Fluid

FLUID

The riverside

manor we reached by a wet morning's ride.

They lent us towels as we went inside.

The moistened scene 

of 50s children's stories that had been

more in Clare's childhood than mine, the dark green

leaves sheltering 

our locked bikes from the low sky watering

July, most of the trip, even that thing

when the day cleared

briefly, the undrained bike path by a weird

reflection momentarily appeared

swimmer-deep under-sun waterway-blue;

not bike then but canal boat or canoe.

'Fluid' was written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's book 52: write a poem a week.Start now.  Keep going (Rugby: Nine Arches Press, 2015); the prompt in question was to write a poem about water.

The riverside manor is the old house at Hemingford Grey that was the setting for Lucy Boston's book The children of Green Knowe.  The undrained bike path is the bridleway alongside Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, and the visit is one that wife Clare and I paid to Hemingford Manor by that route in July 2011.

I posted 'Fluid' to the Places of Poetry map in October 2019.  Places of Poetry I strongly recommend to passengers or walkers who are finding a long journey tedious.  Look on PofP and see what poems have been inspired by places you pass through!

Illegal deposits

THE SEARCH

dare spend night condemned flat.  Online I found
no July game of public schoolboys scaling
a tower block's Heras fence, grazed to the ground,
hot on the concrete steps, higher each railing;

no afterwards: not ninepenny rainbow,
not weeping for the darkness in man's heart;
no record of the night -- what aged them so,
a great adventure from or at the start?

No bad deposits made in lack of water,
no newspaper, eerie from being old,
no noises for the night not getting shorter,
no one they met, and nothing they were told.

So probable, this tale, not mine to break.
Do you remember it? What is your take?

UNFESTIVE

The phrase "a lot of food"
means more food in the sentence
"We've laid in a lot of food for Christmas"
than in "He'd spilt a lot of food down his jersey."
Poignant the difference in tense.

A SPURIOUS CRIME

Ears pinch "e-legal", and the users know
libraryspeak's not theirs to understand,
when copyright means something else.  They go
and make do with the beige-flagged contraband.

CURIOUS

Deposit -- deposition -- kings invite
put-down, counter-claim.  Did your sudden flight
involve such terrors?  Had someone had sight
of things you'd done that didn't match your fight?
What came?  Visit, phone, email, small-hours fright?
Still mystery, twelve years on -- day of night.

The above poems are my contributions to Illegal deposits, a small anthology of writing by staff at libraries within Cambridge University and the colleges.  The anthology was the brainchild of Simon Halliday and features cover artwork by Clare Trowell. It includes a contribution by Adam Crothers, whose debut volume Several deer (Carcanet, 2016) won the 2017 Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize. 

To get your copy of Illegal deposits, contact Simon Halliday on snjh2[at]cam.ac.uk.