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)
OPEN MIC POEMS
NOVEMBER 2020: WELCOME to our new virtual open mic poetry! While public gatherings are 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: MYRA SCHNEIDER
Myra says: I grew up until I was twelve on the west coast of Scotland and then, after a spell in London, we moved to Chichester where I went to the Girls High School which no longer exists. I studied English at London University and lived in London ever since but I still feel a strong affinity with Chichester which I visited often while my parents were still alive. In fact, I gave readings from my first two collections in Chichester Library back in the 1980s. I’m married and have an adult son. I started writing poetry in my teens but I found the poetry scene in 1960s London very unsympathetic so I gave up on it for several years and wrote fiction instead. My first publications were novels for young people. I came back to writing poetry in the 1970s and have since published ten full collections, most of them with Enitharmon Press who sadly stopped producing poetry in 2017. I’ve also had some pamphlets published. For many years I ran sessions at a day centre where I taught severely disabled adults. Since the 1990s I have been a poetry tutor and I’ve run seminars for The Poetry School for over 20 years. I am consultant to the Second Light Network of women poets.
Introduction to the poems:
I write on a wide range of subjects: personal experience, women’s lives, the natural world, meditative poems – for example about different perceptions of time. I also draw on the surreal. In the last few years many of my poems look at how we are treating the planet and other contemporary issues. I tend to think visually, and this has a strong effect on my work which includes ekphrastic poems. From my days of writing fiction, I’ve retained a strong interest in long narrative poems. For this feature I’ve chosen a group of three poems from my most recent collection, Lifting the Sky which was published by Ward Wood Publishing. The book’s main theme is survival which is explored from different angles. I’m also including the poem, August in Arnos Grove, from my new collection, Siege and Symphony, which is due out next year. Three of the poems below look in different ways at contemporary issues. The other poem, 3AM, is personal.
SEAHORSES
They look unfishlike and so unlikely, upright
in the water, could easily be taken for cousins
of stick horses with their tapering tails,
ribbed spines and equine-shaped snouts.
No surprise they swim poorly but the internet
reveals they’re full of surprises: the bones
circling their heads to form coronets,
their courtship that begins with partners bowing
to one another, a prelude to linking tails
and waltzing serenely as a couple in the glitter
of a stately ballroom, then hours later
rising in spirals from the seabed. I smile
as I watch a pair in a video that’s so fairytale
I wonder if they’ll metamorphose into a prince
and princess but the facts of their unexpected story
outdo fantasy. A real gentleman, the male
receives his mate’s eggs in his mouth – yes it’s he
who takes on the pregnancy and how touching
that his sweetheart visits him each morning.
Their lives, meandering edges of the sea
and anchoring themselves to its trailing fronds,
seem idyllic so I don’t want to discover
that seahorses are over-fished, often end
up as dinner delicacies and Chinese remedies,
don’t wish to know they’re likely to disappear.
I want to daydream, as I luxuriate in shallows
among shells and underwater grasses,
I’m in a world where it’s safe to forget fear.
3 AM
I’m moonless as tonight’s sky, helpless
as a rabbit’s blind and furless kits
and in my body’s cave misgivings hang
from the walls like folded wings. To combat
thumping pain and racing fear, I picture
a Matisse-red room with French windows,
potted palms and a half-naked woman
lounging on a sofa, then the yellow surprise
of the first drifts of daffodils trumpeting
spring to morose February this morning.
It doesn’t work and the silence is implacable
as the dark – I wish it purred like the cat settling
her warm self into the curve of my spine
to sleep but the black cat has long gone.
A tremble in the air – and there are my friends,
shadowy at first beyond my bed. Their outlines
slowly fill out with muted colours and now
they’re facing each other in two rows
as if for a formal dance. They reach out,
join hands across the divide. I gaze
at their arms which seem to form the ribs
of a boat, the kind ancient kings were buried in
but this is no death ship – it’s a hammock
they’ve created for me. The moment I lie down
it takes my body’s burden. No one speaks
but touch has its own language. I let go
of distress and feel such lightness of being
I could lift off into the blue like a damselfly.
AUGUST IN ARNOS GROVE
Determined, I suppose, to lap the holiday sun,
he’s made his pitch the post box by Sainsburys,
is patting his sad-eyed collie that’s a hotchpotch
of about five breeds. The dog’s in good nick
but he is flabby and somehow seems hollow.
He refuses the sandwich I offer but asks for milk.
An aged so-and-so I sometimes pass in the street,
who always asks: are you twenty-one, beautiful?,
appears out of nowhere and butts in, voice
that of a patronizing child: say thank-you,
then drifts away. The milk makes my fingers
so cold I picture them falling off as I wait
in the tiresome queue to pay. Outside, he puts
the milk in an elderly holdall, wants to chat.
I nod and nod but ceaseless heavy traffic
is blundering down the road and I only catch
the odd word, notice he has no teeth, guess
he’s younger than he looks. When I go he waves.
Flowers spilling from the florist shop greet me
with crimson and yellow laughter, a row of pink
watermelon mouths beckon from the minimarket,
at the café’s pavement tables they’re all gorging
on hot sun but I’m worrying if the milk will sour
and how long he can stave off the dark.
I PEGASUS
lift my hooves for gallop,
rise as my white wings open.
Wind rushes into my pricked ears.
Excitement whinnies from my mouth,
ripples through my flanks, drives me
towards a place that’s always cloudless.
Below me are snow-spattered peaks,
valleys where rivers wander, where trees
are laden with oranges, small suns
which pay homage to the sphere above.
Below me are huge cities with domes,
spires and innumerable buildings,
the tallest invade the blue of sky.
I miss nothing: the glassy stare
of cars stampeding like maddened cattle,
humans fleeing from burning towns,
forests felled like mighty armies,
the sea hurling itself in fury
at the land, barren fields thirsting
for water, skeletons of starved creatures.
I choose a verdant slope when I land,
hoof its milky grass and a spring
bubbles up from earth that’s rich
with squirming worms. Then I rejoice
for I am the breath in and the breath out,
I am the quickening which comes unbidden
to the mind, blossoms into words
that tug the heart, I am sounds which bell
the air and enthral the ear, shapes
and colours which come together
to sing. I counter hatred, destruction.
I will not be stamped out.
OPEN MIC POEMS
David Swann
Midsummer on Tenantry Down
The thing that hates walls also has it in
for fences, sheds, frames, fruit-nets,
and this bish-boshed thing I’ve named
The Stage, where we’d sit to salute midsummer
if it wasn’t cracked down its centre
and tilted at some ski-slope camber.
Our allotment’s surrounded by structures
like it, huts fished from skips,
greenhouses reclaimed from the shame
of Eighties glazing. And some of the work’s great,
like the oven our neighbour forged
from brass plates and sunk in a chalk slope
to bake flatbreads in, or the cold-frame,
fashioned from beachcombed bottles, tied into lines
by bean-canes and string. Mostly, though,
these structures have failed their makers’ dreams –
and so what? Midsummer’s meant for dreams,
surely? For the magical inconsequence
of our trough, agleam now with warm rain,
or that short hop to the neighbour’s shack,
where a nest of wrens lie tucked in the corner,
singing their doo-wop to the mother’s
seeds and nuts. There, if you’re charmed,
you’ll see slow-worms writhe free
from tarpaulins, set down to smother brambles,
which dandelions have headbutted holes in,
as if they were drunks at the kebab shop
on the road down the hill, where I hear
sirens now as the wind shifts. The thing
that hates walls is hard at work,
stitching bindweed in every seam,
threading viperous cables through soil.
But it’s midsummer so forget all that,
forget the spores and cracks. Look –
I’ve made a sunbed from onion sacks
and old pallets. It’ll drop to bits
in a few hours, so – quick! – lie back
and watch the sky, bluer now
than the sugar-spun wings of the damson-fly
that has gone by like a thought
and taken the thought with it.
Swordfish
Richard Williams
Just in earshot
over the hush now shush of traffic,
all the rumours of a city,
fully awake but not.
Swollen sea churning,
brown black blue black
steel black
black,
White black white.
Swordfish
pebbles kiss,
Swordfish
Swordfish.
November 1940
a blue grey steel grey sky,
she is still waiting,
still hoping,
knowing and not knowing
until ’83,
A memorial service;
washing away,
forty years’ silt
in a brine-filled blink.
(The above poem was turned into a film by the team behind the Places of Poetry website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrZcNMi3xQY)
Pallant House
Christine Rowlands
A hush in the Galleria
then low voices....
Snatches of music drift
from another space.
In dimly lit rooms
visitors, perfumed and well heeled,
peer at exhibits...
at the writing on the wall...
at oil paintings in golden frames.
There’s a portrait
by Sir William Rothenstein
of Barnett Freedman, an official War Artist
He spoke of life on a submarine of
“wearing any old clothes,
eating pickled onions, listening to
mouth organ music, laughter
and friendship...perfect.”
His work is painstaking
detailed, familiar, varied and
profuse.
In the old house it’s cooler
the wax polished staircase creaks.
On display a collection....
Manet, Hockney, Andrews,
Blake and others.
Paintings brought together
after years of separation.
Visitors peer at exhibits....
assess, consider, compare
and admire.
They head for the cafe, and
comment on the work, the
building, the weather and
ask each other why they
had never heard of
Barnett Freedman before.
Naomi Foyle
On watching the statue of Edward Colston
get dumped into Bristol Harbour
was there a poem
in the long grass
today?
in the black-spotted blood drop
of a ladybird
claiming a stem?
the reticence of nettles
at a distance?
that enormity of sky
beneath which other people marched
from Minneapolis to London
Amsterdam to Accra?
if so, I didn’t
find it, nestled
as I was, on the crest of a hill
between tower block and garden centre
spiderweb and iPhone
failure and elation
a white friend with an elderflower posy
acknowledging her fear
of black men on the street at night
and, at my back, licking its blue lips
the history-hungry sea
Geoffrey Winch
Anne
resided diagonally opposite
my pal Steve – we perceived
she considered herself to be
a cut above.
Flatties accentuated her
dancer’s feet as she set off,
straight-backed, for convent school
though slightly backwards she slanted
to make sure her fair hair sashayed.
Her sky-blue eyes that only ever looked
ahead, said, “Look-if-you-must-but-
do-not-cross-to-my-side-of-the-road.”
I called on Steve early one Saturday –
“Still in his pit” his mother said so
I climbed up to the shambolic attic
where he slept and shook him until
he opened his bleary eyes, whereupon
one hand stretched out from his jumble
of covers to extract two Park Drive
from their open pack. I struck a match
and lit our cigs then, as he exhaled smoke
from his first deep noxious drag, he sighed:
“Dreamt I was on a date with Anne!”
“So dream on!” I advised.
Denise Bennett
Unveiling the World War 11 Memorial
4th December 2018 St Mary’s Portchester
Seventy three years on.
Today a plaque is unveiled
to honour local men who died;
the church teems with top brass.
Sir Timothy makes a speech, twitches a string,
Bishop Christopher says some prayers,
and we stand to sing Eternal Father,
me and my brother, dry-eyed
We have the best seats in the house,
as if watching a play about our own lives
with bits missed out;
it’s all boxed up in pomp and glory;
I want to say –
Let me tell you about my brother,
left fatherless at eight weeks –
about the telegram –
MISSING PRESUMED DEAD
received and read
folded re-read and re-folded
for seventy three years.
Let me tell you about our widowed mother
who mourned for a grave, a place
to lay flowers, and how we have carried
her grief all these years.
Let me tell how she imagined
his torpedoed ship,
the Frigate Tweed, blown to bits,
imagined her husband drowning –
and how, in her dreams,
she thought she saw him swim …
Even in old, old age, she still called for him.
At the end of the service,
the clergy, the gold braid, Sir Timothy
and dignitaries, file into a private room.
My brother and I queue for tea.
We do not speak.
Barry Smith
Elizabeth, Expectant
You get used to them coming and going,
a week at home and always under your feet
or drinking all day down the Fox with the men,
rowdy songs splintering the unquiet night
and you breathe a sigh of relief when they’ve gone,
getting back to mending clothes for the bairns
and worrying about new shoes for the winter.
But this time it was different –
we knew it was too good to be true
heading off to sort out Kaiser Bill,
back home again in time for Christmas.
When the knock came, it wasn’t him
but a telegram that signalled his return,
though they couldn’t really bring him back,
just did what they could where he fell.
That was in late November’s muddy days,
no point in hoping now, no bustle or baking
to welcome him home, just waiting
for January when the waters broke
and his farewell gift, my last little one,
slipped squirming into the breach.
Kevin Maynard
Litten Gardens
‘well-born’ toff and ‘common’ Tommy
each had a name, each one a face
one voice ‘coarse’, the other ‘plummy’
equal now in Death’s embrace
Wilfrith Elstob, Maurice Patten
took the shilling, went to war:
war, whose hammer both would flatten:
they lost what nothing can restore
not bugle calls or solemn prayers
or bright parades with flags and hymns . . .
one uniform of clay each wears
no victors now—just old victims
this statue or that plaque condones
the politics that did for them
we won’t forget? memorial stones
say, don’t forgive . . . condemn, condemn
Chris Hardy
SICKLE
white sharp
edge to blue
untrodden floor
reefs of scallop
oyster shells
fill hollows
in the ridge
salted oak grey
standing baulks
rust bolts
soaked
orange
stain
green sea moss
through a wood
a cuckoo sang
cool ruthless
song
the shingle
rises where
the path
and
trees
stop
waters fold
as light airs
shake out
a dress
or
blue silk
conceals
a snake
loose stones
underfoot
settle firm
stand
on
broken
mountains
safe in the sky
for a minute
out of mind
we two
who no one
knows
Greg Freeman
THE Battle of Hastings, as Seen by Roy Keane
Look at it not so much as a game
of two halves – although it was that,
too – but the result of fixture congestion.
Pure and simple. Two crucial matches,
far too close together. A great win up north,
despite Tostig’s last-minute transfer
to the other side. Then the rush south.
Even then, the game could have been won.
Tight defensive set-up worked well
up to the break. It was a good plan,
if only they’d stuck to it. But they got
carried away, thought the Normans
were there for the taking, lost their shape,
got bogged down in midfield, left themselves
wide open at the back. Those tricky Normans
took full advantage. I don’t blame the keeper,
he never saw it coming. But there was no need
to celebrate in that way. Everyone here at Sky
condemns the scenes that followed,
the repercussions of that defeat.
These foreigners coming over here
bringing in new rules. Droit de seigenur?
What’s that all about? The bastards.
Excuse my French. It’s the ordinary
fan I feel sorry for. I might get
into trouble for saying this, but October’s
far too early in the season. No need
to dismember the manager, in my opinion.
Deborah Tyler-Bennett
Smith and Son’s Golden Gallopers*
Watching them closing, night after night,
magic cloth seeming to appear just as
you look elsewhere, couples begging one
last ride after the floor’s swept.
Strains float hotel wards: ‘Joshua …Joshua …’
Grind then halt. Above limned pinks and jades
flaring bulbs light: FOR YOUR PLEASURE.
Midnight, it starts anew, dropped cloth
revealing cloche-hatted riders, kimono-coats,
men’s deckchair stripes and boaters, holiday
Escalado. Steeds named Owen … Elsie …
rise and fall to ‘Joshua …Joshua …’ over
beach pebbles. Free of barley-twist poles,
pounding kinetic waves, lit by the moon’s
magic lantern.
(*Dating back to 1888, built in King’s Lynne and now a fixture on Brighton seafront.)
Richard Davies
Refugees
It is hard for us to comprehend
how the mud and the rain,
the squalor and the pain
that they now know
could be better than the life
they left behind.
But that was a life
where bombs and guns
and fear held sway,
a life that drove them on
to seek another
in another land
where even poverty improves
on what they had before,
even if the loss of a child
was the price they had to pay.
Mandy Pannett
Close Enough
yesterday a feather by the fence dusty with grit
no hint of the bird that wore it but then
there never is
featherbrain featherweight featherwit
a figment a part
of the sorrows of Lear
no breath on the feather
no breath
a feather’s for memory
not the loss of it not
the loss
today two feathers
unmistakeable
magpie
separate but close enough
for joy
Joan Secombe
Rainbow at Cwm Ivy
Climbing the hill from the tiny teashop at the end of
The back of beyond, with its Grand Circle view
Over the salt marsh and its sure-footed sheep
Called in from the tide,
A green leaf-smell suffuses the air
Hedged in the narrow lane.
Summer rain
A blessing, a baptism
Has briefly passed over
And sunlight sparkles the tarmac, jewels the leaves,
Brings out the birdsong,
Enriches our spirits, dampened in uncertain times.
And there, as we turn into the field,
Above the five-barred gate, is
A firmly painted promise,
A perfect quadrant of hope.
Margaret Wilmot
Eight Weeks into Lockdown
The man at the Garden Centre sells me a trowel
through the fence.
The garden is positively thriving despite no rain.
On the phone I forget to ask the price of things.
Voices float over the hedge from people
on their walks, chatting across a width of road.
There are six buds on the orchid I moved to a north window.
An old mill has got its wheel going again, grinds flour
for local bakers – whole wheat, every particle used.
A friend rings who tells of the pleasure of leaving
a plate of yeast waffles by a helpful neighbour’s door.
I remember in childhood the batter was left out overnight
on the kitchen counter, working.
TERRY TIMBLICK: POETRY COLLECTION AVAILABLE (proceeds to Save the Children))
Chichester Open Mic regular Terry Timblick has produced on behalf of Save the Children "Versibilia", a collection of some forty poems across 30 years, many of them new to friends in our group. Topics include John Keats, Tangmere Fighter Station, unorthodox theology and David Attenborough. £8 via a Terry delivery; £10 by post. Tel. 01243 537812
terrytimblick@gmail.com See forthcoming Chichester Observer interview.
OPEN MIC POEMS FOR NATIONAL POETRY DAY
NATIONAL POETRY DAY 2020: WELCOME to our new virtual open mic poetry! We are delighted that this edition is supported by the South Downs Poetry Festival to celebrate National Poetry Day, which this year has a theme of Vision. While public gatherings are prohibited, 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: ALAN MORRISON
Alan Morrison is author of several critically praised poetry collections including A Tapestry of Absent Sitters (Waterloo, 2008), Keir Hardie Street (Smokestack Books, 2010), Captive Dragons (Waterloo, 2011), Blaze a Vanishing (Waterloo, 2013), Shadows Waltz Haltingly (Lapwing Publications, Belfast, 2015), Tan Raptures (Smokestack, 2017) and Shabbigentile (Culture Matters, 2019). He is founder and editor of The Recusant and Militant Thistles. He was one of the winners of the 2018 Bread and Roses Poetry Award. His poetry has been awarded grants from the Arts Council, the Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust, the Royal Literary Fund, and the Society of Authors.
Website: www.alanmorrison.moonfruit.com
About Gum Arabic
Over Xmas 2019 I was contacted out of the blue by Dr Karunesh Kumar Agarwal, managing editor of Indian poetry imprint Cyberwit, who said his press would like to publish a collection of my poems after having read some of my work online. I just happened to have a fair number of uncollected poems which I was able to quickly form into a broadly thematic collection and redraft and get up to scratch in a matter of weeks. So Gum Arabic was born. Being also a book designer, I almost always design my own covers, and for this particular book I wanted to go for something purely typographical and simple, the distinctive lettering of the book title, in Algerian font, is meant to resemble that of RIZLA cigarette papers. Although it has its fair share of political poems, much of this collection is deeply personal.
Gum Arabic: Poems
The poems that make up Gum Arabic form an amorphous patchwork of overlapping themes that fundamentally address the complexity of the cosmopolitan human condition at a time when multiculturalism is under increasing threat from nativism, nowhere more so than in "Brexit" Britain's "hostile environment" against immigrants. Poverty, homelessness, racism, Islamophobia, mental illness, imperialism, spirituality, mythology, socialism, capitalism, colonialism, consumerism, immigration, are among the challenging themes in this uncompromising collection.
A mixed assortment of historical and literary figures populate this patchwork landscape: William Blake, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gordon of Khartoum, Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, Victor Tausk, Jack London and R.D. Laing among them. But the polemical tone apparent that has typified much of Morrison's poetic output for the past few years is here tempered by a more personal touch. These poems help remind us of our spiritual and psychical interconnectedness as human beings, something above and beyond the accidents of our nationalities, or faiths.
Gum Arabic binds its subjects together like the substance it's named after, which is used on cigarette papers to make them stick when licked.
Excerpts from Gum Arabic
Gum Arabic
Daily he’s cursing
Under hostile breath
At the ever-increasing
Numbers of turbans,
Hijabs, niqabs,
Burqas embarking
In dogwhistle-daylight
On his local high street -
“Bank robbers”
And “letterboxes”
He parrots the prime
Minister, for he’s one
Of Boris’s blue collars...
Does he ever think
As he takes a lick
Of the cigarette paper’s
Seam of Gum Arabic
That his daily smoking
Habit is dependent
On acacia sap
Harvested in African
Islamic countries,
The Sudan, for instance...?
His daily hate is
Spoon-fed him
By the red top
Newspapers
Which smear his
Familiar enemies
Framed for him -
“Scroungers”, immigrants,
Muslims, Gypsies -
Make him hate them
Even more than
He hates himself,
His unaffordable
Life, his property-
Worship, his
Prostration before
Home ownership,
His fruitless pursuit
Of fulfilment
Through consuming,
For the red tops
Know if you throw
Enough mud some
Is bound to stick
Like Gum Arabic...
Summer Without Monika
The cancer has crept up through her lungs like acrid damp
After forty-odd years on sixty fags a day,
Her emphysema-hampered lungs have long been wrung
By choking pistons of cigarettes and now she
Wants to fade away for there’s not much fun in life
When every hour is a fight for breath, the itch on
The tongue still ignited by the thought of a lighted cigarette
In spite of there being so little in her air-pumps left
To appreciate the drag and pout, the luxurious smoke,
The sting of nicotine, tickle of tar at the back of the throat –
Everything nostalgic is brocaded in tobacco…
She’s nearly delirious now, still chimneying away
As she gasps for breath, and her memory’s dismembering –
She never learnt to speak chic English like the rest
Of her aspiring generation of Swedes, and yet,
Apparently, this afternoon she started singing songs
In perfect English, lyrics she’d not learnt consciously,
In a foreign language strange to her ears which sounds
To Swedes as if it swallows the ends of its words,
Now she speaks it, spins it into music, her scorched
Ochre fingertips accompanying on air-piano–
A mystery fluency perhaps sourced from her smoky
Unconscious now suddenly unchained, catching on her
Enchanted tongue just as soon to learn in any case
The lingua franca of absence, stubbed out in an ashtray…
Footprints in the Snow
My mother used to say when a Robin hops into your house
It does so as an omen forewarning coming doom
(For one of her grey uncles had passed away soon after
Playing enraptured host to such a rubecula visitor);
The Redbreast is a fleeting guest, a chat come unannounced
With unassuming friendliness, trusting in the gloom
Of winter, bringing colours, fire-brief orange, white and mouse-
Brown, seems to make itself at home in human room,
Its feathers quite unruffled under unfamiliar roof –
That there’s nothing to fear in this sprightly portent’s surely proof
That the darkening change it augurs gently falling soon
Like softly silent snow, is no more something to dread
Than a sudden change of wind, or the coldness of a bed,
Just brushing off a breath, or a through-draft with a broom,
In a moment, one of trillions that made us who we are;
Everything we think and feel and touch and love and know,
Our memories, experiences… footprints in the snow…
(Previously appeared in The London Magazine)
Two Yellow Birds from Hyderabad
For Prakash Kona Reddy
Dear Prakash,
My far flung friend
From Hyderabad
Hindu-Catholic
Heartfelt socialist
Poet, academic,
Philanthropist,
Documenter
Of lower castes
And untouchables
In priceless poems
And magical prose,
You reinvented
Yourself for
The bookshelf,
I have never
Forgotten that day
You visited me
In Hove going
Out of your way
Before you attended
The conference
Up in the big smoke,
When you brought me
Beautiful artisan
Gifts crafted by
Impoverished hands
Of Hyderabad,
I still have those
Two exquisitely
Painted yellow birds
Sporting grey beaks,
Crested heads
And zebra-striped
Wings, perched on
A miniature tree
Textured like bark,
A nest in-between
Cradling two eggs
Strewn with dry grass
On its green plinth,
Which I’ve kept ever since,
Perched on a shelf
Yet to take flight...
Nasturtiums
for V.S.
They used to say “be nasty to nasturtiums”
For these flashing red and orange flowers thrive on neglect,
Blossom hardily in dry soil with little watering –
Except as comes naturally with noncommittal rain;
Unsociable but boldly coloured, growing on their own
(No commingling except with unassuming weeds)
Especially well when picked and arranged in a vase –
Nasturtiums have been known to drink water so fast
That other flowers bunched with them wilt from thirst,
But this is no malice, more a clumsiness, a quirk,
An unintended consequence from brutalising bloom;
Nasturtiums are the ruffians of flowers, harsh
But beautiful, indefatigable, self-reliant, tough
But fragile, as glass, monstrously sensitive
To unfamiliar comforts– with little nurturing
They grow up to expect nothing, are wise in
Their distrust of fuss, fragrances and strangers;
They suffer for their feistiness but are successful
At flourishing where other plants wither –for
They know nothing but harsh environments,
Are most at home in inhospitable beds; bashful
Flowers; cautious, hyper-vigilant, they mostly
Dread the wind that shudders through their petals,
Though this shuddering’s disguised behind carefree façades;
A fundamental guardedness camouflaged against
The greenest gardens, lushest foliage –of all
Flowers nasturtiums are the most traumatised...
Gum Arabic can be ordered here: https://www.cyberwit.net/publications/1402
OPEN MIC POETS FOR NATIONAL POETRY DAY 2020
Scroll down to see poems by Hugh Dunkerley, Chris Hardy, John Haynes, Camilla Lambert, Greg Freeman, Barry Smith, Maggie Sawkins, Martyn Crucefix, Robyn Bolam, Geoffrey Winch, Raine Geoghegan, Patrick Osada, Joan Secombe, Richard Davies, Christine Rowlands, Alan Bush, Terry Timblick, Isabel Blyskal, Richard Williams, Denise Bennett and Kevin Maynard.
Hugh Dunkerley
Touch
We’re forbidden the language of touch,
can no longer translate our need
into hug, kiss or simple handshake,
must keep our distance and breathe
through masks of dumb cotton.
Every other body is a potentially
lethal weapon and must be treated
as such. We live on screens, pixelated
simulacra of embodied selves,
voices reanimated through the witchcraft
of the digital, but it’s no match
for an arm of comfort on a shoulder,
the syntax of a caress, the bliss
of one body speaking to another.
Chris Hardy
Inner Life
Mist in the lane,
the moon’s breath.
Sometimes, if you can find it,
life is worth the work.
A sound like rain is leaves on leaves,
then rain begins to fall like rain.
This iron rod from roof to earth
buries lightning in the ground.
Today the horizon stopped moving away
and began moving back towards us.
Morning’s unlined page outside,
a day we can go into.
If you should find me dead
close my eyes so I can see.
John Haynes
Aminu Kano and the Indigo Dye-Pit Worker
In his white robe, Aminu Kano turned
towards the old man: “Malam, spread your hands
and show us,” and his palms were blue, “are stained
not just with indigo: with education,
what he does, how his hands think, the man
Allah has made, has stained.” And later when
I came to bow before I left, “Yes, I’m
a teacher, too,” he said, “but then, I mean,
what is it anyway, ever, to learn
you have to ask, what does it ever mean
for some equation to become a line
of symbols made of tissue in your brain
and yet as abstract as Allah’s own mind -
and where is the exam for that?” he grinned.
(Aminu Kano (1920-1983): Nigerian socialist politician who opposed British Rule in the 1940s and led the People’s Redemption Party in the 1970s.)
Camilla Lambert
The Colour of Storms
What’s your favourite colour? Blue like wave-tops.
What’s your favourite colour? Green as waves turning over.
And yours? White like the underneath of parasol mushrooms.
But they aren’t white.
Not if they’re in snow, but next to blackberries on my kitchen table they are.
What’s your favourite? the smoky taste of butterscotch.
And yours? Rapunzel in her tower.
But you don’t have long hair. No, but I know a witch.
What colour are you? The colour of a wasp wing.
What’s that? I have no name for it, no sound, not even a whisper in a cathedral.
How about you? red and yellow and blue, like my best bouncy castle ever.
What’s your best ever? My squeaky rocking chair, my hot water bottle at midnight.
And yours? My favourite colour and the fluff in my belly button
and the gingerbread man running as fast as he can.
But he gets eaten by a pig. In my book it’s a fox.
Why is grass green? It’s to do with chlorophyll, something that makes it green.
Why is chlorophyll something? It just is.
Why is grass green? I did tell you before.
Perhaps you’ve changed
I don’t change. Well, colours change
Is a crow always black? Sometimes black crows look purple
And sometimes purple is the colour of storms, not crows.
And sometimes storms are deep-sea blue.
Greg Freeman
BRIMSTONE
for Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough
Light floods the room.
Butterflies glimpsed
for an instant - peacock,
orange tip, holly blue, brimstone.
Moments illuminated by albums
left in their sleeves for decades,
songs open doors to pictures
of girls in afternoon sun.
Cheesecloth shirts, loon pants,
hot pants, short-lived maxi-skirts.
It dawns on you, it couldn’t
have worked, how it all went wrong.
You wake from the usual pm doze.
Those hot-blooded incoherent teenage
poems inspired by Mersey’s poets of 67.
Why, now you’re sixty-seven,
does this coven of Cathys, black hair,
flashing eyes - girls you’d forgotten
for years - tap on the window,
flutter into your quarandreams?
Barry Smith
On the Rocks
What coil of suffering entwines
those who fall from grace to the rocks
below
impelled by some self-worn
sense of doom, they trek the cliff path
to stand momentarily fixed,
like Christ tempted on the temple
ledge, gazing down on all that swirls
beneath
we cannot share their last
whirlwind of being, the final
step from foothold security
into wild air, stripping all sense
and care
only marvel at their
act and note the wicker basket
of bent flowers marking the edge
of the last to fall
and gaze
above to where a weathered stone
measures grief from another age
and beyond to the stark barrows
that stalk the ancient chalk-face ridge
completing the arc from sky to sea.
(reprinted from South 62, Oct. 2020)
Maggie Sawkins
Seven Questions you might ask an Artist
Which do you prefer to paint or draw?
- Why do you ask?
Have you drawn the short straw?
- No, I’ve drawn a junkanoo mask.
Will you finish the 1000-piece jigsaw?
- Too much of a task.
Which of us has a tragic flaw?
- The woman in green wearing a basque.
Have you painted seagulls on the seashore?
- Yes, wearing a birdcage mask.
What’s your way of dealing with a bore?
- Talk about the weather forecast.
Is that a sketch of your mother-in-law?
- No, it’s a sketch of my vacuum flask.
Martyn Crucefix
from Notes on a calendar (hung on a demolished wall)
A box of Quality Street a constant marriage
a murdered girl under a bridge
a rustling then no more to be heard
a job on the precision parts bench
a language you’re both familiar with
a microwave ping
a mouse’s paw caught in the trap
a new care plan to be introduced
all night a light burns on the landing
almost midnight—strangers mostly
a well-cut lawn apple trees in the garden
as at a disused level-crossing
at 6.30 then 4.30 each afternoon
bedding plants shrivelling
before bed a sweetened drink birds doing
what birds do blue lights urgently circling
chairs and stools a low coffee table
chaos of dissolving townships
clamour of carers clarity at the sink
moving right to left into cleanliness
(This poem first published by PERVERSE poetry https://perversepoetry.tumblr.com/)
Robyn Bolam
The Cornfield
a watercolour by W.H. Allen
That year, there was a shortage of reapers.
It rained so much after the wheat was cut
that grass started to grow in the furrows,
sap green on umber; stray grains set off shoots.
Dawn after the storm, it could have been worse,
though some sheaves leant as if drunk, dishevelled,
while others, sprung out of their ties, were frail,
collapsed, like weary gleaners on the ground –
but the shorter stooks survived, bright, intact,
spiky and proud, upright as bold youngsters
fanning out gold, back to back, standing firm.
The trees were, again, in their old places,
dead branches lighter, and the nimbus clouds
that brought the storm which changed so many lives,
cared nothing for our old ways. They swept through
uneasy dreams and travelled on to town.
Geoffrey Winch
Solutions
seldom we’d complete
a crossword –
always that final clue
we’d discuss
a score of possibilities
only memorable for
the tranquil atmosphere
in which we’d deliberate
before
agreeing nothing seemed to fit
then tensions would rise
and words would be exchanged
down to both of us trying
to get our own points across
before
deciding we’d be better off
going to bed sometimes
just to sleep on it
Raine Geoghegan
they lit fires, moved in close
dikka kie my carrie, come and sit yerself down
yer look dukkered
me granny used to sit by the yog all the time
rubbin’ ‘er ‘ands then movin’ ‘em close to the flames
‘er skin turned dark and she said that the fire did it
dark raddi’s with no moon
only the brightness of the yog
great aunt bethy tellin’ a story
the one about ‘er great great granny Margret
who drowned in a ditch drunk as a lord
her face down in the water
‘alf a dozen piglets runnin’ around and over ‘er
them not seemin’ to notice
‘ands ‘oldin’ saucers of mesci with drops of tatti-panni in ‘em
all of the malts slowly gettin’ skimmished
(Romani words: dikka kie – look here; dukkered – done in; yog – fire; raddi’s – nights;
Mesci – tea; tatti-panni; malts – women; skimmished – drunk)
Patrick Osada
The Reading Test
It takes an age for you to move
From Blue Badged car to waiting chair :
Those alien legs refuse to work
Leave you tottering on the brink
Of actual or imagined falls…
But today’s visit is for eyes
At Opthalmology, First Floor.
You brave the lift, there is no choice
And soon you’re wheeled into a room
With lights and lenses, screens and lists.
A grey haired woman, half your age,
Conducts the tests that measure sight
And sits to hear you read from books.
“Try this …and this…Well done!” she says,
Marking success with ready praise
As you had done those years before
When you had taught her class to read.
Joan Secombe
An Optional Poem
During the early pandemic there was a debate over whether poetry was too difficult for G.C.S.E. students reliant on distance learning and should therefore be an optional area of study.
The only option is
I have chosen to do this -
Sit here, think, pen in hand,
Scribble, think, sit here, scribble -
This First of All our verbal arts
This heartbeat of the rhythms of life
Always we have walked with verse;
Hand in hand with its sister, music,
It has lullabied us to sleep
Formed the rubric of our playground games
Fixed our memory with clever tricks
Pressured us into purchases
Marked the rites of life
Is important enough to deserve
A day of its own…
Thus poetry is not an option
Almost unwitting we invite it
Into our inner ear
Where it sets our thoughts to rhythm
And echoes our minds in rhymes
No need to struggle
It is not an equation that needs to be solved
So take a poem, any poem, off the page
Unwrap it
What do you see?
There, it is yours, now
Forever.
Poetry
No problem
Richard Davies
Wild Oats
(In memoriam - Dom Moraes)
The problem with sowing wild oats
before you are twenty,
is that in the sterile ground of brief affairs
all those drunkards, robbers, turncoats
whom you knew a-plenty
somehow stay with you
snapping at your heels in dreams
like fractious dogs,
reminders of your youthfulness
and of time you might have better spent
doing something else.
Christine Rowlands
Saturday ...... Thinking Aloud
“Sunshine brings out butterflies and motorbikes”
I say, thinking aloud.
“Write that down“ says my son, “because of the..... the?”
“Juxtaposition“ says Dad.
“Yes, that’s it.”
“But, motorbikes are all shiny chrome,
powerful and heavy, speeding
with a great racket” I say, “whereas butterflies dance on the air, graceful and delicate.
A silent whirling mystery!”
“Yes” they say as one.
“AND SUNSHINE BRINGS
THEM OUT!”
Alan Bush
New Cricket
people distanced
on the outfield
a pram by the square, a rug, a radio
a mother, a toddler
on a good length
and the grassed-up sightscreens: unmoved
and it’s as if the DRS referral is still ‘upstairs’
whilst we remain
here, lingering
in the space between the sudden roar
of the ‘soft signal’
and the umpire’s finger
Terry Timblick
Gently Does It
In Stubbs repose, tan-jacketed,
Two amiable horses deepen matt shadows
Beneath oaks in a divotty field.
The Warnham winterscape is twenty miles
And an anguish of betting slips
From Goodwood’s glossy high summer glory
Amid gaudy silks and muscular intensity.
Honour old deeds by carrot and caress,
The threadbare old couple deserve gentle years
In a field called “Dunracin”.
Isabel Blyskal
Theatre Sestina
Anything can happen in the Seeing Place
The only rule is something must happen
Art is not a mirror to reflect reality
But a hammer with which to shape it
And if theatres close and become dark
Who knows when we’ll see the light again
In a while life will seem normal again
A return to unity of time and place
Ministers keeping audiences in the dark
Comedy masks worn tight so nothing bad can happen
Write a tragedy and then bury it
Now whose role is it to shape our true reality?
NHS headlines are the new reality
Applaud for nurses then lower their pay again
Listen to lies; pretend we don’t believe it
We love the NHS; in our hearts it has a special place
Where nothing bad could ever really happen
Keep wages low; keep homesteads in the dark
Nurses and actors tread the boards in the dark
No prompts, cues, just walking shadows in this reality
Ever hopeful that something will happen
Illuminating ward and stage again
Hospital theatres with PPE in place
The surgeon sweats her hour: no-one applauds it
Live through a performance and partake in it
Meander home on public transport in the dark
Drunk passengers, masks akimbo, out of place
Acting up, acting out scenes from their reality
The play was a wild success again!
The audience a disaster! This can happen
Remember theatre where anything can happen?
Seek it, chase it, find and recover it
Nurse it, direct it back to health again
Which play will ease the anguish of the dark?
Which play’s the hammer to shape reality?
Nothing happens without a Seeing Place …
The light shines again where life can happen
Actors in their place; audience sees and believes it
Sitting in the dark, participating in reality
Richard Williams
Page 126 of the Marathon Runner’s Handbook - Visualization
It is about sticking to the plan,
it is about not giving in,
it is about sticking to the plan,
it is about not giving in;
remembering
remembering
is imagining
is believing,
remembering
is not giving in,
running
running
remembering,
on and on and on,
Tower Bridge and down the Mall,
believing
all the things that can still be achieved,
sticking to the plan and not giving in.
Denise Bennett
After the festival
we always stopped
on the top of Hay Bluff
to listen to the skylarks.
It wasn’t the wisdom
from the books or words
that we carried home,
but the birdsong we heard
in the clear blue sky,
which caught our throats -
the ascending prayer
of those melodious notes
floating on soft summer air.
Kevin Maynard
Lockdown Knock-On
bare floorboards . . . blinded mirrors
lockdown and recessionary flotsam
of fixtures and fittings
flung in the back of a van
buckled plastic
splintered spars of wood
flakes of white paint
sprinkled in the gutter
a naked headless mannequin,
two stiff dummy amputees:
forcibly abducted—
they utter not a word
mouths as dumb
as eyes are blank and blind
limp garments swathed in cellophane
and hung from rails
wheeled out, swinging
swiftly bundled,
manhandled away
and those who served
behind the counter?
their pockets and their futures now as empty
as the bankers’ bonuses
are always full
OPEN MIC POEMS
JUNE/JULY 2020: WELCOME to our new virtual open mic poetry! We are delighted that this summer (June to September) edition is part of the Virtual Festival of Chichester and supported by the South Downs Poetry Festival. While public gatherings are prohibited, 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: JOHN HAYNES
John Haynes: Winner of the Costa Poetry Prize, 2008
John says: I have published four books of poetry: Gari (London Magazine Editions, 1974), the second First the Desert Comes then the Torturer (RAG Press, Nigeria, 1986), Letter to Patience (Seren, 2008, won the Costa Prize for poetry), You (Seren, 2010), shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize). Several further books are in the offing. My parents were performers (Mum singer, Dad pianist) in seaside summer shows and pantomimes. I went to private posh boarding schools which I loathed, and dropped out of public school when I was sixteen to work as a deckchair attendant in Southsea, a stage manager at the Theatre Royal Southsea, a teacher, then it was King Alfred’s College Winchester, then Southampton University, eventually lecturer for eighteen years at Ahmadu Bello University, and on return infants school teacher. My Nigerian wife and I live in Cowplain. Our two children have left university and are working.
Introduction
I began with an undergraduate passion for Ezra Pound, and also Herbert Read’s Jungian conception of free verse, in which the force of feeling gives shape to the poem. This shapes the poem The High Jumper. In Nigeria I learnt much from translations African poetry in and derived from the oral tradition. You can see that in the poem Dan Foco, originally written under the Nigerian name of Idi Bukar. A while after I’d returned from Nigeria, I began writing in my own versions very old forms with Letter to Patience. Paradoxically the ‘restriction’ of metre gives the poet great freedom, I found.
The High Jumper
(from Sabon Gari)
I’m the high jumper: I guard my innocence.
I have a theory about my centre of gravity.
And there’s a moment lying out along the bar
when I’m a sleeper with one knee bent under me
and one cheek melting into my forearm.
Then I’m dropping into my shadow forming in the soil.
I erect flimsy barricades. I make pure air.
Dan Foco*
(from First the Desert Came Then the Torturer)
When the paid newsreader was announcing his death
someone noticed him watching the screen
someone glimpsed him on the bush road
someone was listening to his lecture
before the rag and kerosene lit blackboard
How could they have expected to kill him
So many disguises
so many ordinary heads to look out of the eyes of
so many moving feet
so many hands and hands and hands working
so many bodies
each with the common blood circling inside them
hardly known of
(*Dan Foco: an imaginary Che Guevara-like figure)
from Letter to Patience
XLVIII
Another dream: Ayo under the trees
sprawled barefoot on the front seat of his taxi
reading South the stereo on, his keys
with Che’s head dangling from them HISTORY,
he’s had somebody paint for him, STILL RIDES
WITH US. But not in the academy.
In the same letters on the other side’s
ALLUTA, nothing else. “Our classroom farce’s
over man, he grins.” The Datsun slither-slides
through motor park mud and muddles, passes
meat hawkers, holdalls, touts calling. We come
to gates and now the road. Slouch hat, dark glasses,
flower shirt, he guns the engine; thrum
turns ragged fart; dust fills the rearview; tink
of winkers, bare foot right down. Now we’ve swum
out wide to overtake, but no, flash blink-
blinking headlamps and a tanker’s iron wall
rises in front of us. Okay, we jink
back in, fast whirls of steering wheel, all
easy elbows, though, then right at our brake
lights suddenly another caterwaul
of parp and parp. Amazingly we make
it and slide out again, out into emptied
pure blue road just waiting there to take
us in, and clicking Fela on to plead
his “Follow follow follow” Ayo goes
for it, up to his bare shin-bone in speed
Faking It
(in memory of my father)
(from Poetry & All That Jazz magazine, 2020)
Grandma said that, as a baby he startled when he first
heard the key of a piano struck. Something in him
matched the frequencies of notes. He always said he liked
the chords to be an orchestra, with great handfuls of tenths,
and upbeat with a bit of crunch, despised that Jimmy Gross
who had to have a secret double bass to do his left hand for him.
Dad had no time the smiling showmanship of fakes.
Sometimes I sit down at the keys at night and try to play
some of the tunes he showed me chord by chord and bar by bar.
As if it’s in his memory. Although I never hear
the sounds before my fingers touch, as he would have,
and although, yes, I forget chords, chord inversions, whole bars,
I muddle on just for the sake of being with him still,
however flawed it is, however much, alas, I find I have to fake.
John Haynes
Stephanie Norgate
Sweet Woodruff
Remember sweet woodruff in armfuls
stuffed between the mattress’s linen
or piled under hemp?
A scratchy softness for a body to lie on
in the ache between work and morning,
a dream floating in farm-dust
before waking to straw-lines of thatch.
How comforting the gathering and strewing
in the days when woodruff scented our skin
and ticked on in its crackle,
a rough life slowing to a dryness of stems.
When the body twitched and itched,
we could look for hope in a garden.
Ancestors, take us now
to a bed of sweet woodruff,
and, in the cutting and gathering,
soothe us with thoughts of a cure.
In the touch of our hands on a plant,
whisper your lore.
Barry Smith
On the Rise (Transubstantiation)
I met Elvis on the rise at Brighstone
tending the frisky black-faced Shropshire lambs
on the sweet spring grass opposite the Mill Pond.
I knew it was him because of the quiff
and those trademark sideburns, though he was dressed
in blue overalls and horn-rimmed glasses.
He was separating the twin black sheep
from the flock, his favourites, he said,
although they were all bred for the table.
Later that evening, I saw him again
in the bar at the Sun in Hulverstone,
watching the sunset bleed over the white cliffs
with eight black-garbed priests sitting in a line,
down from the seminary at Mottistone,
relishing their braised lamb and rich red wine.
To see Barry perform this poem with the Charlotte Glasson jazz trio, click on youtube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLc0SkBsR1M&feature=youtu.be
Naomi Foyle
The Other Naomi
She’s blonde, Japanese, Black British,
Palestinian, a Jewish New Yorker ‒
but still people get us confused.
She’s famous, an icon,
falls off catwalk runways,
lives on a small island in the Salish Sea;
speaks from podiums to thousands,
was beloved of Nelson Mandela, leads
the Marxist, feminist, anti-Zionist revolution,
writes universal poems about kindness,
and prize-winning bestsellers
in a genre I have modestly attempted;
she rides horses,
sternly corrects people
when they mispronounce our name –
but when I joke she is the Greater
to my Lesser, she looks aghast
and protests No . . .
When people get your name completely wrong,
I want to ask the Other Naomi,
do they call you Fiona too?
And when the Other Naomi’s
mother dies,
even though I never met her
I’m invited to the funeral
and travel hours to attend.
Richard Hawtree
Rocking Horse Ghazal
In one ear, out the other. Brain like a rocking horse,
mother would’ve said; up on his high horse –
give him a ball, he’ll be happy till doomsday.
Mind you, hasn’t time flown. Only horseplay,
always mixing business and pleasure. Here today,
gone to grass. Thinks he’s the business.
It’s all mixed up in that Doomsday Book head of his.
He wouldn’t listen: even to the hoarse
canter of apocalypse on judgment day,
on the very last day of the very last days.
Maggie Sawkins
Ibis
“At the end of March the government wrote a letter to the leader of every local authority in England asking them to accommodate all people sleeping rough or at risk of sleeping rough and to find alternative accommodation for those in “shelters” where they could not easily self-isolate by the end of the weekend, in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”
Local authority rough sleeper accommodation guidance
This is what I heard:
you are holed up in a hotel
named after one of the first birds
Noah released from the Ark
and, confined to your room,
you are going slowly berserk.
I imagine you cloaking
the corporate eiderdown
around your shoulders,
stepping to the window,
blowing cigarette smoke
into the uncommonly quiet
city street. A strange break,
it must seem, to have been sent
here to protect others
from the virus lurking in doorways.
Perhaps I should write
a letter from the heart,
letting on that I share your fear;
reminding you of the hope
I still have, as precious as flight.
But for now, I will include your name
in a prayer to a God I barely
believe in. It’s a start.
Mandy Pannett
jonah
he will never be a whaler the stench of fish lasts a lifetime in the nose
he is the son of truth and the living proof of stink
he lives inland
nightmares come less in the spring a blink or two
and summer lightning
is gone
the first day
put yourself in his place imagine
a shoebox a labyrinth a puzzle box
a cell
the first day is for terror
wallow in it and relish the echoes the doubleandtriplescreaming echoes
or finger the wall and find
a ladder of ribs
mind your head on the heart
this heart has four chambers and they are all
pounding
the second day
foetal
you pray to anything
everything
grovel gibber and dribble
slip and slide in blubber
you promise to make the world repent
london beirut tokyo all shall fall to their knees
sheep must fast and cattle shall be robed
in sackcloth their foreheads
anointed with ash
anything
Chris Hardy
Stitches
When I was ten I went to a new school.
One thing I remember about it was the food,
how I hid slabs of liver between two plates
and how the Headmistress wished
to beat me on the hand for this,
(my mother put a stop to that).
There was one girl I liked,
and I told her on the way to the bus.
She swung her small square case at me,
its sharp edge cut me over the eye,
the blood stained my grey glove black
as I rode home on the top deck.
The conductor and the doctor laughed,
even my mother smiled,
when I told the story
about how I found out
that a girl hits as hard as a boy.
Andy Waite
The Offerings
I cannot find them now, the circle of trees
in the margins of this dark wood,
that I've so loved and yearned for,
where the moon weaves a song
in the uppermost branches
and the dust on the wings of sleeping moths is
only unsettled by the rising of sap.
I looked long and hard for it was a sacred place,
wrote notes on leaves saying
“lost, one failure of imagination, if found please return”
and waited for the night creatures to report any sightings.
An owl as white as myth and rich as myrrh flew close,
said the forest has grown but you have not changed
and engulfed with this philosophy
I sat quiet awhile to consider,
only to find I was naked and cold.
Two deer drew near, one antlered one not;
he bowed his head as if divining an underground stream,
she carried a dress of golden light on her back.
Beautiful offerings, and I tried to call out
but a monastery of silence fell from my lips,
I could not accept such extraordinary gifts.
You're a fool whispered festoons of ferns and
so I ran and ran to catch up with kindness
but I stumbled and fell, cut my knee on the metal of others
and with a stick scratched the words “come back, come back”
in the sky in my blindness, knowing they were long gone.
Walking home through trailing branches I was troubled,
how was I to undo this straitjacket I'd stitched to my skin,
to needle out the cruel splinter’s pinch,
to unfold this too tightly blanketed night.
So from deep in my pockets I took out some shortcomings,
held them in my hands a while, then let them fall.
Turning at last I could just make out a halo of light up ahead
and caught the moon again, a scythe of silver etched deep into ink.
Eve Jackson
When the World Was Quiet
A distant thrum; a generator, an engine, something
that forgot to stop or be stopped as I watch
birds embolden across the margin
of their usual edgy presence; pen themselves:
sparrow, wren, finch; that one blackbird
scatting in jazzy colour all his wants and wishes
across my morning. Bird-space refills
wing by wing, each flap counted; a measure
of how far they have come; can go.
Below, a dunnock picks up secrets in full view
of the window. A pigeon hunkers on the fence;
sunset swell of each steady breath.
Bedstraw and ox-eye daisies yawn
across tarmac. Buttercups, not under
the chin, but enough yellow to seep beneath skin.
Splashes of white-light on leaves that trickle
from trees, to fall on these overgrown paths,
where I wade waist high through the quiet of an afternoon.
Christine Rowlands
Lockdown TV
Here are the characters
I recognise them
The military man
The femme fatale
The maiden aunt
The gigolo
The ingénue
But.. they gather together!
They shake hands
They hug
They stroll, arms linked
Or sit close
Lean in to whisper
To confer
To kiss
I feel nostalgic
Once life was like that
No masks
No gloves
No distancing
No queuing at a safe remove
Now there’s PPE
Endless hand washing
Distant greetings
Fearfulness
And loss
We will get
used to the new normal
Won’t we
Won’t we?
Raine Geoghegan
A Memory of the Hop Fields
She is in the front garden
bending low, picking bluebells,
wearing her old red apron,
with the Spanish dancer on the front.
She stands up, rubbing her lower back,
her mind shaping a memory.
The hop fields,
her mother lean, strong,
picking the hops as quick as a squirrel.
Her bal in plaits, tied on top of her head.
Her gold hoops pulling her ears down.
Ruddy cheeks, dry cracked lips.
Her father pulling poles,
sweating, smiling,
his gold tooth for all to see.
At the end of a long day
she would stand on top of an apple crate,
comb his hair, kiss his neck tasting of salt.
He would pick her up,
Swing her high, low and say,
‘You’re the prettiest little chi there ever was.’
(Romani words: Bal, hair. Chi, daughter/child)
Geoffrey Winch
A Vintage Affair
glass perfume bottle
with silver collar and cover,
Chester 1917
I slowly rotate this aged
and emptied globe of glass, fondle
its graved swags and ribbons, feel
for meaning in its laurel garlands
and petals of rose;
wonder who the lady was
who coddled it so frequently
she polished its silver cover smooth
did she turn it as gently as I
in order to reveal its stopper?
the stopper that resists my easing
until I discover her toing-and-
froing technique that eventually lets
escape traces of her garden flowers:
flowers with such a wildness
about them that I imagine her
perfuming her warm skin,
can almost feel myself
caressing it –
so!
she must have been a lady
who loved to tease
Richard Davies
The Wakeful Hours
The tell-tale signs of passing years
are not the lines now etched upon my face,
nor the limbs and joints that ache when I arise.
It's the way that memory haunts
the wakeful hours
when my mind eludes
the blandishments of sleep
and I wallow in the images that hide
within the corners of my mind,
images of happy times long past,
of friends long lost
and of idle dreams still to be fulfilled.
Patrick Osada
From Lockdown
(Dreaming of the River Tresillian)
The stillness of this place is quite profound
when water’s slack beyond the wooden quay,
just wind and silence are the only sounds.
A heron stands inert as if becalmed,
no curlew’s song or gulls’ cacophony —
the stillness of this place is quite profound.
Across the mudflats egrets can be found,
white dots in clusters perched in Merther’s trees;
here wind and silence are the only sounds.
Tresemple Pond now flanks this path and ground,
its trees and bushes hold faint sounds of bees;
the stillness of this place is quite profound.
Spiralling buzzards turn and turn around,
circle St. Clement’s Well, its scrub and ivy,
yet wind and silence are the only sounds.
This spot is where tranquillity is found
with mind and nature joined in harmony;
the stillness of this place is quite profound
when wind and silence are the only sounds.
Paul Stephenson
The Orrery
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars , ... .The children
follow the little balls round their concentric paths.
If they could turn the wheels themselves,
they would command the world as God must do!
Night falls. Time to go home.
The closing door sweeps their light away
till the blackness yields one tiny silver point.
How far it must be if this is a world like theirs!
No longer gods, their little bodies shiver.
Denise Bennett
Kindergarden
19th March 2020
Here is a festival of flowers;
children in a garden playing in winter drizzle,
or seated on logs, drinking milk,
holding on to each other, laughing.
The whole world is full of fear.
A-tishoo, a-tishoo, we all fall down.
I write a prayer in my notebook.
Please God, keep them safe.
3rd June 2020
They have come out to play again
in soft summer rain. I hear their laughter;
the garden has been so silent.
I look through the trees
and pink dog-roses in the hedgerow,
to see them.
A-tishoo, a-tishoo, we all fall down.
I write again in my notebook.
Please God, keep them safe.
Marian Foat
Daydream
How important it is to daydream
To break free,
Abandoned,
running through grasses
and the froth of cow parsley
Alive as the pulse beats out
the song of bird and bee and air
Awake to notice the world of small things
drifting in a maze of mote and dust
To feel a tumbled mess of hair
touching face and lips
To lie on the grass
To see the cirrus clouds
stretch and slide into a
kaleidoscope of warmth and chill
as sun and shade collide into a
space of uncertainty where nothing
seems normal and everything is transitory
To Wail
To be
Still
Allowing a new order of things.
Richard Williams
Cacophony at Gunwharf Quays
%
MAY/JUNE 2020: WELCOME to our new virtual open mic poetry! While public gatherings are prohibited, 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 or the Library in Chichester.
POET OF THE MONTH: RAINE GEOGHEGAN
Raine Geoghegan writes poetry, monologues and short prose. She was born in the Welsh Valleys and is half Romany with Welsh and Irish ancestry. She worked for many years in the West End and London Fringe as an actress and dancer. She toured both England and Ireland with her own dance troupe working with many artists including Shakatak, Vera Lyn, Chas & Dave, Tommy Cooper. She founded Earthworks, an experimental theatre company in the 1990’s. She also taught theatre and movement at a number of Drama schools. In 1996, a severe illness and accident put an end to her theatrical career and she turned to writing. Her poems and prose have been published both online and in print. She was profiled on the Romani Arts website for International Women’s Day as a high achieving Romany artist and was featured in a documentary film called ‘Stories from the Hop Yards’. Her debut pamphlet, ‘Apple Water – Povel Panni’ has been published by the Hedgehog Press and was previewed at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2018. It is based on her Romany Heritage.
"These are poems of Roma memory and survival brought to life through beguiling lyric and dramatic telling. They bring a way of living, of thinking, listening, seeing, into immediate and natural focus.
- David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry.
Raine says: Dear friends, I hope you are staying well and safe during this challenging time. I am thrilled to be the featured online Guest Poet for May, although I will miss seeing you all in person. My husband Simon and I are now settled in the Malvern Hills and I have been busy writing and working on an exciting new project. My first poem, ‘The Greenhouse’ is from my latest pamphlet, ‘they lit fires: lenti hatch o yog’ and was also published in the Poetry Ireland Review, Winter Edition 2018. I got to read it at the launch in Dublin, where I met the amazing Eavan Boland, who was then the Chief Editor. She sadly passed away just recently, so this in her honour. They really know how to throw a launch party in Dublin, it is an event that I will never forget. The second pieces are two triolets, both reflecting the sad demise of the cuckoo, although I seem to be hearing of various sightings of late. These too are from my book, the first was also published on The Clearing, Little Toller Publishing in 2018, the second one in Under the Radar, also in 2018. Enjoy and go well.
The Greenhouse
Mourners spill out into the alleyway. Amidst the black are flashes of purple and red of women’s scarves and men’s ties.
My uncle, a staff sergeant in the army and just back from Germany is dressed in his uniform. He leans against the kitchen wall, having a smoke. We drink tea laced with whiskey. My aunts dry their tears on freshly pressed white handkerchiefs.
I go into the sitting room and see my sister sitting on a stool, her hands clasped tightly on her lap. The coffin is open. Grandfather is in his best suit. His pocket watch hangs from his top pocket. A family photograph is tucked into his waistcoat, close to his heart. His old hip flask lies at his side, no doubt there will be a little whiskey in there. He still wears his gold ring. He looks as if he’s resting, as if he’ll sit up at any moment. I place my hand gently on his …
Grandfather and I are walking down the path to the green house. I am six years old. It’s a hot day. I’m wearing my shorts. Weeds and wildflowers tickle my ankles. He pushes the door open, ushers me in, points upwards. ‘What d’ya think of the grapes my gal?’ Tilting my head back I see huge bunches, deep red, ready to be plucked. He reaches up, pulls a few down, rinses them in a bowl of water then places them in my hand. I bite one and the juice runs down my chin. I eat two more. ‘They’re lovely Grandfather.’ He smiles, opens a can of beer, takes a mouthful and says. ‘Do ya see these grapes? Do ya know why they’re so tasty?’ I shake my head. ‘Well, it’s because the Mulo watches over ‘em.’ He laughs, I laugh but I’m not sure who the Mulo is.
I finish my cup of tea and tell Granny that I am going down to the greenhouse. The door is slightly ajar, the white paint faded, flaking. I push the door hard, go in and smell sawdust, stale beer and decay. There is an open can of Pale ale on the shelf, alongside three broken brown pots. An old knife with a blue handle, its blade stuck in the wood. It’s the one he used to carve the wagons with. I bend down; pull an old crate out and in front of me the unfinished wagon. Taking a tissue from my pocket I wipe the dust off. It’s painted red, green and yellow. Tiny faded net curtains hang limply against the small windows. The front door has minute horseshoes attached to it. All the Romany’s believe them to bring good luck. I would love to have this wagon. Before I leave I look up to where the grapes used to grow in abundance. All that is left is a dried, tangled vine hanging loosely from the roof.
Koring Chiriclo (i)
(When the Romanies were forced off the roads into houses, they were saddened by the fact that they could no longer hear the cuckoo sing)
I’ve loved to hear the cuckoo sing.
I’m a Romany, always travelling,
from Huntingdon to King’s Lyn.
I’ve loved to hear the cuckoo sing.
since I was a chavi in a sling.
Summer, autumn, winter, ah sprin.,
I’ve loved to hear the cuckoo sing.
I’m a Romany. Always travelling.
(Romani words: Koring chiriclo – cuckoo; Chavi – child.)
Koring Chiriclo (ii)
Jel on me dad would say.
Pack up yer covels, we’ll be on our way.
Take our time, get to Frome’s ‘ill by May.
Jel on me dad would say.
The cuckoo’s callin, untie the grai,
up onto the vardo. It’s a kushti day.
Jel on me dad would say.
Pack up yer covels. We’ll be on our way.
(Romani words: Koring chiriclo – cuckoo; Jel on – move on; Covels – belongings; Grai – horses; Kushti – lovely.)
Raine Geoghegan
Camilla Lambert
No Cornish summer
Instead of rainy westerlies a weighted surge
of air swept up from the south. Its long hot
gusts tore coltsfoot flowers into bullion dots,
bleached grass struggling from the hard earth.
In the cove blackbirds pecked at dry seaweed;
I swam early, languid in clouded water, spying
on a green-glossed cormorant taking flight,
low over waves. Sea-beet had gone to seed;
In the walled garden the June drop of apples
lay un-rotting, shrivelled. Boats from the Haven
returned with slim catches, mackerel’s dappled
backs still with a sheen of silver. Sheep stayed
huddled in hedgerow shade on the gorsy slope;
from high above came a cruising raven’s croak.
Terry Timblick
Cornered
Terror of terrors – alone, moated in self-absorbed solitude,
In an Edward Hopper picture.
Are there softnesses to offset that bleak, sharp-edged saloon bar?
Are all such apparently detached melancholy-bubbled figures humming
“Make it one for my baby, and one more for the road”?
What images wearily effervesce at the bottom of the glass –
Lost loves, inopportune windows, earthbound dreams?
None of that cosmic half-full, half-empty philosophy here,
It’s the artist that’s drained – of cheer and optimism.
“Get out a bit more, Ed.”
Pratibha Castle
refuge
i tend a wild garden
a bawdy house
of scent
and sound
and shade
where roses
toss their manes
in the manner
of New Forest nags
marigolds scorch the soul
with orange rage
nasturtiums writhe
with promiscuous
lithe ache
about the willow
where a blackbird
sentinel of whispered trysts
and the pond’s gold wiles
bugles a salute
to gypsy snails
emerald jewel beetles
tumble bees squiffy
on the damask malt
of antirrhinum
jasmine
thyme
wind sigh of long tailed tits
woodpecker
bully of the fat ball
acrobatic finch
sparrows in the bay bush
sputter certainties
and seeds
in a deckchair
by the pond
Kali on my lap
a furry shell
the grind of traffic
in the distance
slackens to a purr
Paul Stephenson
Elegy
Within the brain of the serial killer
negotiations proceed.
He only knows that, somehow,
the parties must be reconciled
with the tree in the prison garden;
much as it twists, growing upwards cell by cell
with the slow measure of light upon it
shared those twenty years.
Among its leaves the finches celebrate
a nameless aspiration.
In the brain of the finch no voice is raised.
It is free to tune to the pulse of the world.
He would divine their secret,
trace back the Nile of innocence to its source.
For a journey in time a prison has no walls.
But an inch within the skull he is turned back
and must begin again. For Sisyphus,
the record of adventure is a loop of tape.
He should have been a gardener,
hands creating the newness of the day,
brain, the promise of it.
Outside the finches sing.
Within the brain of the serial killer
loud voices drown them out.
In his silent watch, the tantalising dawn
grows bright beyond his reach.
Kevin Maynard
Kisses for the Milk Fund
A little kindness in a cruel world
to slake the suffering of cracked parched lips—
and this you freely granted, Norma Jean,
transfigured by the lens to Sugar Kane:
sugar for all poor hungry suckers eager
to die of sweetness on the milky dugs of lust . . .
Who hasn’t thirsted for your Milk Fund kisses,
sick with longing for your honeyed loveliness:
you knock your lookalikes, the Blondies
or Madonnas into our cocked hats—
And yet, there’s ‘Mary’ in your Marilyn
and how you mothered all our fantasies . . .
mother inviolate, cause of our joy
house of gold, star of the salty sea—
there’s art in each performance that you gave,
and that dumb blonde routine was all for show.
‘She had a kind of elegant vulgarity:
and at the first rehearsal she was perfect—
absolutely perfect. With everything she did
there always was this thing that came right through . . .’*
Of all the avatars of Venus you were queen:
white goddess of the shining silver screen
across which deathless shadows come and go,
forever young and beautiful and free,
shared deathless dreams, white dreaming in free-flow . . .
unlike your mortal flesh, which could not last,
unlike the light you blazed, which could not last . . .
nor could the happiness you made us feel.
* Billy Wilder, as quoted by Cameron Crowe (words slightly recast for metrical reasons)
Greg Freeman
The Junk Room
I go outside for a change of scene
to the room we still call the garage.
Most of the stuff’s been cleared;
there’s space on the futon again.
A few of your mother’s
porcelain ladies remain,
waiting for gentlemen
to take them to the dance.
Last orders? A clutch
of your father’s prize tankards
we borrowed for the last panto,
awarded for golfing achievements.
It’s still a bit of a junk room,
but now’s there’s space to breathe.
I settle down to read poetry,
listen to Steely Dan on vinyl,
look out on spring in the garden.
The nearest place I know
to somewhere else.
Barry Smith
Willows
(after Ivon Hitchens)
sometimes
you can hear the voices in the woods
sighing by a sycamore tree
singing of a green willow,
streams of light filtering the riverbed,
the tangled pool, the linear stretch,
the gate between shadowed waters,
the leaf, the path, the veins,
the patterned willow boughs
gently curling grey-green leaves
flowing from olive-brown arcing stems,
sometimes
you can see the music in the woods
Lindsay Rebbeck
Consolation
Clothes swinging on the line
Pegged by rabbit ears
Which made me smile
For a while
Before I fell back
Into my comfortable hole
Pulling the earth in
Over my head
My life in lockdown
Sifting time into a baking bowl
Diverting my fears
And comfort eating
Through the afternoon
Focus on the little things
That’s what they said
Joan Secombe
Slow Worm
I would not have noticed but
hose spray caught the light, silvered its smooth skin
as it circled itself in the dying afternoon warmth.
A little disturbed, but taking its time, it uncoiled
elegantly, slipped into the damp darkness
of its sanctuary under the shed.
Slow worm. One of my garden friends.
I’ve missed them.
I should have known they were back,
absence of slimy pests proof enough, but
they work so silently
I did not notice.
A memory thread unspooled.
The first time there was a nest
in the disorderly compost heap
apprehensively uncovered.
But you knew not to be wary, delighted
by the intricate knot of kin.
All nature spoke family to you.
We watched out for them then;
upset when mower caught
and the cat teased,
pleased by the rare glimpse of them at work,
the not-snakes snaking through
the green and dank of the herbaceous border,
our very own eco-warriors.
So I really wanted to tell you they were back…
but I had to tell your photograph instead.
Denise Bennett
Bidbury Lane
Walked to Old Bedhampton
where water purled over pebbles
in the clear stream,
where Tom sailed his model boats.
We kept our distance.
Remembered, as we passed
the locked church,
how the crowd thronged here
on our wedding day.
Cherrie Taylor & Geoffrey Winch
Going Places
(responsive tanka)
the moon
lights the way
towards the place
I hold
back
Reading: where I grew up
has so much changed –
memories
no longer feel settled
in the place it has become
the ferryman takes me
back to the place
where I was born
I breathe in the
same salt air
the chain-ferryman
carried only those who paid
across the Avon –
I recall him landing me safely
not far from The Other Place
not yet born I travel
from Bankside to Looe -
a place of safety
I see the mothers
waiting smiling
after my parents moved
to Sherfield-on-Loddon
I drove there one night
safe without headlights
so brilliant was the moon
Geoffrey Winch
Haiku
navigation lights
overhead passengers
seeing how we glow
Haiku
the fog lifts
nothing
has changed
Senryu
new fence
our neighbours
now more distant
Senryu
hanging pictures
your eye always
better than mine
Senryu
glaring at me
the ornamental dog
I forgot to dust
Tanka
I walk
through the woods
to share my troubles
with the trees
who whisper sound advice
Tanka
two days after
the argument
our quieted lips
touch
and your eyes smile
Tanka
my stone
plunges in the lake
ripple after ripple
I watch my influence carry
to the furthest shore
Mike Jenkins
Otherly Love
Otherly and
Southerly and
Occasionally lovely
I cross the Atlantic Ocean
And worship a Saint
In my shower
He says he does
Not perform miracles
But being otherly
I know other wise
I’ve seen the sun rise
In his eyes and
Set soft below
Bless the others
In disguise
Gliding through the sea of streets
And sheets of greets and heats of meets
Graceful as a tea clipper
Carrying a cargo of choirs in his heart
And a symphony in his skin
Where to begin to convey
The miracle of the everyday
Hidden in plain sight
In a Hackney carriage
Amid the night
Like a jewel in a vast empty ocean
A haven for the traveller’s plight
An isle for my otherly love
To rest from flight.
APRIL/MAY 2020: WELCOME to our new virtual open mic poetry! While public gatherings are prohibited, 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 or the Library in Chichester.
POET OF THE MONTH: DENISE BENNETT
Denise Bennett has an MA in creative writing and has taught this subject for Portsmouth College for 28 years. She is a published poet with three collections: Planting the Snow Queen and Parachute Silk by Oversteps Books and Water Chits by Indigo Dreams. She runs poetry workshops in community settings and is currently working on her fourth collection.
Denise says: Hello Barry, Joan and all poets. Thank you for allowing me to be the online guest poet of the month in lieu of the planned April Open Mic Poetry session at the New Park Centre, Chichester. Here are two poems from my ‘Water Chits’ pamphlet collection published by Indigo Dreams. I like to use local history to inspire my work, so the poems I am offering are: ‘Water Chits’ the title poem, based a letter written by a Royal Marine Bandsman who served at Gallipoli, seen at Portsmouth Museum of the Royal Navy, and ‘The Baby’s Bottle,’ a poem prompted after attending a lecture about the artefacts on the Mary Rose.
Water Chits
Gallipoli 1915
I joined the band to play the flute
to chivvy the men to war –
but mostly I was lackey to the medic,
sent out with the water chits;
scraps of paper with the words,
please let the bearer have some drinking water;
sent out to the lighter
to fetch the water shipped from Egypt.
Even in dreams I can hear
the medic’s call –
water, water – we need more water –
as if by magic, I could conjure up
eight kettles of water to wash
the wounded, to cook the meal,
to clean the mess tins,
to give ten dying men a drink.
In all this dust and heat, no one
said we would have to beg for water.
Denise Bennett
The Baby’s Bottle – Mary Rose
Artifact found in the surgeon’s cabin on The Mary Rose which sank in 1545
Eight pints a day each man had,
barley mashed to make the brew,
swigged from a gallon tankard
by every one of the crew.
In the museum I hold a wooden vessel,
shaped like a baby’s bottle,
found in the surgeon’s cabin
used to feed sick sailors –
men with gaping facial wounds,
or those too weak to eat;
made in three separate pieces
with a maple teat to suck,
no spilling of rations allowed;
thin ale was poured inside,
the wooden nipple put to the lips
of injured men to drink,
slake their burning thirst, this
for some, their last sup on earth.
Denise Bennett
(From the collection Water Chits, Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2017
ISBN 978-1-918034-35-0)
Richard Hawtree
Bricolage
The news is bad, but woodland viola
clusters beneath your garden bricolage.
So rhizomes of a hardy Damask rose
settle themselves beside green Maris Piper,
holding out for sudden gin-pink moons.
Camilla Lambert
What to watch out for
Forbidden to play by the rusted seat
at the orchard edge, near pampered rows
of orange dahlias for the village Show,
we went only on apple shift, Bramleys to eat
with handfuls of blooded blackberries mixed
into soft greenish flesh. Most September days,
late morning, clouds spilled rain across the bay,
driving us back. ‘Run home quick, you’ll risk
a lightening strike if you shelter by the oak’.
Grandmother’s voice was steady, but her eyes
sought danger everywhere, slither surprise
of adders, diamonded with black, feet soaked
by a seventh wave, touch of jelly-fish
she called by her childhood name: mermaid’s dish.
Julia Cole
Cold Easter
In the casting metal light the beeches are tall,
Before even the buds and leaves. This Eastertide
The wind is cold, running among the clouds,
Taken as a spring in winter, or a glimpse of Heaven,
Before the dark door closes like a vice.
And the snow is small and bitter as it blows in
Down the hill, crossing the path. Each flake a
Frozen petal from a great tree of blossom
Beyond our sight. It cuts across our way
In a scud of blooms too cold to catch.
But this bitter Easter will not last.
The summer will claim the hills
And fields and we’ll walk here again.
Because we have been here before,
Even when we were strangers,
And love came gentle on the breeze.
Paul Stephenson
Ersatz
Round a Biergarten in the Ruhr
there runs a dry stone wall,
an evocation of the Yorkshire Dales
- if only it did not flap.
So I tell my host,
“VR is better than vinyl,
give your drinkers headsets
and theirs shall be
the whiteness of sheep and clouds,
the greenness of hills and fells,
the yorkshireness of the jolly farmers.”
“We would inquire ‘Wie geht’s?’
and they would say ‘Middlin’
or ‘No’ but middlin’
or ‘No’ but very middlin’
or - in extremis -
‘No’ but just’.”
“Next week it could be pipers in Scotland …”
“… or puffins in the Farne Islands”,
my wife adds sarcastically,
remembering when
high winds had stopped the sailing
and we’d had to be content
with cameras steered remotely
from the Seabird Centre.
On loan from the Hermitage
sits a vase in a glass case.
You smash with your gemmy
but there’s nought to grab:
the hologram’s still there.
Is it really you reading this poem
or a bot? I need proof
of your identity: a laugh, a curse,
a coffee stain on the white page.
At least tick the lines
containing Yorkshiremen.
Kevin Maynard
In Time of Pestilence
rain so small, so thin I’m not even sure,
from my window, that it’s really falling:
but flags on the ground grow darker:
magnolia blossom glows with a brighter pink
in the car-park below, a couple’s purloined
metal trolley — bags in its basket tumescent
with plunder — oh, the relief on those faces!
in aisle after aisle, shelf after shelf plucked bare:
civilization so thin, I’m not even sure
I can see it tearing apart — it takes a pandemic
to show us how fragile we are, how swiftly
we panic, how smoothly we slip back through time
the graphs climb higher, keep pace with our rocketing fears
Gaia is culling the species — preserving our planet? —
if not for us, then for more innocent life-forms . . .
modelling outcomes, the experts spew brittle statistics
while we, who are none of us numbers,
but real flesh and bone, because we are older
and frailer, are one by one starting to die:
which, to be fair, we would have done anyway,
sooner or later, our three-score-and-tens
well behind us —puffy hands, shrivelled lungs,
stiff joints and weakening blood
— and now the rain thickens and falls
with a sibilant roar . . . some of those petals
are ripped off and some of them stay . . .
and white-masked Spring goes trundling
Winter by on a gurney, sheeted and pale . . .
Richard Davies
Take this stone
Take this little stone,
this slip of chalky flint,
spit on it and rub away
the dust and dirt that hide
the traces of another life.
There, for all the world to see,
like insects locked for all of time
in an amber carapace,
are the outlines of a tiny shell,
a scallop shape preserved
by God knows what device
a million years ago.
It lay concealed the while
waiting for my clumsy boot
to root it out from where it slept -
a tiny trace of life,
that came before this grassy hill arose,
before the wind and ice and rain
carved out the rolling downs,
and the march of man and beast
turned the tranquil soil
to beaten paths and fields.
How wonderful this is.
Barry Smith
Supplicant
As if called to midday prayer he hunches
on all fours, his back turned from the abbey
where angels and pilgrims blithely
ascend heavenwards gripping stone ladders
flanking iron-studded oak doors
while solemn attendants collect entrance fees.
The crouching man kneels in convocation
vision fully engaged with grey pavement
as a blackly-bristling wire-haired terrier
stands guarding his singularly suppliant master,
sole immobility in this crush of busy shoppers
hustling beneath civic Roman colonnade
rising in fluted stonework above.
No-one pauses or seems to witness
no hasty handful of change clinks by his side,
only the pool of liquid spreads
slowly suppurating the patch
between recusant dog and man.
Joan Secombe
Empty Buses
Most late afternoons, I avail myself of
My allotted exercise.
Urban dweller that I am, can only walk
The semi-desert of the city streets,
Passed by occasional lycra-ed cyclists,
Side-stepping the few like-minded
As in some long-forgotten folk dance,
Listening to confused seagulls
Complaining bitterly to the fruitless pavements.
All this is strange enough,
This Whovian episode,
Where nothing would surprise,
Not Cybermen standing to attention at the market cross;
Not Daleks, gliding up South Street, promising
A different kind of extermination;
Yet what chills me most is - the once unimaginable,
The eeriness, - empty buses.
Empty buses still working their routes, sticking
To the routines of their numbers,
Like a sort of modern day Sisyphus,
Condemned for ever to circle to their beginnings
Past stops unhailed, unladen, unfulfilled,
As if the city is some giant model railway
And the buses, for once like clockwork,
Go blindly round and round into futility.
Richard Williams
Erosion of Trust
A surf-wall of shingle,
sinuous waves now stilled,
lured into suspension.
Sun-blessed glass,
brilliant white buildings
to face off each tide.
Wave-caps collapsing,
this repeated call
always toils on through.
Harvested stone
will eventually yield;
and so with us, with us.
Sue Spiers
Call Out
I thought myself hardened,
able to go serenely through crisis,
stoic and getting on with it.
Two women in nurse-type tunics
were putting on gloves,
pulling pedal-bin pinnies from their boot,
preparing for a house-call.
On the other side of the road,
exercising as per government permit,
I burst into applause.
The women smiled, said, ‘Good morning’.
My eyes stung and my throat tightened.
It took about thirty paces
to recover control.
Alan Bush
Environmental Impact
Even the East Street Seagull
seems non-plussed as I stand
my turn outside the Minimart
his rounded breast towards me
the dark tips of his primaries
crossed behind his back, waiting
the regulation two metres
from the scuffed chalk of my
position before he steps, stops
again and flares the orange
behind the hook of his bill
as his head swivels awry
as if to empty the space between
us of stare, of hunger so that I can
fling him the crumbs of Greggs
I usually have ready to discard
but I, and all my kind have none.
Isabel Blyskal
Weeverfish
Even in August
Getting into the sea is
Hard work. The worst part.
Lapping cold and grey
Inviting yet repellant
Waiting to bite at
Toes, arches, ankles
Shins, knees, thighs and other parts
Hidden underneath.
Over those small stones
The sea works for centuries
Smoothing razor sharps.
Jellyfish jelly
Ugly shoe on tender foot
Seaside assurance.
Pebble, grit and point
Give way to softness and calm
Soothing sandy floor.
But still, gritty shell
Gets stuck between tender toes:
And jellies are off!
Oh freedom of foot!
Jellies flung askance, a shore.
But what lies beneath?
A pebble or two,
An innocent bides its time.
Lesser weeverfish.
Terrible wee fish
Buried in sandy waters
Especially low tide
Shallow. Calm. Waiting.
Stings most likely in August.
Discharges venom
Spine to tender skin
Carrying neurotoxin
Pain. Sick. Breathe. Calm? Scream!
Boiling hot water
Brings on denaturation.
Protein based venom.
Sometimes in August
Small is big and big is small -
Little weeverfish.
Christine Rowlands
There’s Poetry In It
There’s poetry in the wearing of a mask.
Not as a burglar or bank robber might
Not for a grand ball or carnival
Not as a surgeon or dentist would
But to keep everyone safe.
It’s a global community effort
and for self preservation.
There’s poetry in the washing of hands
Sluicing away invisible germs.
Poetry in the singing of a little song
Twice over to time the action
Poetry in the elbow bump
Not a handshake, in smiles not kisses.
There’s poetry in taking care
Though when so many are lonely
It’s sad that we should keep
Our distance.
We must do the right thing
And behind our masks
We can all be superheroes.
There’s poetry in it.
Raine Geoghegan
Up Early
She walks the three mile journey in all weathers, pushing her empty barrow through the station yard. Burt the Guard, is always there to greet her, he lost a hand in the trenches and she calls him a ‘dear, blessed man’. Dressed in her green pinafore and coat, her side pocket tied around her waist, and wearing a purple head scarf, she sucks peppermints.
Pushing her barrow up the ramp she enters the carriage at the end of the train, standing all the way from Feltham to Waterloo. Once there, she walks swiftly out of the station and over Waterloo Bridge then onto Nine Elms market where she buys the freshest, most colourful loolladi. This is where she uses cunning to get what she wants, never paying the full price. She bumps into ‘all sorts of characters’. There’s Joey who runs the café who gives her tips on the horses. There’s old Mrs Kray who sells tulips when they’re in season, a relative of sorts.
Spanish dancers
blood orange dahlias
soaking in water.
‘Ooh, yer can’t beat ‘em.’ She also loves carnations. ‘ow much do yer want fer these cars?’ The seller says, ‘Two pounds for you Amy.’ ‘I’ll give yer one pound fifty and not a penny more and I’ll ‘ave another two boxes.’ He tries charging her more but she’s not having it. She walks away, he calls her back. ‘Alright Amy, they’re yours.’ The barrow is filled box by box, she ties them tight with string then says, ‘I’m off ‘ome.’ By the time she gets home to ‘anarth, she’s worn out. A bowl of oxtail, a drop of whiskey and she’s ready for bed. Her husband wraps his arms around her waist. She says. ‘Go to sleep Alf, I’m dukkered.’
(Romani words (jib): Kushti – very good; Lolladi – flowers; Dukkered – exhausted.)
MARCH/APRIL 2020: WELCOME to our new virtual open mic poetry! While public gatherings are prohibited, 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 or the Library in Chichester.
POET OF THE MONTH: NAOMI FOYLE
Naomi Foyle is a British-Canadian poet, novelist and essayist. Her many poetry publications include The Night Pavilion (Waterloo Press), an Autumn 2008 PBS Recommendation, and Adamantine (Red Hen/Pighog Press, US/UK). Also the author of five SF novels, she has read her work in the UK, Ireland, Canada, America, Europe and Iraq. She lives in Brighton and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chichester.
Naomi says: 'Hello Everyone and thank you Barry and Joan for arranging, in lieu of our planned celebration at Chichester Public Library, this online gathering of poems. I’m sending two poems from my lyric sequence ‘The Cancer Breakthrough’, which forms the second half of my new book Adamantine. I wrote the sequence while undergoing treatment for breast cancer in 2016-17, an experience that gives me a particular perspective on the Covid-19 pandemic. Though cancer isn’t contagious, it is an endemic existential threat that asks both individuals and society to question and change the way that we live. I offer these poems in the hope that, as my illness was for me, the coronavirus may yet prove to be humanity’s medicine.'
Naomi Foyle
If It Is a War . . .
for Sara ‘FizzySnood’ Cutting
The war on cancer is fought in furtive exchanges
of stained rayon frocks, loud ties, frayed leather belts,
left against orders in plastic bags at the doors of closed shops,
steam-cleaned in back rooms, tagged and hung
by immigrants, retirees, transwomen and students,
fingered by party girls, single mums, lads between jobs,
worn-out lecturers on zero-hour contracts
who don’t earn enough to Gift Aid.
The war on cancer is waged by athletic baristas,
weekend cyclists, half-marathon runners, hill climbers,
cake-bakers, crochet vest-makers; their media queen
a beaming bald veteran, posting bad jokes and fab pix:
a kooky carousel of tiaras, tinsel and fruit fascinators
crowning her stubble, she commands: dig deep,
past the shrapnel for a fiver, a tenner –
#NowGoCheckYourBits!
Armies of scientists chase magic bullets;
generals clink champagne flutes at celebrity dinners –
but from control rooms to trenches, everyone knows
the war on cancer will be won by the dead:
their anonymous names engraved on brass plaques
screwed to ice-cap machines and hospital walls,
commemorating lumps with lump sums,
in thanks, in memory, in hope for us all.
The Cancer Breakthrough
Will not take place in a lab
or corporate boardroom;
won’t foam in a test-tube,
blink in code on a screen,
be hawked for mega-bucks
by big pharma,
or flood the world’s RSS feeds.
The cancer breakthrough
is happening now
and again, and again ―
in the echoing space,
that cold ocean of years,
between one heart
and another.
Denise Bennett
The Grace of Gloves
Once this was a high-class shop
called Handleys of Southsea,
where my mother took afternoon tea
as a lady’s companion before the war.
It’s closing down now.
In her memory I buy
a pair of pale pink leather gloves;
such luxury she would have loved
at a greatly reduced price,
nothing so vulgar as
a bargain buy back then.
How she must have scrimped.
I try them on, feel the touch
of sumptuous, soft, kid leather
on my bare skin, remember
the grip of her small, warm hand
as we waited to cross the roads.
I wrap them in crystal tissue,
lay them in a drawer,
think of her cold manicured hands
in her coffin, my last kiss –
lips to her fingers;
the grace of gloves.
Alan Morrison
There is a Time Everything Must Go
There is a time for everything when
Everything must go. This is the time. Amen.
A time for taking sides and sitting on the fence,
A time for taking stock and taking offence,
A time for moral panics and panic buying,
A time for outing and for othering,
A time for pulled pork, a time for gammon,
A time for tea and Tetragrammaton,
A time for witch hunts and casting stones,
A time for glass houses and empty homes,
A time for plasma screens and iphones,
A time for taboos and Youtube vlogs,
For verbatim Tweets and verboten blogs,
A time for panic rooms and comfort zones,
For echo chambers and isolation booths,
Weighted blankets and anxiety bracelets,
A time for the woke and the wilfully blind,
A time for rainbows and unicorns,
A time for food banks and poverty porn,
Facebook petitions and Twitter storms,
A time for snowflakes and shrinking violets,
For bearded hipsters, and shaved-head varlets,
A time for outdoor smokes and indoor vapes,
For schoolchildren eating toilet paper crepes
And picking apple cores out of bins,
A time for sinning and losing SIMs,
A time for calling out and cancelling,
A time for blacklisting and whitesplaining,
For hate-emboldening and virtue-signalling,
For xenophobia and victim-blaming,
Self-isolating and social distancing,
A time for psephology and crystal balls,
For pop-up shops and flat-packed malls,
A time for chiliasm and existential threats,
A time for hedge funds and hedging bets,
For occupancies and pop-up protests,
A time for scapegoats and grotesques,
A time for yellow roses and yellow vests,
A time for throwing milkshakes at fascists,
A time for starting your answers with 'So',
A time for everything when everything must go...
Mike Jenkins
The Empty Streets Are Full
How can such emptiness
be so full?
So full of
Awe and beauty.
So full
Of life.
How can such
Stillness
Stampede with such
Promise?
Or peace
Be so gently
Raucous?
So unassumingly
Audacious?
Like this, I guess.
Like words on a screen
Tap dancing out from
The surrendered
Blank page.
This is how worlds are made.
In the empty
Space
Where form
Take its place
Upon the stage.
Camilla Lambert
When she was very young
All she had was a leather case; inside, a tattered book −
poems by A.A. Milne − and a faded quilt, hand-sewn
crazy-work, scattered shapes spun across at random
like crackled glaze on earthenware scullery pots.
Each day she is washed and dressed, curls beneath the quilt,
gazing at the patches. They fit some blanks in her head:
a Sunday frock of sprigged muslin floats against her legs,
Nanny holds her hand through shadowed Paris streets;
on a Cornish terrace her elder sister sits watching the sea,
yellow braid round the neckline of her peasant blouse.
People visit this strange room, they read aloud; she nods
in time, to They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace
gleefully repeats What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She is ninety three, and ‘When we were very young’ is now.
Luke McEwen
A Spectral Review
The world’s greatest touring show has this massive star.
Who never fails to deliver a compelling performance.
It’s best to arrive early and enjoy the anticipation,
then marvel at his majesty, commanding our devotion.
A show for all the world to see and different times to suit.
Free tickets, and two shows a day – no matinee.
A heavenly lightshow, the best I’ve ever seen.
The first act celebrates hope, everything is possible.
Let wonder settle where the eye falls, make your merry dream.
The curtains of darkness are drawn back, action bursts forth.
How the weary worries of the day, somehow melt away.
The interval is welcomed, a time to meet with others,
for sustenance, our toilet and all that we must do.
The second act regards appreciation. A thank you,
for all the mini joys we’ve shared, the laughter and the beauty
now applauded. For in their harmony they connect us all.
A final stage exit, the changing hue of each tableau,
with the calmest encore which does not leave us saddened,
but inspired and being grateful for this pause, we let it go,
resting in the certainty we’ll see it another day.
Like the greatest celebrity he’s more than what we see,
an off-world perspective of his heavenly body,
as if it were us this wandering star revolved around.
The sunrise illuminates a truth and we awaken in bliss,
a daily reminder with every rise and curtain fall,
that we only play a minor role, a walk on part at best,
we never take the lead. Most of all we realise
this show will continue long after our own sunset,
that in this theatre nothing of what we do remains.
What we say and do may rub off on one another,
but our Grammys and Baftas will be forgotten.
A thought which leaves us open and ultimately freed.
Paul Stephenson
The Origamist
The origamist comes flat-packed.
But the evening unfolds
and his many sides appear,
now shy, now bold; now quiet,
now sharing our delight
as his cranes multiply
and flutter down.
His eyes are on us
as his fingers crease and crimp,
fast and free as a pianist
watching the conductor.
Swans, apes,
penguins tottering on the table edge,
a man playing a double bass, …
till, last of all,
he gives us each a square,
raising his eyes to heaven as if to hang above it
the question mark of the child creator
on the First Day.
Joan Secombe
What is it about Wisteria?
Edwardian beauty, décolleté, languid
Over arches and pergolas, stately tall
On walls, your colour
Complimenting the sky.
Impossible to pass by without a second glance,
A secret lover's touch, cupping
Heavy blooms, an avid inhalation of that spring incense,
That silky confection of warm vanilla, nutmeg and cream.
Beneath the safety of an English sky, more lilac
Than the lilac, you hint at the exotic,
Moorish pendants in cool mosques and
The breath of spice that wafts from secret cedar shutters.
And as your touch strokes my skin, perfume, nature’s reminder,
Rushes me back to a tendril tap on a child’s
Half-open window, and an awakening
In a twilit room.
Richard Davies
Restoring a Ruin in France
It's comforting to think
that in that old dead house,
beneath the dust and dirt of years,
there was a hidden home,
a living place that we could disinter.
Where once was darkness
we brought in light,
where once was damp decay
we lavished thought and care
and step by step we breathed new life
into sleeping stones and wood.
We filled the hearths with blazing logs
and opened up the shutters wide
to let the sunlight in
together with the songs of birds,
the barking calls of wild deer
and the distant sounds of village life.
Music, love and laughter
replaced the sighs of ghosts,
and the rustling wings of birds and bats,
became the echoes of those times long gone,
when other people lived and loved and maybe died
beneath that ancient roof.
Barry Smith
Pilgrims of Night
In an age which is defined by its faith
when even apostate Swinburne was interred
in holy ground, laid to eternal rest
amongst public outrage in a neat row
with pious relatives who had knelt
on assured, cold-stone certainty,
we can imagine that lost souls seeking
salvation were stirred by the glowing glass
which luminesced above their bared heads
and fervent supplications for grace.
In this sequestered church of St. Lawrence,
separated by scouring tide and crumbling cliff
from the moss-aged beauty of the old abbey
and its spruce Victorian off-spring
where the reviled prince of pain still lies
in Bonchurch, we can detect an air
of studied neglect in the dusty
display of angled aisles, dark-grained pews,
solemn slabs of memorial tablets,
hand-sewn kneelers and famine appeals.
What vision remains in this temporal age,
whose currents rush by the latched wooden door,
when only occasional visitors
step from the world into this quiescent
solitude? It is the glass which catches
the eye with sinuous swirls of living
lines that at first engage and then impose
their narratives. We see the sick and dying
reaching out for succour, pilgrims of the night,
transfigured by the fickle wash of light.
Christine Rowlands
Seen From The Garden (evening ) Take Two.
In a pool of lamplight
She’s there at the sink
Pushes back her sleeves
Runs water, tests its warmth
Reaches for her yellow gloves.
Soap bubbles cling
to glasses and bowls
All are rinsed and stack
Her gloves removed
Leave only a dust
Rubbery smell.
She crosses to the kitchen table
where papers are piled, she sits
picks up her pencil and writes.
“In a pool of lamplight
She’s there at the sink
Pushes back her sleeves
Runs water, tests its warmth
Reaches for her yellow gloves.”
Kevin Maynard
Widower
such practised courtesy: your wise old eyes
still crinkle with amusement
at every casual jest, yet
one senses the abiding absence
held in check—the face remains
a surface decorating blankness—
like dusty sunlight falling
on the weed-choked platform
of a long-abandoned station
as trains grind by
towards so many urgent destinations
that now don’t interest you at all
Terry Timblick
Two Sides of a Square, Tenerife
To the north, against the black cathedral,
Five Puerto de la Cruz boys play kickaround at midday,
The ball ricocheting from 200-year-old walls,
Sometimes at angles as taxing as Church theories
And doctrines which, 80 years on, still bounce towards me
Twenty metres away, on the steps, it’s Mother Teresa’s daily rite
As the mock-saint figure, in familiar blue-touched white habit,
Congeals statuesquely in the warmth, an inviting basket at her feet.
Calcutta’s world mother would, I suspect, smile wryly at
The cheeky compliment and walk briskly on,
Hands out to balm the pain and fear of the dying.
Saints’ feet hardly touch the ground.
Michael Sherman
Smoke and Mirrors
(like candles in the wind)
I saw us in the mirror,
two candles wrestling air,
small spears of spluttering light
for the mysteries to play with.
Not noble like trees,
just flickers of uncertainty,
our endless scurrying proof
we were mere mice aeons ago.
Now in a candle’s breath
I see the hourly contest with life,
always too busy to notice
time’s unwavering eye
casually marking our progress,
observing without caring,
primed with a deep breath
to extinguish our glow.
With a flicker and gasp
we stutter and fail,
fragile as gossamer-sleep
plummeting through a dream.
The trick of life unravels feebly,
silent as forgotten vespers,
thin as puzzled smoke escaping
a surrendering flame.
Alan Bush
And Still
a solitary blackbird sings
from light in lock-down, and sleep slips
silence, with song-words
that touch age-taught ways
through the days’
lengthening
Joanna Lilley
Waiting room
Sixty dogs dead in a fire,
a boy accused of arson.
Four men sit in outpatients,
waiting for their bladders
to drain strong tea, hoping
they’ll go home today
without a catheter.
Two men are here with wives,
the other with his daughter,
like my father and me. I stop turning
thin newspaper pages, to watch sudden
Spitfires, Messerschmitts, flying over the hospital,
old sound through glass. My father tells me
what they are, how he remembers diving
under hedges, playing strafing.
Everyone is watching.
The other daughter vomits
on her father’s trousers. She sags,
unconscious. A nurse slaps an alarm.
We slide, my father and I, closer
to the wall. A dozen staff arrive
in the waiting room to put the daughter
on a stretcher. They take her away.
The mother she was waiting for returns
from her appointment, sits next to her husband
who’s changed into blue medical trousers.
She tells him, Alfred, to ring Kenny.
She’s all right, says Alfred on his mobile.
She’s gone to A and E.
I put my sunglasses on because I’m crying
and watch planes fly across blue sky.
Our cups and saucers rest on the broad arms
of our soft seats. I eat my father’s biscuits.
He’s worried they'll put the catheter back in
if he can’t pee, I know. My father tries to smile
as one of the other men leaves with his wife.
None of us is watching the television
that’s showing us how to cook.
Will Forsyth
New Spring 2020
Spring is not a thing we can line up along with Summer and the others like standing stones
nor a place on the other side of our orbit that we move into once a year on our way into
summer.
We do it.
The winter trees hazed with green standing in bluebell floods and snowdrop carpets, young
badgers and suicidal rabbits now roadside corpses, alarmed blackbirds, sudden thrushes,
hedgerows alive and mounds and piles of yellow gorse, flitting tits and finches, dunnock flocks
and flocks of crocus, tall daffs, yellow dandelion bursts and white spheres, heavy bees and
bluebottles, sheep flecking fields, fine kept horses, bright forsythia and fullest pinkest
magnolia, even the tall grasses in slanted sun, then late snuffling hedgehogs and nocturnal
foxes,
all vividly, extravagantly, promiscuously, outrageously, licentiously, profligately, superfluously
and all at once
erupt.
The gulls, whose last year’s chicks both died, now do it again nonetheless
and stand facing sunrise on their roof ridge among the suburban chimneys,
among the vigorous dawn chorus, among the blossoming and freshly budding trees,
springing.
This is living.
This creating and recreating, bubbling and bursting making of more, full and outpouring,
is of and for itself worth living for.
Then, between the rising and the falling is the hiatus,
gravity free and exertionless when there is fulfilment:
a momentary, dreamlike moment of no motion before the
fall, when the fullness of the heart empties and the heart’s singing stops.
Music turns tinny and dance absurd, limbs awkward, friends strange, love hollow, talk
tiresome,
and all the days are too long.
Spring is not a thing we can keep
nor a place which we can rest and find peace in
nor a purpose to be inserted into souls.
We do it, like the gulls, again and again and again until finally
we stop.