26 Trees

COMMON/PRIVATE

Paired, my trees mark gates of the old workhouse
(now private residential streets, like many),
surround themselves with (I’ve just learned this word)
suckers – new growth that gardeners control.
Their bark is grey. Not photo grey but live,
gnarled and with recent branches offering
leaves greenfly have holed. The trees stand tall,
one bent. The tree book keeps them with X rating.

This was my contribution to the 26 Trees project, one of many from 26 Characters that have stimulated me since 2015.  My brief was to write 62 words of prose or verse about an individual lime tree (a pair of them was acceptable) in Cambridgeshire, plus 400 words on the background to the species.  Click on the project link above, then follow your nose.

The ex-workhouse is that of St Ives, Cambridgeshire -- across the River Ouse from the town, and now on the eastern edge of the village of Hemingford Grey, whose manor house drew an unrelated poem from me in 2018. 

The X rating is the mark given to the Common Lime in Alan Mitchell's The trees of Britain and Northern Europe, which rates the gardenworthiness of trees as follows:

I -- first-class

II -- good

III -- mediocre

X -- little or nothing to commend it.

And one question in the 400 background words remains unanswered.  Who was this elusive French chemist Missa, and in what century did they live?

26 Trees was a joint project with the Woodland Trust, who generously presented participants with saplings of their species.  What I did with mine is this:

It's in! For TreeCharterDay, my 26trees lime from @WoodlandTrust. Planted in the grounds of @WorksopPrioryCE by their kind permission, and with help from @hughcrispin & other green-fingered kin. Dedicated to parents Ivon & Barbara Baker (1928-2011 and 1932-2008). 

A letter to the Second World War

A LETTER TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Dear Mrs War,

the one middle-aged Britons hanker for,

you happened, so you're not there any more.

Why do we lack, 

seeing your legacies, the will to hack

them for our own day and not want you back?

What should I say?

Not being there, you cannot go away.

Please fade.  Napoleon's did. They had their day.

This poem was originally written in response to one of the prompts in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week.  It was for number 20, to write a poem in the form of a letter. 

It has attained no publication higher than self-publication as part of a social media conversation.  I tweeted it in response to colleague Clare Trowell's disquiet, working from home on a rainy day, at the sound of a Spitfire beyond the clouds.

This song of gladness

This Song Of Gladness

Beautiful Saviour by Stuart Townend

Verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, greater chorus –

yes, a structure to fit the song’s ideas:

verse worship, work, ordinary time,

and chorus echoing something more.

Less sung now than it used to be in our church,

unexpected that Sunday in the Spring.

New out of hospital, I sang it loud,

loud as recovery let me sing.

Biblical language, resonant names of God,

let’s say clear day, let’s say vista,

let’s say journey which has made.

We felt it raise us, we felt it let us see,

with our gathering, yes, our gathering

flying higher than before.

True, nothing inherent in this structure,

which I’ll call A A B A B B dash.

It will not beautify each pairing known

but may serve others, like this song.

Biblical language, resonant names of God,

let’s say clear day, let’s say vista,

let’s say journey which has made.

We felt it raise us, we felt it let us see,

with our gathering, yes, our gathering

flying higher than before.

Biblical language, resonant names of God,

let’s say clear day, let’s say vista,

let’s say journey which has made.

We felt it raise us, we felt it let us see,

with our gathering, yes, our gathering

flying high, high over all.


This poem was originally written in response to one of the prompts in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week.  It was for number 42, to write about a song.  I chose to write about Stuart Townend's worship song 'Beautiful Saviour'.  After the rediscovery described in the poem, Clare and I spent a Sunday lunchtime talking about the song's structure.

"It will not beautify each pairing known" -- we thought a bit about whether the structure in its most basic terms -- AABABB' -- would have much effect on every pair of things put into it. We tried a couple:

• Portugal, Portugal, Finland, Portugal, Finland, Finland in winter
• 60s nurse film, 60s nurse film, cement mixer, 60s nurse film, cement mixer, cement mixers

and concluded that the structure had no magical power to be inherently uplifting.

The poem has now found publication in Orbis 191, spring 2020.  It has benefited somewhat from suggestions by editor Carole Baldock.

Regarding church music more widely, I continue to add to my Google Maps list of places in the British Isles that have given their names to hymn tunes, with 273 at the last count.  During lockdown I have developed an addiction to Ralph Vaughan Williams' tune King's Lynn.

Final places of poetry

I put thirteen poems on the Places of Poetry map, and have so far blogged ten of them. Here are the remaining three.


LOOKING BACK

Centuries to keep
this castle state-of-the-art
that saw no action
till a Civil War slighting
felled its walls into the ground.

Our visit didn't
find the same guidebook as mine
nineteen years before,
but we both together thought
ruins of Cair Paravel.

I liked that guidebook's
leading me through room by time
then on to ramparts
for a vista of the whole.
That was in a work-bad year.


The castle in question is Helmsley Castle in North Yorkshire, and the guidebook that had so pleased me on an earlier visit is by Glyn Coppack.  

The poem was written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  The prompt, in a chapter contributed by Helen Mort, was for a poem about a significant place out of doors.


MICHAEL DRAYTON AND I

(on reading Michael Drayton revisited by Jean Brink)

They tell us now that Polesworth never was
remembered village to the poet Drayton.
Move just a little, read him cause by cause,
and see the Goodere idyll first unstraighten,
then vanish like cloud-streets. I spurned the good
in my remembered village at first dare,
age five or six: replanned it new Nutwood,
gave people roles round me as Rupert Bear,
and told them so. But nobody enjoyed
co-option in this way by such a lad.
My parents were embarrassed and annoyed.
I had some explanation from my Dad.
Patrons miscast in myth and golden age;
Drayton did that, older than I, little more sage.


Polesworth is the Warwickshire village where Michael Drayton (1563-1631) may or may not have grown up. In 1580, he was in service to Thomas Goodere at Collingham in Nottinghamshire. Nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars, on the basis of scattered allusions, in his poems and dedications, to Polesworth and its River Anker, conjectured that he might have been intimate with the Polesworth branch of Goodere's family. Jean Brink's book, published in 1990, casts doubt on those speculations.

The poem was written in 2008, my entry in a competition for work to be included in the Polesworth Poets' Trail. Entering a poem on doubts about the basis for that enterprise wasn't really a good idea.

The third poem is a piece of reporting, written in 2004. 

AN ACCOUNT ON A TRAIN

The boys quizzed him about his family:
his sister, twenty-one, brother in prison
for murder, fifteen years, somehow missed thirty,
for a debt of around five hundred pounds –
a gang from Milton Keynes, and gypsies. Who owed whom?
which was which? "Gypsies, they're hard," the boys said.
That on my left, across the carriage. Rightwards,
window, and tracks, and other tracks disused,
with gantries over them, hanging no cables,
then trees between the gantries, then big trees.
Welcome to Northampton, home of the Saints.

An anti-Adlestrop! OK,
I know it happens every day,
but commonly when I'm not there;

excuse my noting it as rare.


I imagine I would irritate readers if I included explanations of Cair Paravel, Rupert Bear, and Adlestrop.  If you're reading this online, you can look them up there.

Standard class

STANDARD CLASS

The mask of no eye contact, when walking past a beggar,

fits most of us, I reckon, on most streets.

You wore it fixed and you were the still ones

on the train, in other passengers' booked seats.

No selling masks to you whose bad

has pulled your faces into tweets.

Too late. You took a risk against the card,

against the wheels, the racing. Now it's known. Hard.

The above has a very simple publication history.  It was written in October 2019 for the Momaya competition, on the theme of masks, and published in the competition's anthology.

Boston's elevation

BOSTON'S ELEVATION

(acknowledging John Beckett, 'The city of Boston?', Lincolnshire past & present 49, autumn 2002, p. 18)

Probably not banking the same river

as Botolph's monastery – waters shifted

more in those days – and not an east coast mainline

station since early routes soon shifted too,

but with its tower and famous namesake, why

should Boston, Lincolnshire, not fantasise

above its neighbours? Spalding, Sleaford, King's Lynn

mere towns, but Boston standing as a city

set on a hill cannot be hid, a city

that is at unity. They tried, you know:

in 1944, for their forthcoming

four-hundred-years-of-Charter celebrations,

with help from newly-citied Lancaster,

Boston put in a bid for city status.

But they hadn't Lancaster's royal connections

of duke and castle, weren't a county town,

had non-citied in documentary.

They were politely ushered out. The Charter's

quatercentenary was in the week

of VE Day. And riverwise, my source

says celebrations had to take that course.

This poem is mostly self-explanatory.  It was written in the autumn of 2015 for a Poetry Kit competition on the theme of cities, and published as one of my 13 postings on the Places of Poetry map of England and Wales.

The documentary in which Boston had non-citied was Country town, directed by Sydney Box in 1943.

My interest in Boston was sufficiently piqued by John Beckett's source article for Clare and me to route our 2016 bike tour through the town.  We found the church building a model of itself in Lego, and supplanting thereby an earlier model of the church in wood, that was still lit up in its humbler place at the back.

Disclosure

DISCLOSURE

"And you must never, ever, ever disclose 

price information, even if it's rough --

saying they'd charge about a pound still shows

enough to compare."  This bit loud enough

for the next Costa table.  Harmlessly --

an induction, with no such information,

and no one would have heard much of what she

said. If you were hot on pronunciation

you might have caught the haitches.  This was work,

hospital contracts.  The haitch-shibboleth

disclosed in this mall nothing worth a lurk,

no tribal loyalty of life or death.

Further (accents disclose no changeless natures),

it's enn aitch ess, it seems, even from haitchers.

The poem dates from October 2017 and, like so much of my recent work, it arose from a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  Chapter 8 asked for something about a street.  I chose Cambridge's Grand Arcade shopping mall, and the Costa Coffee outlet there, and a thing overheard at a neighbouring table.

It has dipped its toe in publication.  In January 2020, the broadcaster James O'Brien tweeted

"I’d back the scrapping of HS2 just to stop people saying ‘haitch’ on the news"

and I threw the poem's final couplet in among the replies -- not the first time I have rendered a poem ineligible for most competitions by partial self-publication in social media.

Church going 2014

Here are two more poems I contributed to the Places of Poetry map -- arising from a day out that Clare and I spent in 2014, retracing by bike an excursion that antiquarians had made in 1868 to churches on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. For an account of the 2014 trip, see my tweets from the day. For an account of the 1868 trip see

Anon. 1869. 'Haddiscoe, September 16th, 1868' in 'General meetings and excursions'. Quarterly journal of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, January, pp. 13-16. Available online at http://bit.ly/1AGPUqB [accessed 8 July 2019]


1860s LITE

We aim to follow, not to recreate,
that learned tour in 1868
on horse-drawn omnibuses from the station
Haddiscoe had then (not today's location).
We cannot make the antiquarian
jaunt's mid-September mid-Victorian
quality of light. That we don't know.
Cooler planet. Steam trains at Haddiscoe.
At Oulton, night, earlier then, unlit,
made the last visit rush and shortened it.
'Postscript 1868' ends Possession
with a century-buried uncompletion.


SHADES OF 1860S LITE

We biked after the 1868ers,
tweeting their churches till the juice was low.
September, both day trips, theirs not so late as
ours, and their station nearer Haddiscoe.

Their Reverend John Gunn, at Flixton Ruin,
should have written a paper, but had not.
His ad-lib burns the page -- what not to do in
that case, shot down. I hope he soon forgot.

Had we found Flixton, by day's end? The map's
"Church (rems of)", this track, these beehives, this clump.
Glimpsed stonework under leaves. It was perhaps
church-shaped enough to be the ruin's stump.

Overgrown hulk, church shadow, where what should
have been done and was not has almost cooled.


My 1996 poem 'City rules' was an earlier glance at John Gunn's unfortunate memory lapse.

Cambridgeshire bike rides

Here are three more things I posted to the Places of Poetry map in the summer of 2019.

The first was, like some in other recent blog posts, written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  This was prompt number 4, for a poem that's an invitation.  The Tins path is a bike route between Cambridge and the village of Cherry Hinton. John Adams' Harmonium was known to me from having sung in a Cambridge Philharmonic Society performance in 2009.  And the invitation to cyclists is still open, though it might need some planning if accepted by many people.


INVITATION TO THE TINS PATH, CAMBRIDGE
If you know John Adams' Harmonium,
and ride a pushbike, let's recall the drum-
roll throbbing in the quiet that will grow
riding a stretch from death to the full throw
of movement 3, 'Wild nights'. Let's do the bike
version along this path, small flat bridge like
the drums, and power in the riding rise
for that crescendo of sonorities.
The bridge won't rumble now as once, I fear,
under one bike, so let us all draw near,
a pedal-strengthened Adams multitude
in mind of that orchestral interlude.

'Chester Road' was written in 2009.  Clare and I have not yet ridden from Cambridge to Chester, but, in the summer of 2011, we did make a bike tour from Chester to Cambridge.  Not sticking to Roman roads, mind.

CHESTER ROAD
Via Devana -- Chester Road -- the name
spurious, eighteenth-century invention
(rhymed, I suppose, retainer not Tirana) --
I rode northwest that turmoiling weekend,
a 90s time of names and letters reversed,
seeing how nothing could be for the best;
we ride southeast over the clunky stones,
a bouncing practice for our next bike tour,
and spend an afternoon admiring beasts.

Perhaps some day we'll take the invitation
in the road's name -- bogus but true enough --
and ride northwest to Chester, the whole way.

'A three-year cycle' is my first, and so far only, attempt to write in the form of a pantoum.  This was for a 2010 competition organised within Birkbeck College, though I forget by whom. The idea that events, or at least the emotional colours of events, move in three-year cycles has been present to me since I was about eleven, though it hasn't the importance to me now that it once did.  Reach and Over are villages to the north of Cambridge.  The quality of Psalm 102 in its sequential place is, I admit, a thing I had already explored from a different angle.


A THREE-YEAR CYCLE

But things move on if it's a cycle --
grey as old photos, January, bruises,
with piled-up consequences happened already.
See the sky rhymed with the street

grey as old photos, January, bruises.
Where does the three-year cycle start?
See the sky rhymed with the street
turn red-blue as daring.

Where does the three-year cycle start?
Where put the defining moment's
turn red-blue as daring?
They cycled from Cambridge to Reach.

Where put the defining moments?
They cycled from Cambridge to Over.
They cycled from Cambridge to Reach.
Green-gold as July, O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands,

they cycled from Cambridge to Over,
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture --
green-gold as July, O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands,
they ran into Psalm 102: a bruised forgetting to eat bread.

We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture --
with piled-up consequences happened already,
they ran into Psalm 102: a bruised forgetting to eat bread.
But things move on if it's a cycle.