Radio poem

RADIO POEM

Today's radio dial's not just a dial.

It's a display: gives you more information

running, but goes to blank at rest. Old-style

analogue dials, over the base gradation

of kiloHertz and metres, still when still

were effervescent with their banded cities.

And when I was a boy, with time to fill,

I could sing at the possibilities

for hours. They belonged with binoculars,

maps, number-plates, star-charts, but came to displace

astronomy, which was the previous

interest. Today I'd call the phase

that happened next addiction. I first found

Radio Moscow's English under June

sunset, and it became a nightly round

by the autumn of 1971 -

Tirana, Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, and later,

drab 1972's political

balance, west dictator for east dictator,

the fifties sound of Radio Portugal.

But why - given ten words to improvise

some verse around, an email parlour game -

pick as a subject for the exercise

the story of a former hobby's claim?

Because the words suggest it. I can say

how new and various the short wave shone,

what pleasures it delivered in its play.

The pleasure of the hunt, the catch, was one.

CBA Moncton, netted from my bed

in Nottinghamshire winter - that was great.

But Radio Tirana, wishing dead

so many, I could only hate,

and hate's a noxious pleasure, lashing sweat.

That was the sour inside the bright kumquat.

Then hate and hunt gave less and less to get.

I scanned the dial for them, and scanned, and that

was the addiction, radio quagmire.

But I have seen the quagmire sink, not me.

I put restraint on radio desire

as early as Lent 1973.

It faded slowly, surged in my French year,

and again more than ten years on, a freak

throwback stunt for One World Week, but there

it ends. The world's got other ways to speak.

And I shall not be one of those who fret

to hear of kids addicted to the net.

The above was my entry in the CV2 2-day Poem Contest 2009.  The key point of the CV2 contest, for those who haven't followed that link, is that the entry has to be written in 48 hours and include ten words specified by that organisers at the start of that period.

My excuse for blogging the poem is that I have recently tweeted the concluding couplet, thereby presumably rendering the poem ineligible for entry in competitions that disallow published material.

Another piece of poetic fall-out from my foreign-radio phase is this haiku of January 2013, 'Tirana's trumpets'. And you might also be interested in this article, published in Cambridge University libraries information bulletin 60, 2007.