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.