sharp as the notes they played.
Those six straight backed, instrument armed
musicians have been sitting in my father’s cupboard
waiting for a new intro these many years now,
but I know the call never came – well,
not the one they were expecting anyway.
Little did they think then, that in a few months
their uniforms would be khaki and the sands
of the Dunkirk beaches and The Western Desert
would take the place of The Majestic Ballroom.
They were not as close a knit group as their music
suggested and there were moments of disharmony.
Milligan was never one to fall in line with instructions
and there was a certain strain on his face even then.
Tommy was always apart – the organiser, the arranger,
the multi-talented musician, the one who held the glue
and stuck the mixed personalities back together
when the dust had settled – after the last dance –
and a warm beer and a Woodbine allowed
the adrenaline rush to slow down a little.
They all came back when it was over.
The white coats were by then, a seedy cream,
and the facings had faded along with
their enthusiasm – they’d all seen
too much red in the intervening years.
And anyway, jitter-bug was now all the rage.
Jitter-bug and piano accordion are poor bedfellows.
The sharp edges of the thirties were blunted
and ‘swing’ seemed utility-makeshift now.
Uniforms and the music stands were consigned
to the dustcart and the instruments’
only outings were in the privacy of
the family Christmas get-together.
Then, a wetness around the smoke filled eyes,
was the only evidence of memories
of the late nights, the glitter and the pretty girls.
The photo is now as faded as the jackets were but
the richness of the melodies still echoes
through the years and stirs the dust
at the bottom of my fathers’ cupboard.
(Slipstream Workshop led by Paul Ward
on using photographs as prompts.)
Piers Rowlandson
Ghosts
Lovers parting:
“We have all the time in the world.”
Do the dead follow us down the years,
through the mists of time?
Try to leave the dead behind.
They surprise you:
at the gate into the field,
on a lazy summer afternoon.
“The yellow flowers are poisonous to ponies.”
The voice is as clear now
as it was fifty years ago.
“Only when cut down;
leave the flowers alone.”
In the estuary,
an old fashioned boat
approaches the shore
where blackened twisted trees
mark the receding bank.
It’s the smell of the seaweed
that brings back
those two sailors.
The line of the Downs
echoing a coachman’s whip.
The chalk white fields,
fringed by dark woods
The old open topped car,
the smell of hay,
waiting to be baled
He’ll make us
brandy eggnog
when we get home
to the farmhouse kitchen:
“You boys need warming up.”
We are hurrying onward.
Ghosts have all the time in the world.
OPEN MIC POEMS
APRIL 2021: WELCOME to our new virtual open mic poetry! While public gatherings remain unsafe because of the current pandemic, we plan to continue our monthly open mic sessions online. Each month we will have a featured guest poet who will start things moving with a couple of poems. This will be followed by one poem for each open mic contributor. The plan is to post the Open Mic Poems on the last Wednesday of each month when we would normally be meeting at either New Park Centre, the Library in Chichester or elsewhere in the South Downs.
POET OF THE MONTH: DEBORAH TYLER-BENNETT
Deborah says: I’m a European poet and short fiction writer living in Leicestershire but who (current restrictions permitting) spends some time each year in Brighton and East Sussex. Thus, Brighton and the South Downs are abiding influences on the colours, textures and sounds of my work. As are vintage clothes and hats which I collect and wear. I currently have eight volumes of poetry, and three books of linked short fictions published by various presses including Shoestring, Smokestack, Kings’ England, and Nine Arches. Volumes include Pavilion (Smokestack, set in Brighton) and Mr Bowlly Regrets (Kings’ England, 2017). I was also fortunate enough (in 2010) to be offered a residency at Keats House, Hampstead, which influenced the volume Kinda Keats (Shoestring).
Before the pandemic, I performed my work a great deal, and currently still do this for various festivals and events online (my most recent being for Storytown, Corsham in 2020). Brighton venues I’ve read at include Castor and Pollux on the seafront, Brighton Pavilion for Sussex Day (where I read to individual tables and performed on balconies and under portraits, upstairs, in my favourite historic building), Pighog Poetry at the Red Roaster Café, and AT Open House for the Brighton Fringe - reading in a lovely garden alongside other performers. I miss performing live at such welcoming and inclusive venues, and my poetic work for art galleries and museums.
During the past few months, I’ve been teaching my usual Adult Education creative writing classes (online) for the WEA but have also been sending work out to small presses and projects. Newly published pieces include work for Writer’s Café (online), The Hunterian Museum’s Edwin Morgan Poem (online), Imminent, David Severn’s poetry, music, and photography web pages - Songs of Solitude, The Black Lives Matter Anthology (Civic Leicester, 2020), and in various projects for City Arts, Chichester Poetry and Durham Festival’s Murmuration Project amongst others. This year, I have a new poem coming out in Dear Dylan, an anthology dedicated to Dylan Thomas, for Indigo Dreams press. As with many poets, writing poetry, and organisations such as South Downs Poetry and this site, have been lights in the shadows during these difficult times.
Poems: ‘A Dance in the Dark …’
The poems I’ve selected for the Open Mic are ones I feel sum up my poetic career thus far. ‘West Pier Serenade’ and ‘Regent’ were both published in my volume, Pavilion (Smokestack, 2010), and are set in Brighton. I’ve performed them often. In the first one, I tried to convey how the ruined West Pier has continued to haunt my imagination. I thought a lot about sound, and filmic imagery when writing it. In the second, ‘Regent’, I travelled the poem to the Royal Pavilion with it’s astonishing array of colours, textures, and ghosts. For me, the Pavilion’s one of those structures that provides a feast for the soul. In these hard times, just thinking about the unlikeliness of its art and design gives me a lift. I’m sure, I’m not alone in that.
Given the wonderful You Tube film for Keats’s Bi-Centenary from South Downs Poetry and the University of Chichester, I thought I’d also include a poem from Kinda Keats (Shoestring, 2013). ‘John and Tonic’ was about a reading by John Hegley that I attended at Keats House. Events at the reading (watching two birds flittering outside as Hegley read) seemed very Keatsian. I was lucky enough to have the poem also placed in a Keats House anthology edited by John Hegley, (Here We Go Round the Mulberry Tree, Keats House, 2013, pg.40), illustrated by Quentin Blake, one of my favourite illustrators. In Kinda Keats, I wrote many poems directly about Keats’s life and Wentworth Place, his shared house, but felt this one really summed up a spirit of place as it exists now. I’m so happy to have it re-printed here, for his Bi-Centenary.
Lastly, there’s a new, hitherto un-published poem, ‘Short Pantoum of the Foxes.’ Watching through my bedroom window, recently, I saw two foxes playing in the snow on a garage roof. These bought to mind the lovely James Wright poem ‘A Blessing’ and Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ – both poems involving joy brought by the natural world, or maybe secreted within it.
As with ghostly couples dancing at the old Pier, the Regent refusing to leave his outrageous palace, or parakeets courting outside Keats House, those foxes are my ‘dancers in the dark’ and, I hope, provide the reader with images of poetic endurance in stressful times.
Deborah Tyler-Bennett: Poems
West Pier Serenade
There’s a dance going on, in the dark, above our heads,
men pressing women against laundered suits,
a girl’s surprised to find her older partner dances
better than boys, a woman leaves imprinted lips
staining the bar-tender’s milky cheek.
Above us, the burned-out Pier against evening’s
Guinness-black curtain, where feet shuffle in rhythm
(a few toes getting stepped on) and maybe this
close-stepping’s what we’re made for,
hands tight against gabardine or georgette clad backs.
It may be the sea, or the dancers’ suggestive whispering:
“At last, at last, at last …”
Above our heads, pier-bones lost to night,
where phantoms clutch each other.
Only the sea? Or a woman breathing to her partner,
before kissing him: “I wish tonight would last,
would last … would last.”
From Pavilion (London: Smokestack, 2010), pg. 9.
Regent
Ghosting the Pavilion, struggling to catch your eye
as you study pock-marked mirrors I knew new.
Shock of my floury, moon-pie
face, hair seeming too small and not well curled,
spirit of better times, bereft of dogs … parties … mistresses …
Hoping to make tourists, like yourself, recoil
my impressive form’s refracted
in one hundred
knives … forks … spoons…
Shudders in and out of compotes
hefty with wax fruit, whorls eyes
of porcelain Mandarins
to no effect.
Through gift shop shelves I squish,
tinkling pot-bellied Christmas baubles,
juddering gewgaws, rattling shrink-wrapped postcards
(depicting regal under-drawers that can’t be mine
too large, sink me, too large)
and think of breathing times
when trifling debts were trumpeted
around the house, and penny-sheets lampooned me
fat enough to sport those mighty under-drawers.
Listen. Sore phantom feet squelched
into silk Chinese slippers for eternity
task your steps. I call … I call …
nothing sounds against empty air …
Outside, exotic borders roaring with a thousand scarlet Dragon-tongues.
From Pavilion (London: Smokestack, 2010), pg. 52.
John and Tonic
Tonight, as John Hegley sang poems, him coaxing,
Keats House chorusing (happily, scarily, uproariously)
bright green parakeet, g-and-t’s slice of lime,
bounced into trees with tomato-billed, fractious mate.
Readers … audience digging ribs: “Did you see?”
Unconcerned, his own deft poetry
dainty-clawed parakeet hung upside down,
mate off, soaring.
Passing gilt Music Room as I was leaving
saw through framing windows, beaming
faces, their interior candles. Gazing
netted trees, caught love bird laughter.
Kinda Keats (Nottingham: Shoestring, 2013), pg.13.
Short Pantoum of the Foxes
My window watch, as snow had dropped all day,
night’s inky blanket muffling the street,
starred fall vanishing on garage roofs,
and then I saw the foxes’ silhouettes.
Night’s inky blanket, muffling the street,
as cub hailed cub, scissoring the dark,
and then I saw the foxes’ silhouettes,
shadow catching flakes out of the void
as cub hailed cub. Scissoring the dark
sibling faced sibling, leaning from the white,
shadow catching flakes out of the void,
limbs bracing in a moment of pure joy.
Sibling faced sibling. Leaning out from white,
my window watch, as snow … had dropped … all day …
limbs bracing in a moment of pure joy,
starred fall vanishing on garage roofs.
Open Mic Poetry – April 2021
Please scroll down to read this month's poems by Barry Smith, Chris Hardy, Kevin Higgins, Greg Freeman, Camilla Lambert, Richard Williams, Geoffrey Winch, Raine Geoghegan, Christine Rowlands, Denise Bennett, Alan Bush, Kevin Maynard and Piers Rowlandson.
Barry Smith
Noli Me Tangere
At nine just after breakfast on this
Good Friday, I step into the garden
for a breath of fresh air in the shrubbery
with spring sunshine bouncing off
the jaunty celandines, all pert angles
and generous in their Easter giving,
the bountiful camellias are fully
alight with bright pink Donation’s
spent petals spilling across the grass,
Guilio Nuccio replying in regal red
and soft-white Magnoliaeflora
offering its perfectly formed coronets,
the bluebells in long-leaved sprawls
of green are calmer now after the night’s
smothering wash of sickly-sweet perfume
and the tiny birdseye blue flowered alkanets
are bullying their way to prominence
at every corner of the pathways.
This morning’s emails bring the cathedral
newsletter, a line of communication
in this time of lockdown and isolation,
and there on my screen I see Sutherland’s
incandescently orange and turquoise
image of Mary Magdalene reaching up
to the gardener on the spiral steps above
the tomb, compelled to keep her distance –
Noli Me Tangere, touch me not.
At six today, as every day now,
we will brew a pot of Ceylon tea
and take our seats in the front room
turn on the television news and listen
as the overnight tallies of the dead
accompany the shots of enveloping
blue gowns, gloves, visors and masks
carrying the crayoned names of those tending
the cocooned forms on their beds of white.
(Easter, 2020. First published in Chichester Cathedral Newsletter and subsequently in Littoral Press magazine, Spring 2021.)
Chris Hardy
An Unkindness
On the hill where I
cut thistles in July,
cut them then
and they will die,
I followed a white rooster
up and down
while axe-billed scavengers
mocked us in the sky.
He kept running knew
he’d outrun me
but didn’t know
he couldn’t last
and couldn’t fly.
White tailed cockerel
you crowed
in Summer dawn,
woke us both
too soon.
We don’t need you
in our field,
there will be eggs
in hedge or barn
when hens declare
look where hay lies warm
and my daughters run
to find them
in the sun.
They laughed at me
with my long pole
unable to catch
a small white bird
and when I did
they stopped a while
but then forgot.
We didn’t put him
in the pot,
left him laid out
for the ravens
that let souls lie
until noon.
The couplet near the start 'Cut them in July and then they will die' is part of a piece of folk lore about controlling thistles ('Cut them in June that's too soon' etc).
A gathering of ravens is an 'Unkindness' .. that's not the only unkind thing here of course.
The setting is Radnorshire, In Greek myth Ravens are associated with the souls of the dead ..
Apparently they are back at Chichester Cathedral. But I have not seen them or the Peregrines recently ..
Chris Hardy
Kevin Higgins
Artists For More Of The Same
#Right2MoreOfTheSame
When the regime begins auctioning
your children off to the Chinese,
and cremating the homeless;
for everyone who goes marching or writes
shouty poems against such things
there are others, like us, who quietly
welcome such reforms.
Our plans have been independently costed
by the Office of Budget Irresponsibility.
All the Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre’s
hairdressing needs will be paid for
by raising the retirement age
for garbage disposal workers
to seventy five.
For their fortieth birthdays, all novelists
of no discernible consequence
will receive a knit-your-own
Martin Amis kit, and the ability
to cause nausea and bloating
in others.
For their fiftieth, members
of the National Academy of Arts and Letters–
and those who consistently liked
the right Facebook posts –
will receive a Jowl Development Grant
(payable annually) and a toothpick
with which to remove
any of the Minister for Culture’s pubes
which may have become
lodged between their teeth.
http://www.manifestopress.org.uk/index.php/publications2/48-the-minister-for-poetry-has-decreed
Greg Freeman
THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE
Mick shrugging off the starstruck teenagers
told by the director to get up on stage,
concentrating more
on his moves than his miming,
holding it all back on Little Red Rooster.
Cilla’s face lit with wide-eyed astonishment
that all this was really happening.
Sixteen-year-old Lulu
descending a staircase
knowing exactly what was happening.
Them, led by him. The Beach Boys
in their striped shirts; strangely,
not very hip at all. Gerry crossing
the Mersey; the robotic Dave Clark Five;
a lost and left behind Billy Fury.
Dusty at her happiest
in her Motown comfort zone
trying too hard to transmit her joy.
Martha and the Vandellas,
Heatwave in all its glory.
Camilla Lambert
Thoughts on the weight of a soul
Does my soul
weigh more than yours,
a fat cherry
not half a blackberry?
When it comes to judgment day
will my soul-mate
lend me a slither
to weigh down the scales?
Or perhaps a lighter soul
can more speedily girdle the earth,
seek out nectar, sustenance
for infinite time.
*
All I could do
when my mother died,
each arm light as a swallow’s skull,
was gather up my threadbare belief
and pray her soul be untethered
to swim with a company of seals,
in easeful peace
away from the storm.
*
I met a melancholy soul,
staring at a wolf moon
on the cusp of midnight,
poised to leap skywards.
I questioned it delicately:
where did it came from
or want to be?
It could not answer
nor could the black-haired child
thrown out from the sea
over sea-weedy rocks
on the edge of the shingle beach.
When I lifted them up,
soul and child,
they rested feather-light,
equally balanced.
Note: in 1907 Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts hypothesized that souls have physical weight. He attempted to measure the mass lost by a human at the moment of death. One of the six subjects lost three-fourths of an ounce (21.3 grams).
Richard Williams
Butterflies in the Age of Dinosaurs
Such fragile wings entombed:
fragments for our imagination,
we press faces to the past,
sluice colour into the ghosts of veins,
from there to the shadows of bone.
In the time that was before flowers
moths and butterflies drank sap
from the weeping bark of trees,
then forests laid down and died,
a layer of world renewed.
Here in this cathedral to the dead
rows of display case cabinets,
exhibits long extinguished
like the trees that hold these fossils,
such base material to reform.
Or the sand melted into panes of glass.
Or the copper and zinc refined to brass.
Or the stone that held such treasure.
So much there was to extract.
So much fuel to burn.
This first appeared in South last spring.
It came from a news article about the discovery of butterfly fossils predating flowering plants by millions of years.
Geoffrey Winch
Answers to your Unasked Question
Because when I’ve answered
your questions before with
questions of my own,
you have never answered.
Because things we said
in company remained
the same but different
when we were alone.
Because when stakes appear
too high it’s necessary
to believe bluff
has a part to play.
Because now we’re back
in the real world, there’s
no need to leave it so long
before we leave it once more.
Because certain experiences
are better rehearsed only inside
the head: best not to review ethics
so soon after making love.
Because known answers
do not require questions
to be asked.
Raine Geoghegan
The Lungo Drom
Bare,
blistered feet.
She walked
over stone
on grass
through thicket and brush
in water,
snow,
flowers and mud.
Her hair grew long,
flowing like a river.
Tiny silvery fish latching
onto each tendril,
longing for the open sea.
At night
she slept in bushes, caves, beside trees.
She dreamt of fire.
She drank from streams,
picked heather, lavender, rosemary for healing,
exchanged them for bread,
kept on walking.
Her hair turned white.
Her bones thinned.
Her body bent over
and her eyes grew weak .
Still she kept on moving.
One early morning under a mottled sky
she stopped.
The moon shone in her body.
Light fell on the ground
and she knew
this was her atchin tan.
(Romani jib (words): The lungo drom - the long road; Atchin tan - stopping place/home.
Published in Words of the Wild Anthology 2019)
Christine Rowlands
Kitchen Know How
Peel, plunge
Discard, dice
Separate and slice.
Lift, layer
Sift, stir
Season add some spice.
Beat, blend
Skim, score
Scatter, mash and mix.
Crush, drain
Chop, toss
Arrange and serve and
EAT.
Denise Bennett
Tulip Kiss
45th wedding anniversary 14th June 2020
he takes the wood
in his arms
a bough fallen
from a tulip tree
in the churchyard
and with his
sculptor’s hands
fashions an image
of lovers
caught in a near kiss
Alan Bush
One life
(after Caroline Bird)
bolted down, burning
a clean version
of me, each cloud
a shadow
a shrill name with still air
flickered in the instant
blackness of a frozen
river, and the balcony
of the sun
filled the sky
like lampshades
with your body
a rush of ash
from someone
else’s dream
that said ‘it’s how
you win’
Kevin Maynard
VIXEN
the whole estate’s asleep now but one tall silvery lamp still
flutters amber light in a flickering circumambient pool
revealing a furry lump of something wholly feral with a twitching tail . . .
casual, coolly incurious, curled up beside a Lexus in our car-park’s
a shamelessly, comfortably coiled-in-slumber she-fox;
from the bedroom window I fiddle with the focus on my binocs
and admire the near-perfect triangles of her white/black/russet face
the near-perfect smaller triangles of her white/black ears
and the sudden red of her yawn—as if bored by our stupid dead cars
by our predictably prissy, mundane and diurnal lives, as if proud
of her own free nocturnal domain, an outlaw away from the crowd,
but in no way furtive, no, a brigand queen, quick teeth and sudden blood . . .
her head twists lazily back and round, she stretches two dainty black paws
and for a moment rolls half over in an elegantly fidgety daze
before nibbling the snuff-coloured fur on her back, foraging maybe for fleas . . .
‘foxes have holes’ . . . and you may have one down by the river, it seems . . .
Reynard, tod-lowrie, dodd, volpone—oh yes, you’ve quite a few names:
you’ve surely nested in me and burrowed your sharp snout into my dreams
and maybe that’s why in China the fox is a most spooky creature,
often a beautiful woman: but if you, say, reach out and touch her,
she’ll let out a bark and a yelp and reveal her true otherworldly nature
as this etherial vixen lifts herself, flicks up her delicate brush and is off
a long lean silently gliding shadow slicing the dark like a knife
and then through the frosty air (my breath smokes white) comes a distant cough
which is all that she’ll grant me now after flitting away like the thief
in the night that those who classed her as vermin would coarsely harrumph
as with horncalls they rode out to hounds to ensure that their hencoops were safe
and it’s left to us ignorant townfolk to see her for what she most certainly is
a kind of nocturnal divinity haunting the streets where she flows
from shadow to flickering shadow, fleet shadow herself under the guttering stars
Piers Rowlandson
Country Churchyard I
The headstone is up there,
By the hedge. Yes, the white one.’
and of his beloved son
Richard.
1949-1972
I can see you’re doing the maths.
“Only twenty three.”
You seem surprised.
Twenty two, I reply.
He never reached his twenty third birthday.
The view is south, across the valley.
But you can’t see the estuary
Where our memories were made.
The wooden scow.
The Fireball: out on the trapeze.
The smell of the mud
And of seaweed rotting in the sun.
The trees have grown tall.
You can’t see the Downs
Where his ashes are scattered.
There’s nothing more to say.
Or perhaps just one last thing,
A favourite saying of his:
“Let’s go faster”
OPEN MIC POEMS
MARCH 2021: WELCOME to our new virtual open mic poetry! While public gatherings remain unsafe because of the current pandemic, we plan to continue our monthly open mic sessions online. Each month we will have a featured guest poet who will start things moving with a couple of poems. This will be followed by one poem for each open mic contributor. The plan is to post the Open Mic Poems on the last Wednesday of each month when we would normally be meeting at either New Park Centre, the Library in Chichester or elsewhere in the South Downs.
POET OF THE MONTH: ROBIN HOUGHTON
Robin says: These days I’m fortunate enough to be (pretty much) purely a writer. I was what was called an ‘early adopter’ in all things internet - leaving a traditional marketing career to take an MA in Digital Media in 2000, then running a business helping other businesses with their online marketing. Like many poets, I started writing when at school, but then the day job got in the way. When I took it up again in my forties, I started reading contemporary poetry and realised I needed to work a bit harder if I wanted to be published! In 2014 I got together with Peter Kenny to form Telltale Press, a poets’ publishing collective, and with three other members we published our debut pamphlets and ran regular readings and events. That was a wonderful springboard and since then I've been lucky enough to have poems in many magazines, and to win some competitions, including the Cinnamon Press pamphlet competition in 2018 and the Live Canon pamphlet competition in 2019. I'm a member of the Society of Authors, the Poetry Society, Hastings Stanza and the Needlewriters collective in Lewes. I'm currently studying for an MA in Poetry & Poetics at the University of York.
For the last few years I've been compiling a quarterly list of UK and Irish poetry magazines including details of their submissions windows which I send out free of charge. I've also written A Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines, first published in 2018 and a second edition updated and expanded December 2020. Only £6 including UK postage, available at http://apoetsguide.co.uk/
Although I'm a South Londoner by birth I'm very fond of Chichester and my family has a few ties to the area - my parents retired to Aldwick in 1982, and my sister trained as a teacher at the old Bishop Otter College. Oh, and I've sung Evensong at the cathedral several times with my group The Lewes Singers.
About the poems
'The summer we went to funerals' was published in The Rialto in 2017. I think it was probably inspired by the many times I've been to funerals at crematoria. Also possibly I was thinking about a wonderful 1996 Czech film called Kolya, in which an organist takes his little boy to work with him when playing at the crem. Eventually he stops doing it when the boy makes a little 'theatre' model to play with, complete with coffins disappearing behind curtains.
'Ladies Hour' was written for Poems and Pictures, the blog of the Mary Evans Picture Library. The blog features poems inspired by some of the thousands of images in the library's collection, from historic photos and paintings to advertising material. It's a fascinating archive. This poem was written in response to an illustration from a 1912 White Star Line brochure for the Titanic. It depicts the indoor swimming pool on one of the first class decks, and a number of elegant ladies sitting and paddling. There was a poignant irony to the idea of these ladies practising their swimming, unaware of the fate of the ship.
First published in Prole, 'Before the Splicing' is a little sonnet about having second thoughts before a wedding. Come to think of it, my first published poem was on a similar theme. Possibly a reflection on my first marriage!
'All the relevant gods' is the title poem of my second pamphlet (Cinnamon, 2018) and it dates from the period when I was working for adidas at its German headquarters. I found my German colleagues as cold as ice, and feeling rather lonely, I made friends with the Latin American office down the corridor. I used to often find excuses to visit them. One friend in particular was a big-hearted woman who I call Sagra in the poem. She saved my life I think.
The summer we went to funerals
your suit smelt of floral tributes
and crematorium smoke - just one fag, you said
during Sheep May Safely Graze.
I learnt the importance of names –
Old Blush, Home Sweet Home
fashioned into one big DAD –
craning at the window of a hearse
holding up buses on the High Street.
You told me the cars must be immaculate.
All that glass. Respect is in the details.
I pictured Dad polishing his boots by the back door.
And later, his waxwork face framed in silk.
I came to recognise the rituals –
lads standing around awkward in black
old aunties looking for an arm
everyone waiting their turn in the sun.
Mourners fingering hymn books
not knowing the words, desperate for a drink.
The flower show as they left, cursory reading
of labels handwritten by strangers.
The chapel filling and emptying
a ballcock priest bobbing on eddies of grief.
But you shut me out of the real business –
the night visits and all that happens
between a last breath and the first flame.
You said I wasn't ready for that.
Ladies' Hour
It's good for the bust
just a gentle stretch or two
then small steps in
it's warmer than you think
it's deeper than you think
I love the blue fear of this –
down, down – watching my leg
disappear, and the other,
in up to my waist, my neck –
that's it –
between me and the sea
just the smell of steerage,
the low belly of boat, the swell.
It's good for the bust.
I will do this. Reach forward,
take a breath. I believe
I will float, I will glide,
just a push with my foot,
my little foot, and let go
Before the splicing
Once she's cut her rope from the spool
it has a job to do: it may tie a boat to a cleat,
secure a headsail in fair wind, bind a spell
to teach her standing from her working end.
The line is her friend. She's witnessed time
and again the trouble caused by a hockled
lay, how hard to untwist, unmake the same –
worked so many nights, twined and reeled,
shaped-shifting coiled sisal and greyed hemp,
she's whipped up frays and braided edges.
So why does she fear the heat of the lamp
and the slipping loose of a thousand fastenings?
She will dig out the core, feed a new line through,
strong for the passing and the coming-to.
All the relevant gods
Sagra’s office walls flare chilli and lime.
To enter is to firewalk:
my dry skin puckers.
If Sagra’s mood is aflame, she’s up
and at me, black flap
of hair shake-shaking –
Sagra is whiplash of Carnival,
staccato rage and/or joy –
more shout than song
gravelling my face
with Spanish expletives.
I’m as passive as the laptops
around us. But Sagra is tall,
higher than the jungle canopy
up on a pyramid,
high on chocolate
with Itzamna and Inti.
She breathes rainforest
and speaks sky, more miraculous
than the giant hummingbird
drawn in the desert grit
and I know this:
every morning
her sly lump of an English boyfriend
must grope out of Sagra’s fragrant bed,
examine the cold play of mirror
and thank all the relevant gods
for whatever it is she sees in him.
Open Mic Poetry – March 2021
Please scroll down to read this month's poems by Deborah Tyler-Bennett, Mandy Pannett, Denise Bennett, Raine Geoghegan, Joan Secombe, Rodney Wood, Barry Smith, Geoffrey Winch, Paul Stephenson, Terry Timblick, Kevin Maynard, Richard Williams, Christine Rowlands and Piers Rowlandson.
Deborah Tyler-Bennett
Sonnet
Keats’ Bedroom
Hardest to be here, near his bed,
pen-and-wash light of this slight room.
Visiting Severn’s death-sketch, webbed
ink suggesting ‘wake him’. Catacomb’s
stark day-lily, poet’s white mask shakes
as if the sickly, living, John’s still here,
gaze flickered-insect caught in lace,
‘do stay’ he whispers. There’s a moth tear
on his night-shirt, I consider comic
stories for him, tales of friends,
some diversion from this chronic
silence, thinking moth-holes won’t mend,
stare at his shirt. ‘Better now … You go …’
Young smile’s flame gutters from view.
From ‘Kinda Keats’ (Nottingham: Shoestring, 2013), 20.
Mandy Pannett
Vessel
Seen
in
snowdrops,
crystals, leaves,
petal-full flowers,
tiny hexagonal chambers
of the honeybee, perfect spirals of ammonites,
Man’s DNA, these codes are inbuilt and intuitive, an ancient underpinning.
There
are
many
famous names:
Phidias’ Zeus,
Fibonacci, man of Pisa,
Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci,
architects: Le Corbusier, the music of Satie, Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau.
And
take
Dali’s
obsession
with the Ratio,
his passion for the number twelve –
apostles, months, the Trinity, tribes of Israel –
his Last Supper’s dodecahedron fills the room like a spaceship, a vessel of light.
Denise Bennett
Remedy for Winter Blues
on black-edged days
un-bottle the robin’s song
and listen
pull a soft woollen shawl
about your shoulders;
feel the warmth
buy a blue hyacinth
for your window ledge
inhale scented breath
see the green linnets
trapezing
on the bird feeder, laugh
take a quiet walk
by the water’s edge
and look for haiku
rest on a bench
by the harbour wall
by the hanging baskets
purple pansies
flecked with snow
shiver in the wind
let your sadness
be carried on the tide,
swish of grey dance-dress
anyday now
the blackthorn
will burst into white lace
Raine Geoghegan
Dark is the Forest
Dark is the forest and deep.
In times gone past it’s where we’d sleep.
Under the oaks or the Hawthorn tree,
drop our covels, our minds roam free.
Dark is the forest and deep,
For dukkering, our malts will keep,
a small gold ring tied with string,
around their wrist or in their fist.
Dark is the forest and deep,
where foxgloves grow and deer do leap,
our plans are spun and boar will run.
We take our time, we ‘ave some fun.
Dark is the forest and deep,
we pass by patrins for those who seek,
to keep in touch with folk that are dear
and pass on news of birth and fear.
Dark is the forest and deep.
(The title is taken from a poem No 131 – Poems 1916 by Edward Thomas;
Romani words (jib) covels – belongings; Dukkering – fortune telling; Patrins – signs left along the road, can be leaves, string or stones.)
Joan Secombe
Lockdown Lent
It crept up on me this year, in the absence of
the usual Sunday reminders -
Septuagesima, Sexagesima, Quinquagesima;
those haunting words of ritual and rhythm
familiar from my youth.
Shrove Tuesday surprised, but
I threw a pancake or two
grateful that online shopping had
inadvertently delivered the requisite goods.
Ash Wednesday then and no solemn communion -
of any sort. Remote worship,
Too remote for me.
I want to be enfolded by God’s architecture,
stone under my feet, monastic chanting
echoing to the vault.
I’d rather walk in the garden meditating,
loosely, under the sky than sit and stare
passive, at a screen.
Lenten discipline:
Sugar, chocolate, alcohol now
not important enough to make
their lack a penance.
I will read,
as reading has been a fitful,
fickle comfort to me of late.
So I will read.
And I will read Revelations
because it has not yet revealed itself to me.
And in this uncertain world I would like
to try to make sense, albeit ineffable sense
of Something.
Rodney Wood
Sonnet with Jawbreakers
The front room where I played blossoming with glass
jars packed with sugar-coated jawbreakers,
the hard Black Jacks, Peanut Brittle, Pear Drops,
Mighty Imps, Sherbet Fountains, Gobstoppers.
While still a baby I grabbed a sweet, held it
in my little fist and cried when they wouldn’t
come out to join my toothless mouth. Dad’s
laugh said everything will be alright. When a few
years later, Mrs West, the fish-monger’s
wife bought in her baby for us to see
I burst into tears because I was
no longer special, no longer the world’s
youngest person. When I told them mum and dad’s
laugh said everything will be alright.
Barry Smith
Deep Water
A woman is weeping
by the sea-shore
as so many have done before
she wants to go home
she sobs and rocks
the skin of her knees
peering through the frayed
denim of designer jeans
a bearded man hefting
a loaded backpack
looks on, his face a mask,
rigid, helpless
he’s lost
she’s far away
weeping at the sea-shore
we gather awkwardly
offering help
she clasps a woman’s hands
locking onto human warmth
she wants to go home
but doesn’t seem
to know anymore
where home is or was
I’ll be alright, she says
I’ll be okay
you’re so lovely, she says
and weeps
the bearded man is stiff
he tries to touch her
curling shoulder
he asks for a light
for his roll-up cigarette
but we have no light to give
and we cannot help
him to reach her
or her to get back home
(First published in London Grip)
Geoffrey Winch
Reality of Fiction
He created her
to be the sole occupant of his novel;
placed her under the impossible strain
of formulating his original philosophy.
At first she was silent –
a silence akin to death
but then her ideas began to blossom
like lilies.
Her origins may have been conventional
but she developed unchallenged
until she became his superior
and there was no argument: he admired her.
Every time she emerged on a new page
it was as if he opened his door to a stranger
wearing a mask –
a stranger who could be looking for someone
to stab in the back.
Published in Linkway magazine in February 2001
Paul Stephenson
The School of Athens, a jigsaw
Plato’s autonomy is lost.
How can I make sense of ancient thoughts
when the heads that held them are shared
with bits of masonry and fabric?
Pompeii engulfed,
the moment is precise but arbitrary:
a hand stretched out, a finger raised,
a pair of compasses stopped mid-arc,
the theorem half-proved for eternity.
The only thing that moves,
I wander from group to group.
The means to their halting resurrection
is in my doubtful hands.
Ashamed, I do not meet the one-eyed gaze.
I walk with eyes cast down,
oblivious to rank, observing only
gradations of hue and tone,
the consistency of a strip of braid or tilework.
The integrity I seek is also mine.
When all is done and I am of a piece,
I shall reanimate the hall
and voices will rise again to the high arch.
Terry Timblick
The Longest Shadow
Less a heavens-wide wheeling murmuration,
More a dozen-strong chatter of starlings,
Sits newsily atop our community’s horse-chestnut.
But do they know their roof-high roost,
Made a trinity with aligned elms on a crocused bank,
May not stand another year’s canker?
A ten-year-old liquid amber sapling-in-waiting
Looks up at its towering neighbour
And harbours awe, gratitude and acute apprehension.
Rot, die-back, assorted diseases and planning departments…
Trees have their own versions of Covid.
Kevin Maynard
New Deal
The cropped head, hollow sockets, jutting chin,
The caved-in cheeks, beak-nose, the scant red beard,
The torn and faded denim jacket,
Claw hand and stick-like arms . . . So this is where
Your dreams have brought you, borne on the wind
Across the prairies with big scudding clouds:
Tossed like tumbleweed over the widening dustbowl
Of a Great Depression through flat scrubland
Down long roads of disappointment and fatigue—
Till the good air, promise-crammed,
Stopped dead forever and the hungry words all dried.
Peace to your bones. The New World,
Like the Old, delivers everything but luck
To those who live for tomorrow without a today.
You have the dignity granted to those who rest
After their labours took their only pride.
Ants forage in the soil beneath your hair
And reap the crops you never got to share.
Based on a photograph by Edward Weston
Richard Williams
The Next Station Is
Portsmouth and Southsea then Fratton and Hilsea,
clattering over the creek to the points at Cosham
west to Southampton, Salisbury and Cardiff,
east to Brighton, north to Waterloo.
And you will catch your breath in her reflection,
watching the world from a window seat,
as seasons concertina in ripening fields.
Commuter belt villages and old market towns,
reels of film on a cutting room floor;
are the scenes we keep the ones we’d choose?
And she will be returning here in your arms,
like yawning workers on the stopping
train
memories slurring as carriages sway,
past Bowlplex, Vue and the lipstick tower.
Morning always loops home to this place.
dawn into day into dusk into night.
A circle aching still to be filled
with children’s
laughter like marker pens.
Love and hope in permanent ink;
this city by the sea and all that you need.
From Richard’s first collection, Landings (Dempsey & Windle, 2018)
Christine Rowlands
Winter Weather Words
Wet, needle fine, icy drizzle
Bucketing down, dreary, soaking siling...
A deluge of rain.
Rain makes ground sodden,
flooded fields, grass submerged,
deep ruts, motors revving, wheels spinning.
Sticky, slimy, smelly, squidgy, sloppy,
gloopy mud!
Covering our boots, splattering our clothes...
While a cruel wind blusters and blows.
Winter weather.
Piers Rowlandson
Reality
I have not written these books for people who have not asked themselves,“Where does reality begin?” Lawrence Durrell
The Chinese Emperor dreamt
he was a butterfly,
dreaming he was an Emperor.
He decided that in reality he was a butterfly.
A man was waiting to be hanged.
His crime: believing the emperor
was an impostor, and saying so.
“What news from the Palace?”
he asked his jailor.
“The Emperor is a butterfly.”
“Then I won’t hang,”
said the condemned man,
who was a missionary.
“The Emperor has decided
to put things to the test.
He is going to climb a high tower
and jump off to see if he can fly.”
“Good news indeed,”
said the condemned man.
“Not really,” said the jailor.
“You are to go with him
and jump first.”
At the top of the tower
they paused.
“I’ll see you on the other side,”
said the missionary.
“Really?”
said the jailor.
The Emperor smiled his wicked smile.
Mike Jenkins
With Keats: Sit and Wait
Here
we sit together
the world moving around us
with an uncertain almost
astonished gait
here we sit on curve of
Eastgate square and
wait
for that spark of unifying
fire
that leaps from window ledge above
cradles child curling about your burnished leg
stops passers by who may
in brackets wonder
(who is he?)
in stillness kept serene
what are those words about the curve
what does
it mean to dream
of high romance?
Ah… look
with eyes of heart and see
him here alive
in you
in me
Stay awhile and breathe to fill
in clouds and spires
in streets of moving still.
OPEN MIC POEMS
FEBRUARY 2021: WELCOME to our new virtual open mic poetry! While public gatherings remain unsafe because of the current pandemic, we plan to continue our monthly open mic sessions online. Each month we will have a featured guest poet who will start things moving with a couple of poems. This will be followed by one poem for each open mic contributor. The plan is to post the Open Mic Poems on the last Wednesday of each month when we would normally be meeting at either New Park Centre, the Library in Chichester or elsewhere in the South Downs.
POET OF THE MONTH: GEOFFREY WINCH
Geoffrey says: I was born and raised in Reading, Berkshire, and left at the age of 21 when employment in surveying and highway engineering with local authorities took me first to Hampshire and subsequently to Warwickshire. My wife and I lived near Royal Leamington Spa for 7 years then in the town for 27 years until I retired from full-time work in 2001 having completed 40 years local government service. During that same year we relocated to Felpham and I continued to work as a part-time consultant to West Sussex CC until 2010. Soon after moving to Sussex, and having achieved some success as a small press poet from 1992 onwards, it was a pleasant surprise to be invited to join Slipstream Poets (then based in Pulborough, but now in Storrington) and I have remained a member ever since. For several years I was also a member of Silk Road Writers (Littlehampton), and am currently a member of River Poets (Arundel) and the Chichester Stanza groups. For the past ten years or so I have also read regularly at Chichester Open Mic, and I’m grateful, as I’m sure we all are, to Barry and Joan who have ensured the Open Mic continued throughout 2020 in its current online form. I also thank them for inviting me to be the first ‘Poet of the Month’ for 2021. No doubt we all share in the hope that this year will bring with it a return to normality, and we are all looking forward to the time when we can share live Open Mic readings once again.
Velocities and Drifts of Winds
Since moving to Sussex my poetry has been published in a wide variety of magazines, anthologies and journals, both print and online, and Velocities and Drifts of Winds (Dempsey and Windle, 2020): is my sixth collection. Most of the poems have been previously published, and I have read earlier versions of some at the Open Mic. Following its publication I was interviewed by Nnorom Azuonye for Sentinel Literary Quarterly, and this can be read by following the link https://sentinelquarterly.com/Geoffrey-Winch-SLQ-Monday-Writer-14-September-2020.pdf . My previous collections have all been themed and, as the title suggests, the theme this time is ‘winds of change’. The collection is set out in four parts beginning with historic winds of change and ending with those that can often affect personal relationships. My influences are many, and styles wide-ranging from free verse to short forms (haiku, tanka etc.) as well as haibun and tanka prose. All appear in the collection, although I have selected below one free verse poem from each part. ‘Burned Out’ is about the great fire of London influenced by observations Antony à Wood recorded in his journals. ‘Tables for Ladies’ is based on Edward Hopper’s1930 painting which reflects some advances that were being made in the feminine cause in America at the time. In ‘Meadowland Eclogue’ I consider not only a landscape as a trysting place but elements that might influence its moods; and in ‘Mary, Mary’ I fondly recall a young lady who I dated for only a few weeks in my youth but because of certain circumstances I was unable to bid her a fond farewell! I have also selected two short form poems, a Tanka, and a Cherita – both of which speak for themselves.
Burned Out
“a lamentable fire broke out in London
in the morning, it being Sunday”
Anthony à Wood: September 2nd 1666
apparently an easterly
with an impish bent turned up
Pudding Lane
intent on meeting with
a few bright sparks that fell
from a baker’s oven
there to engage in frivolous
conflagration without meaning
to set the city ablaze
as ultimately more malicious
forces would;
or for Farriner’s bakery
to enter the annals of infamy –
yet for three days here in Oxford
we’ve had billows blotting-out our sun,
the same bloodying our moon
drawing our eyes all night
to the hills’ candescent horizon –
now in their hundreds they come
the bewildered, the footsore, the lame:
some on dung-carts with no chattels,
some without names
blistered and scarred,
the scared-beyond-their-wits
telling of inferno and its capacity
to burn a city –
blood flows cold
through our veins since we’ve seen
how easily flesh will burn
( “the hills” = the Chilterns Hills)
Tables for Ladies
Edward Hopper: oil on canvas, 1930
It is no dream,
just a welcoming sight
this row of grapefruits displayed
in the window of a place to eat with
a pineapple as centre-piece of a basket
over-brimming with fruit – and two ladies
working, cashier and waitress, reflecting
on their new-found status now single
ladies are able to book a table
to dine alone or with who-
ever they please, here in
New York at least.
And the lady diner –
we’ve met her before, alone
and vulnerable with a coffee in
the automat; and the theatre with the
gentleman she’s dining with now when
taking their seats beside the aisle – the lady
we saw enjoying chop suey with her
female friend: now, with her back to
us, it’s his face we see reflecting
on this altered state – she
booked the table and
invited him to eat.
Meadowland Eclogue
Meadowlandsoil: I, your idyll’s
engine room fashioning filaments
with my worming machine to stretch
up from my nourishing depths
to caress your lover’s hair.
Meadowlandscape: I, the festival
of flora; grower of leaves of grass
to mow – with naked leaves I dress
hedges flowers trees, and clover
your unclothed lover’s hair.
Meadowlandsky: I am the spying
sun and cloud watching how you
make tall grasses wave as you ride
therein and upon – with butterflies
I highlight your lover’s hair.
Meadowlandsong: I, the harmony
of avian flocks and insect hordes,
harmonising chorus with beehum
to become the refreshing breath
that sings in your lover’s hair.
Mary, Mary
after the sun had sunk
I remained focused on
her ship – its dark plume
bending to the breeze, lights
shimmering in its wake –
and still I saw glinting flecks
of circling gulls even in
the mizzle of dusk
and Mary at the taffrail, her
hair wild and black, and her
scarlet dress almost dim as if
a farewell flag – saw her
give me one last wave,
blow me her final kiss,
so I lowered then my telescope
and waved back to the night . . .
but, I’m just a romantic and that’s
not how it was – when Mary went
it was sudden, not even planned
or discussed – just failed to keep
our date one night and all her friends
ever knew
she and her family had upped sticks
and moved too many miles
away,
and I’ll never know whether or not
it was simply better to end that way
Tanka 6
morning contrails
crossing the coast
every day
people going places
some back to where they began
Cherita 2
how desire
overcomes
inhibitions
discovers
pleasures
in yesterday’s bêtes noires
Open Mic Poetry – February 2021
Please scroll down to read this month's poems by Myra Schneider, Stephanie Norgate, Denise Bennett, Timothy Ades, Barry Smith, Camilla Lambert, Kevin Maynard, Margaret Wilmot, Richard Davies, Ken Jones, Mandy Pannett, Christine Rowlands, Greg Freeman, Alan Bush, Holly Parton, Richard Williams and Deborah Tyler-Bennett.
Myra Schneider
Looking at Light
You watch it alight neatly as a dancer
on this bottle of water where it implants flecks
like a series of intense kisses on the neck
and captivates the flowers speckling the mat
underneath, multiplies them in the bottle’s
transparent interior. Another feat:
as the sun emerges it starts running
pinkish streamers over the park’s blue
frostbitten grass. Paleness will disappear
as it douses the air with a sense of gold.
All your rooms will awaken and you’ll long
to keep lucidity but nothing will stop
crimsons and violets from spilling over the sky
to herald darkness. When the day dies though
you’ll gaze at dazzle-needles which the bottles
on the bathroom window ledge have snatched
from the streetlights, at the electric red
splashed on the panes by a passing car
and for moments illumination will fill you.
Later, you will wake to a chill nothingness
but you’ll find a lemon pool of moon
on the landing carpet, wish you could kneel
and gather it up in your arms, wish
its certainty could wipe out all grief.
(From Myra’s new collection, Seige and Symphony, scheduled for publication in autumn 2021 to support the Woodland Trust.)
Stephanie Norgate
to sing of soap in desperate times
in spite of palm plantations,
felled rainforests and effluence,
in spite of plastic dispensers,
in spite of nitrogylcerine,
in spite of a name that categorises
life-long dramas
to sing of soap is to sing al-galy,
wood ash that lends its name to alkali,
to sing rainwater and to sing oils,
olive, vegetable, sesame, and not to mourn
an absence of tallow - for who wants
to rub the fat of a cow on their skin?
to sing some soap names but not others,
to sing Pears, Dove and Lifebuoy,
but not Imperial Leather, a name saddled with empire,
whose legacy refuses to be washed down the plughole
to sing of the soap my daughter gave me,
nettle and seaweed, astringent shore,
field margin, seawater, kelp, ribbon of nori
to sing soap is to sing my grandmother lathering
a slip of Palmolive for skin and laundry and then
to sing the green unrinsed forgetfulness
streaking her long white hair
to sing my sister’s gift of a bar of soap
is to sing a fourth dimension containing
the bloom of two lavender bushes
to sing soap is to sing a child
sifting pink stars through fingers
in a bucket of water and soapwort
at the living museum
to sing soap was to choose on days
when the French market still came to town
from les savons de Marseille,
fenouil, citron, or les muguets des bois,
to sing soap is to sing Happy Birthday twice
congratulating yourself like a prime minister
or to watch Gloria Gaynor washing
her hands, singing ‘I will survive’
for twenty glorious seconds of being alive
(First published January 2021 in The Oxford Magazine and forthcoming in The Conversation, Blloodaxe, 2021)
Denise Bennett
The Escalator
A contrapuntal poem
Sometimes I feel her standing next to me
in the department store;
I feel her take my hand
as we step onto the escalator;
remember how she taught me to ride safely,
to hold on tight and when to jump.
I can smell the scent on her clothes.
Learning to Fly
It’s over sixty years since we both stood here
at the foot of the moving stairs.
She’s all dolled up,
tailored suit, newly permed hair.
The fragrance of gardenia takes me back
to that first time I learnt to fly
her gloved hand holding mine.
Flying with My Mother
Sometimes I feel her standing next to me;
it’s over sixty years since we both stood here
in the department store,
at the foot of the moving stairs.
I feel her take my hand.
She’s all dolled up,
as we step onto the escalator,
tailored suit, newly permed hair.
I remember how she taught me to ride safely;
the fragrance of gardenia takes me back –
– to hold on tight and when to jump –
to that first time I learnt to fly.
I can smell the scent on her clothes,
her gloved hand holding mine.
EVENING
by Victor Hugo
Translated by Timothy Adès
The fog is cold and the heather is grey;
The cattle-herds go to the drinking-troughs;
The moon breaks out from behind black clouds,
A brightness coming as if by surprise.
I don’t know where and I don’t know when,
Old Yannick was blowing his chanter and drone.
The traveller walks and the moor is brown;
A shadow behind and a shadow before;
There’s white in the west and light in the east;
Here dusk, and there the light of the moon.
I don’t know where and I don’t know when,
Old Yannick was blowing his chanter and drone.
The sorceress sits and her lip goes long;
The spider fixes her web to the tile;
The will-o’-the-wisp has a goblin glow
Like a pistil of gold in a tulip’s bowl.
I don’t know where and I don’t know when,
Old Yannick was blowing his chanter and drone.
There are ketches and coasters out on the sea;
There’s shipwreck in wait for the shuddering mast;
The wind says: to-morrow! the water says: now!
There are voices heard and they speak despair.
I don’t know where and I don’t know when,
Old Yannick was blowing his chanter and drone.
The coach from Avranches to Fougères
Has a crack of the whip like a lightning-flash;
There’s many a noise grows loud from the dark,
And they mingle together, to float on the air.
I don’t know where and I don’t know when,
Old Yannick was blowing his chanter and drone.
In the depths of the forest, bright torches shine;
A graveyard clings to a mountain-top;
Where does God find all the blackness he pours
Into nights that fall, into hearts that break?
I don’t know where and I don’t know when,
Old Yannick was blowing his chanter and drone.
There are puddles of silver that shake on the sands;
The osprey is close to the cliffs of chalk;
The shepherd is watching across the wind
The devils in vague and monstrous flight.
I don’t know where and I don’t know when,
Old Yannick was blowing his chanter and drone.
There are plumes of grey from the chimney-stacks;
The wood-cutter passes, bearing his load;
The noise of a stream in spate is heard,
With the crashing of branches, dragged along.
I don’t know where and I don’t know when,
Old Yannick was blowing his chanter and drone.
The great fierce wolves have a starving dream;
The river is racing, the cloud takes flight;
Behind the panes where the lamp is bright
Are the glowing cheeks of the very young.
I don’t know where and I don’t know when,
Old Yannick was blowing his chanter and drone.
From How to be a Grandfather (Hearing Eye),
a translation of Hugo’s L’Art d’être grand-père.
Barry Smith
This Way Up
You know how it’s going to end
for the old girl in the wheelchair ahead.
Her bearings have gone askew
she’s off on a twitching fox-trot
her head lolling like a nodding dog
bouncing, then drooping to the side
where her husband’s wispy grey hairs drift inland
washed ashore by the piano’s narcotic flow
her hands worrying the frayed shoulder-strap bag
looped across her back, desperate to get it off
somehow as if that act would free her
as once she unloosened her stockings and slip.
The pianist’s hands swoop and slide
plucking the dancing pulse of the fugal line
but they’re off on a different kind of trip
shuffle-stepping towards the edge
the chandelier casting light from another age
on the wheelchair’s steely backrest where
you can just make out the scuffed black letters -
this way up, it says, this way up.
(first published in the Ver Poets Anthology)
You can read Barry's poem The Masks of Anarchy on Culture Matters - follow the link:
https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/poetry/item/3615-the-masks-of-anarchy
Camilla Lambert
Midwinter ache
December twigs,
black, sharp-angled,
are hung with angels;
they eye each corner of the room,
as they spin, quivering,
while blue peacocks
tinsel the lower branches,
flare sparkles from their tails.
Why are they all so mute
no blare of brass
from the trumpets
held out
in unison
no raucous exchanges
of thine and mine
between the peacocks?
I ache
for sounds of celebration,
listen out
for the slightest quaver
of life- a soft tread of steps
on the stair,
doors’ closing click,
a rustle of paper unwrapped.
The windows are open
to catch the peals
of joy for the world
shaken out
from the squat tower.
But the air weighs heavy
cannot take the load
of a distant owl hoot.
What will rouse
the angels
to raise their trumpets
and send a carillon
around skeleton trees,
brushing away
ice-drops, and on,
up into the frosty sky?
Kevin Maynard
the wherewithal
please madam, sir, do tell me please what is
this wherewithal you say I am without?
the stars shine still without the wherewithal,
the tides come in, come out, frost falls without
the wherewithal, anoints my hair and brow,
it cracks my boots, furs white with diamond crystals
all my cardboard bedding, sheds a sparkle
glissading over paving slabs, lamplights
blaze and Christmas glitter fills the glutted
shops that shut me out, though they all have
the wherewithal, and so do you, where can
I find the wherewithal? not in the hurried
steps, averted eyes, held noses of those
who pass me by, determined not to share
the wherewithal, their precious wherewithal:
my whys and wherefores plucked by winter winds
and blown the length and breadth of Whinnymuir
—the unconcern you give for granted gone—
for I’m the rubbish in the rubble of your dreams
I’m what you stumble over as you pass
and you’ll remember me until you die:
the dead are those who lack the wherewithal
their lack, sweet lack, is what we always share—
we lacklove, lonely, luckless, landless, damned
Margaret Wilmot
Breakfast
His slender neck fills her with tenderness,
long lashes on a cheek. Ten years old.
He spreads his toast with jam, juice-glass in hand.
Artless his words, calm. I’m never having children.
She takes a sip (coffee just right today).
Six months since he came? Too many kids
need homes. Like him. Stressed by all
the fights, he asked Granny if he could stay.
But now he jumps up, agitates, puts car-keys
by her cup. The front door slams. Flustered, she gulps,
wants to weep. Life gone amiss, all frantic scramble,
and then some. Coffee half drunk again.
It shouldn’t be like this. Yet even
his desperate punctuality fills her with tenderness.
Richard Davies
Self-portrait
When I look at myself in a mirror now
I know that what I see,
lined and tired and weather-worn,
is not the face of the dreaming boy
who planned to travel in foreign lands,
climb the highest peaks
and conquer all the deserts of the distant world.
Instead I see grey-haired man
left with few, if any, goals to meet
I've been to many places,
seen a thousand things,
and, though I've left few traces,
the buccaneer in me remains.
I still yearn for open roads
and one day soon I hope to find
my Xanadu, my Shangri-la.
They could be very far away
but maybe they are closer
than I imagine them to be.
Ken Jones
Fairy Tale
Once upon a time
I knew
a truth
when I heard it:
because veracity
came with
no health warning,
no bias
no edge
no prejudice …
once upon a time
truth was a statement
of what is;
objective,
opinion free ...
once upon a time
I heard that truth
had become a construct;
definition free,
arbitrary
without
absolute universal meaning;
variable, not constant ...
and now such a thing
as
outrage
enshrouds me.
Mandy Pannett
Not in the Book
You are doing well with your life:
a massive, inherited stately home,
your memoirs high in a best-seller list,
an immaculate wife.
Tourists write It's a fabulous house.
I would scribble my message in red:
I loved you first.
This is a difficult room.
Watery vistas and one who has painted
himself in a mirror.
Outside there are shrubs and rain.
I am not in your book.
Not a word that you loved me, loved me first.
I shall buy a postcard then.
A souvenir.
Christine Rowlands
Stand and Stare
I tell myself.
Be in the moment
Feel the floor under my feet
with each step.
Smell the earth and the grass
as I walk each day....
Smell the soap
And the hand cream
Think of things for which I’m grateful
Be creative -dance, sing, draw, paint, sew, sculpt,
write, cook.
Look for the
good in each day
Be aware of how I visualise the day ahead....
Say I will
Say I can
Have positive thoughts
Banish negative ones
Set a good tone for the day
Be kind to myself and others
Each evening look back
and ask ....
How did it go?Can I do better?
Greg Freeman
Dusty on the Dansette
It wasn’t a soft-porn movie.
But yes, she was a Danish au pair
in my Methodist nana’s front parlour
while Dusty’s Son of a Preacher Man
played on the Dansette.
Miniskirt, boots; first, necessarily
brief but genuine encounter. Ah,
but she had a bit of a cold
that night. Inexpert as I was,
I could tell she was just being polite,
that her heart wasn’t in it. Our tryst
ended when she blew her nose loudly.
Sometimes I remember her when I hear
the song. I’m a big Dusty fan. But
Aretha’s version is superior, I have to admit.
Alan Bush
Richard Hamilton
Swingeing London ‘67
1967-8
With Mr Richards’
Witterings raided
Mick Jagger’s right
handcuffed to Robert
at a Magistrates’
where the Judge Block
insists his swingeing
penalty on swinging London-
by-the-sea is necessary
at an exact lifetime
later, we’re left
with a copy-painting
secured to a gallery
wall, and a graphic
moving on, by
an empty Court
Holly Parton
Spring
My heart leapt today,
For in the quiet of the night, spring had returned.
A new pink blossom has broken,
And like the first evening star,
It made me catch my breath.
For where before there had been emptiness,
Now there was life.
Richard Williams
Holiday in a Portsmouth Garden
I bought my dreams of the open trail
beyond the humdrum thrum of city traffic,
but how these tracks were calcified,
as criss-crossed skies of wing-tipped stars
were cleared by a future that few could see.
Our lives made rivers filled deep with silt,
mouths dry from the loss of expectation,
so fragile this man-made dissonance,
we can’t see what we already have
for fear of what might be lost.
A blackbird sings two gardens away,
trills above near silenced streets.
Forty days straight I have heard his call
as batteries drain down on racing time,
all this energy spent chasing clouds.
Belted in tight on my rolling road
paying for a journey I couldn't afford.
Now harmonies soar over warming walls,
the lilting notes of spring forgot -
so much I knew but did not know.
My open trail a trial no more,
aeroplanes grounded I travel at home.
All the mountains I leave unclaimed,
all the seas that I’ll not sail,
slipping away with this blackbird’s song.
Deborah Tyler-Bennett
My Life as Cinema Français
I’m wandering spent reels of black and white,
down Cocteau-mirrored corridors
arms form torchères, it’s rustling, my Dior,
frilled just below the knee, and then I see
them – Grandma’s legs, stick thin,
shrunk to a wren’s, off-set by courts,
squared heels (this frame could
cut to tartan, clichéd, slippers).
Realise, looking up, I’ll catch her face,
neck tight, eyes scrutinising choice
of frock without shop-overall protection
(how much the cost, and will it wash on low?).
Subtitling will spell all out below:
AGE SCRIPTS SUCH DREAMS – THE PAST IS ALL WE KNOW.
OPEN MIC POEMS
DECEMBER 2020: WELCOME to our new virtual open mic poetry! While public gatherings remain unsafe because of the current pandemic, we plan to continue our monthly open mic sessions online. Each month we will have a featured guest poet who will start things moving with a couple of poems. This will be followed by one poem for each open mic contributor. The plan is to post the Open Mic Poems on the last Wednesday of each month when we would normally be meeting at either New Park Centre, the Library in Chichester or elsewhere in the South Downs.
POET OF THE MONTH: TERRY TIMBLICK
Terry says: A 12-line poem about a job interview, used in a rival Croydon paper, was my first (unpaid) publishing success in the late 50s, and not till the early 90s, as a fugitive Fleet Street features editor, were poetic instincts reignited, here in Chichester. The spur was a creative writing course at Bishop Otter College (now Chichester University), led inspirationally by Vicki Feaver, covering verse forms from traditional to limericks and haikus. Then, about 10 years ago, I “discovered” Open Mic at the New Park Centre with its monthly offering of frequent amusement, occasional provocation, and constant friendships. That regular framework, with the need, ideally, to produce a fresh item each time, was the discipline I needed. In recent years Open Mikers Christine Rowlands and Richard Davies have contributed to poetry anthologies I’ve produced. In 2012 my wife and I wrote “A Picture of the South Downs”, son Simon has co-authored a book on “Coronation Street”, and son Paul has published a fictional account of his Ethiopian wife’s experiences in “No Lipstick in Lebanon”. In October I was second in Shoreham Wordfest’s 10-word story competition. My entry was based onthe last lines of “Versibilia’s” “To End All Wars”.
INTRODUCTION TO THE POEMS:
Of the 40 or so poems in Versibilia, the latest is “A Psalm to David”, a climate change endorsement directed at our great knight Attenborough. He’s charmingly acknowledged my effort. Another response has come from my niece-in-law, admitting tears on reading “Waiting for the Fall” about her father, among the most deeply personal verses I’ve ever written, as too are “Doddy Just Called…”, “Sweetheart of 60 Summers” and “Just the Once”. There are plenty of local landmarks and events scattered through the collection: John Keats in Eastgate Square, our oh-so-progressive library, Virginia Woolf at Pallant House, and Tangmere (a pivotal day from history), and long-time favourite destinations Sidmouth and Tenerife (encounters respectively with Betjeman and Mother Teresa). PS: mustn’t forget Prague and Ogden Nash.
(“Versibilia”, all proceeds to Save the Children - £8, £10 posted - via Terry: terrytimblick@gmail.com 01243 537812)
A PSALM TO DAVID
Huge, new sub-Saharan dustbowls,
Glaciers shrinking from continental significance,
Sea levels rising as scarily as fever temperatures,
Clean air a metropolitan memory –
Signs enough surely to jolt any 21st century complacency?
Few can equal the singular clarity
Of your rationale about planet Earth.
But even unflappable you, cool hero of
Countless telly encounters with amorous gorillas and alien creatures,
Are unable to reason away spectres of apocalypse.
Your Solomon wisdom is a positive virus we need worldwide,
So keep the even-voiced passion full blast, David,
Ere the hourglass morphs into a coffin.
TARGET TANGMERE (August 16 1940)
A day like no other…
A perfect blue-washed morning
Became an afternoon of black and scarlet.
But Valkyrie-thundering skies could not cower
Southern England, which rose up to face
The onslaught.
At 13.10, above the coastal plain near a Binsted
With poppies and cornflowers about its bare ankles,
The sky suddenly super-midged with murderousness.
Close-packed Junkers and Stukas,
Spitting fire and dumping terror,
Wreaked rapid, shocking destruction on RAF Tangmere.
The death-harvest smoke
Darkened local earthbound spirits
Till steadying voices said, “Jerry is burning too! “
And four days later a bulldog snarled and exulted to Parliament
About conflict, sacrifice and “The Few”.
Immortality had been plucked from the flames.
“DODDY JUST CALLED…”
It was a bit like seeing a nurse wearing stilettos on duty,
Or Beluga offered on the lunchtime trolley.
Wards for the “rather poorly” aren’t usually abrim with jollity,
But there was no denying the burble from Eric’s bed at the far end:
It flowed past fellow-patients and surprised the visitors,
Swept over charts with mainly down-marching trajectories,
Past tender ministrations of underpaid angels,
And bounced off windows looking out on misting yesterdays.
It was the unlikeliest moment of the day –
“Happiness” sung with a croaky, triumphant exuberance,
A ghost with terrified hair and bucked teeth grinned
And headed contentedly back to Knotty Ash.
(In memory of Methodist minister Eric Blennerhassett who died, 96, in St Richard’s Hospital,
Chichester, May 2018. Ken Dodd’s “Happiness” topped the charts in 1964)
A LOVE FOR ALL SEASONS
Always, on his Eastgate Square bench,
The boyish weathered figure sits alert,
Bronze-proofed, gaze fixed on the cathedral.
And St Agnes’ Eve inspiration.
Read his verses and most of all his letters to
“Dearest girl”,
” My sweet creature”,
” Dearest Fanny”
And you may sense that the sculpture
Embodies his deepest animations:
A love for her that lung-ruined death in Italy
Could not suffocate, and, supremely, a love of beauty.
Next time tell John that Fanny
Still sends the words “Good night”.
He always wanted to put them under his pillow.
Perhaps he’ll tuck your message beneath the bench.
OPEN MIC POEMS
Andy Waite
ADRIFT AT NIGHT ON A LAKE
I am perhaps too in love with
this hooded half-light,
embracing its indefinable contours,
dipping my toes in moonlight,
wearing shadows for clothes.
It feels right though to be here in this
small vessel made of trust,
sculling criss-cross, curious fish
whose concerns, as small and big as my own
are consumed by this kind black veil.
I am not heading anywhere,
there's no destination that would move me
and no current or past to surrender to,
pushing me one way or another,
there's just the dipping of wood on water,
the empty spaces between a bird's call,
and sweet scent from a late bonfire,
soon to be charcoal with which,
should I return home,
I may make a drawing of a
man adrift at night on a lake.
(Winner of the Sussex Together poetry competition)
Jeremy Page
INTERESTING TIMES
(after Confucius)
Do you remember when people materialised
on doorsteps, clanged saucepans and clapped
as if their lives depended every Thursday evening
when the clock struck eight? And the sun shone
day after day when all there’d been for months
was rain of every kind – drizzle, hail, the sort that
smacks windows and leaves gardens spongey underfoot,
and there was suddenly so much less to do,
unless you were essential, and one day dissolved
into the next, and time became a stative verb,
and in the streets people decided whether or not
to greet the advancing stranger, but gave
the widest possible berth anyway, exchanging looks
that saved them oh so many words, and neighbours
hollered cordially across the garden fence.
And if you listened to the news you’d learn that
only one thing was happening, because all the rest of life
had paused. And every night you’d have
the weirdest dreams, as if plague drip-fed
your unconscious all day, stirring the pot the while.
Those were interesting times. The toll was heavy.
Maggie Sawkins
Water will wear away Stones
we will meet in a hollow
we will bring our light
and our words will follow
like logs caught up
up in a stream without knowing
where they’re going
we will stay for a while
in plain sight
of the land that cast us
like a stone
from a hollow
from the homes
we left where a light remains
beyond the stream
of words cast off
without knowing
if we’ll meet again
we can only watch
from the plain
as others follow
Pratibha Castle
Koala
I had one as a child.
Just a toy, still,
fashioned
out of real fur,
you could make believe
to clutch a panting life,
feed eucalyptus leaves
into a pink moist mouth.
Black nose, leather claws, eyes
glass, like the marbles
daddy as a lad
shuntered round granny’s yard.
A game he craved
to resurrect
about the kitchen
floor had mammy
not objected.
To crash
my measly
cache of Popeyes,
cats eyes,
beach balls
with the payback
of a copper-sparkled Lutz. Slate
beneath a grown man’s knees
atonement for the folly
of assuming
he could reach
back to reclaim such
smoke screen memories,
and the child
snatched too soon
from his embrace.
I had one as a child.
Black nose, leather claws, eyes
glass that never wept.
and our words will follow
like logs caught up
up in a stream without knowing
where they’re going
we will stay for a while
in plain sight
of the land that cast us
like a stone
from a hollow
from the homes
we left where a light remains
beyond the stream
of words cast off
without knowing
if we’ll meet again
we can only watch
from the plain
as others follow
Alun Robert
A New Build Like No Other
Towering edifice sprouting
from the west bank of the Rother,
wild testament to vision and
commitment to conservation with
sweet chestnut cladding
as if raised in situ
rather than locally sourced
in the county of East Sussex
standing proud in the desert
vistas across to Camber, the sands
while the River on bis in diem trips
twixt Rye and the Channel cries
under an endless sky endowed
with avocet, egret, guillemots
and the swooping herring gull focused
on a battle for survival replacing
offspring of portacabins, modest
on the route to the shoreline
created from blood, sweat
and years tending the Reserve
from Rye Harbour to Winchelsea
through gravel pits, reedbeds
saltmarsh, saline lagoons
and ravages of seasons
with tracks across shingle
orange, pink, blue boulders
chattering, hissing, singing
through inclement weather as
massed mankind passes by
the cyclists, dog walkers,
pushers of buggies, singletons and twins
pausing to admire and stray point
near stationary artists and poets
with senses on overdrive
holding meandering eyes open
to the abundance of nature with
no better Discovery Centre rising
in the centre of a horizon;
a spirited step forward
as a new build like no other.
Timothy Ades
Oak Ash and Thorn, by Rudyard Kipling
A song for anybody to sing
without avoiding A, I, O, or U
Of trunks and boughs which Luck allows
Fair Albion to adorn,
Naught is so grand in all our land
As oak and ash and thorn.
Sing oak and ash and thorn, good sirs,
All on a long day’s morn:
Good folk shall sing, no paltry thing,
Of oak and ash and thorn.
OAK on our clay saw stop and stay
Troy’s pious lord forlorn;
ASH on our loam saw Brutus roam,
An outlaw put to scorn;
THORN on our down saw young Troy Town,
From which was London born.
Thus all may know that long ago
Stood oak and ash and thorn.
- Sing oak and ash and thorn, good sirs,
All on a long day’s morn:
Good folk shall sing, no paltry thing,
Of oak and ash and thorn.
TAXUS grows old in churchyard mould
And spawns a mighty bow;
ALNUS is put on snug-shod foot,
FAGUS to cups will go;
A kingdom’s built, a bowl is spilt,
A boot’s cast off, outworn:
You shall go back for what you lack
To oak and ash and thorn.
- Sing oak and ash and thorn, good sirs,
All on a long day’s morn:
Good folk shall sing, no paltry thing,
Of oak and ash and thorn.
ULMUS abhors mankind, and waits
In calm, if not in storm,
To drop a limb on top of him
Who trusts that shady form.
But any lad who’s spry or sad
Or high on hops from horn
Cannot go wrong by lying long
In oak and ash and thorn.
- Sing oak and ash and thorn, good sirs,
All on a long day’s morn
Good folk shall sing, no paltry thing,
Of oak and ash and thorn.
Blurt to no parson of our plight:
A parson calls it sin,
Our frolicking in woods all night
To summon long days in.
Glad tidings pass by word of mouth
Of joy for cow and corn,
For now Sir Sun strolls up from south
With oak and ash and thorn.
- Sing oak and ash and thorn, good sirs,
All on a long day’s morn:
Fair Albion shall not pass away
With oak and ash and thorn!
Barry Smith
Looping the Loop
(Lines on the Execution of a Tyrant)
When you stand on the trapdoor of eternity,
Rough bonds biting into your wrists, black silk scarf wrapped
Around your neck to provide the final purchase
For the rope which drapes like an umbilical cord
Coiled around your neck, sustaining still your tight breath
For a few shocked seconds more, what do you recall
Of your terror-filled years when a cursory nod
Or faint flick of a finger would condemn those who
Trembled before you: gun or knife, garrotte or rope,
Whatever came to hand or took your quick fancy.
Now the gritty, grained images of some mobile phone
Play forever your exit scene, the jeering chants
Of your captors preserved, your mumbled prayers cut off
In your sudden lurch into immortality.
(First published in The Journal, issue 60, summer 2020)
Nessa Gibbons
After Lockdown
A gentle sweep of hills and valleys
Undulates ahead -
Swaying, aqua and sun-tipped
In the soft morning light.
A soothing breeze lightly
Skims the surface as it
Saunters through the chill air.
Silence.
Then they come, dropping quietly
From the light grey sky.
Raindrops: slender, silver, almost suspended
In their slow descent into the expectant
Water until, like dancers, they leap
Joyfully upward – higher – then pause,
Bestowing sparkling coronas of
Droplets in perfect circles around their
Graceful heads.
After lockdown: swimming in the rain.
Camilla Lambert
December Solstice
She went looking
for intimations of light,
fizzled away
between gaps
in the tumulus line,
seeped through chalk channels
into the high dew pond.
Views east to Chanctonbury
north to Blackdown
lay obscured
by heavy air,
so she raked the dead slopes
for any bright speck
or glimmer:
white mouths of dead-nettle,
eye-glint
where barned-in bullocks
shifted on straw,
red cheeks of pheasants
in flurry over flints
exposing pale grey scars.
*
She went looking
for spring signs,
combed the ridgebacks,
spied into shadow-folds,
on a day when the rare sun
slid away
from the solstice.
All she could see
were left-overs:
shocking pink spindle berries,
fluff of old man’s beard,
flopped maize leaves,
a century-old yew
standing guard by gravestones.
But above hedge-less fields
stretched out
into flattened sheets,
sectioned thinly
by wire,
she found honeysuckle vines
crusted with buds.
Christine Rowlands
Irene’s Fruit Pie
Down the garden
we pick the plump berries
staining fingers and lips...
We fill basins and pans.
In the kitchen...
she tips the fruit into a bowl
covers all with water
adds salt until insects rise to the surface.
Busiest herself with flour,
Marge and sugar
gathers all together,
flours and rolls it
on a coolness of marble
sags the dough
across a blue enamel dish
then into the oven
until partly crisp.
The rinsed fruit, free of crawlies
is saucepanned and warmed to
a purple bubbling mass
she adds all to the pastry case
and tops with a lid prettified
with pastry leaves
leaves I’d cut out
with a blunt knife on that
same cool slab.
Into the hot oven it goes.
While we wait
the smell fills the kitchen.
Geoffrey Winch
By the Way
(from his new collection Velocities and Drifts of Winds)
had you taken that other way
and found it to be narrow with
a deep flowing ditch to one side
and undergrowth, saturated
and overhanging, on the other
leaving no room to easily pass
in the event of a confrontation
it would have been necessary
to decide whether or not to
make a stand, give way or
awkwardly pass while
the other silently interrogated
your integrity and imagination
(and you the same)
possibly then having to agree
whether or not to just gaze ahead;
turn your heads; engage your eyes;
smile sweet smiles or involve
your tongues in order to pass a little
or longer time or even the remainder
of your lives in continual confrontation
or civilised conversation
and probably now you would still
be wondering whether the decision(s)
you made would have been the same
if, on that day, the sun had been shining;
the rain hadn’t been unceasing, and
that buffeting wind hadn’t had a part to play
Denise Bennett
Little Palaces
Portsdown Hill Portsmouth
I passed them on my way to school:
pocket-handkerchief gardens,
neat lawns, netted windows –
imagined the spic and span
clean as a new pin sitting rooms
bright with coal fires –
the scrubbed kitchen floors
you could eat your dinner off.
My friend Jennifer lived in one.
These were shadows of war,
symbols of peace
built on fertile farmland
after the Luftwaffe left –
single story prefabs nestling
at the foot of the hill;
quick-fix house-kits,
bolted together to make homes
for broken families.
I didn’t know much about the war.
We were forbidden to mention it.
After all,
everyone knew someone
who’d lost someone –
so that me and my friends
could skip safely between
the rows and rows
of the little white, post-war palaces.
Mandy Pannett
A Chain of Words for Roseanna
What balm or salve for a child in Orange Row
Did you hear the applause Roseanna for the queen in her Pavilion while
you paddled in puddles of shit and sickened on water and grease
Salvaged by wedlock for a pebble of time
Was there dirt in your nails Roseanna as you dug hard earth on the graves
of your girl and your boy
There was always the slamming of gates
A Camberwell workhouse and later the shame of Cane Hill
Whose lunacy was this
salve salvage lunacy
Asylum asylum nomass for your soul
no Salve Regina no Salve Roseanne
salve salvage lunacy asylum
No roses are named after you
Kevin Maynard
Parole
sun-stippled, sun-dappled the path—
lips and fingers empurpled: sweet berries
twisted boughs of old oaks by the shore
gesticulating red bark of dark yews
cooing of wood pigeons, collared doves
soft breeze threading whisper of dry leaves
delicate and tranquil bubbling of the curlew’s call
reed sweet grasses, tall pink pampas grasses
swaying and rustling as if confiding together:
one discarded white mask hanging from the oak-tree’s
branch like a bra from your clothes-rack at home . . .
strange fruit indeed . . . strange freedoms for strange times
deep menace of an autumn evening by the sea
as your next lockdown looms: house arrest for the elderly—
though no one under forty seems to care:
‘Let the coffin-dodgers perish! Who’ll miss their
foul breath, sagging breasts, food-stained clothes, their
dribbling at meal-times, dithering at check-out tills,
appalling driving, or all their antiquated blather anyway?’
meanwhile lurchers and black labradors still
lollop joyfully along the dusty path
they stop from time to time to circle round
each other and, tails wagging, sniff each others’
interesting bottoms
their hoarsely wheezing
owners—ball launchers poised and wobbling,
plastic bags inverted in their other hands,
like extra anti-viral gloves, all of them
so public-spirited, so eager to scoop up
the freshly steaming poop when it pops out—
lumber never far behind: friendship for a pet
asks no greater guarantee than that: ‘Clean up
my shit behind me as I go!’
pandemic blues
seem very far away: pub chatter and the cheerful clink
of gathered-in beermugs, the clatter of clean cutlery
on trays and tables . . .
but what of homo sapiens,
(homo sopiens more like, as we sleepwalk
our world towards disaster)? who cleans up
the planet after us? after our cast-off filth?
(and maybe—just maybe—COVID has the answer)