Admonition to a goat

 

AN ADMONITION

 

Goat.  Your tether's outside -- not here indoors

among the canine, feline, rodent loves.

They can be mostly harmless with their paws.

Please do not clamber on me. You have hooves.

This is another poem written in response to a prompt from Jo Bell's book 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  Chapter 51 -- the penultimate chapter -- noted that very few poems had been written on the subject of goats, and encouraged readers to make good that deficiency.  It is now six years since the book was published, and we may hope that the deficiency no longer exists.

I have very little experience of goats.  I met one in 1979, whose behaviour was as reproved in the poem.

The poem's washed up here on the blog, having been deployed by me in a Twitter conversation in March 2021.  I can't remember what that was about, but it renders the poem ineligible for entry in most competitions, and thus entitled to this present place.

Four songs by Samuel Barber

 

FOUR SONGS BY SAMUEL BARBER

Arpeggio flare. The nun's high cry that springs not fail. The swell quietened, the unseen swing of the sea.

A jaunty solitude. Madge and what her friend dared not think when young. Margery with them, tight-lipped at the knowing.

A smaller rolled chord. Weep for wonder, in a life disputed decades afterwards, at the kindness, the wholeness, of this shining night.

The fourth song has a lot of sharps and naturals all over it. Sometimes, to be clever, I've compared our diet to music with a shifting tonal centre, "like something by Samuel Barber". I was surprised that the first three songs of the set, when I looked at the music, didn't have that many more key changes than songs by other people. Barber said the music for this fourth song just popped out – not laboured, then – but admitted he wasn't all that keen on the text.

The first three songs are jaw-dropping.

The above was written in 2018, when I was working my way through Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  The brief for this particular one was chapter 22, calling for a prose poem.  It was a new departure for me, who use rhyme and scansion as a rule, but there's no law of nature dividing prose from poetry.  I had a go.

The piece was published in the online journal RIC.  They used another of mine, at about the same time, which has also appeared in this blog; one with similar origins to 'Four songs by Samuel Barber' above, and of the same kind, which I haven't made a habit of in the years since 2018.

Are you familiar with Samuel Barber's 'Four songs', op.13?

New words to old tunes

Here are two campaign songs I wrote during 2021 and sang at demonstrations.

The first was in connection with Global Justice Now's campaign for the dropping of patents on vaccinations against Covid19.  The demonstration was outside AstraZeneca's Cambridge premises, during their AGM in May.  The tune is Vaughan Williams' 'King's Lynn', which became for me the signature tune to Lockdown 1 in March 2020.  I wrote an article about the tune's story for the online news outlet East Anglia bylines, and am following that up with explorations of other hymn tunes.

THE ASTRAZENECA SONG




(to the tune King's Lynn)




We call on AstraZeneca

to make their patent free.

It's funded by the taxes

of folk like you and me.

The firm met the occasion

to get the vaccine done.

Now let it be their doing

but not a thing they own.




We call on AstraZeneca

to make their price pledge fair.

We hear what's outsourced to Pune

gets higher prices there.

We hear of countries with three times

their needed vaccines stored,

and others where vaccine's a thing

nobody can afford.




We call on AstraZeneca --

they're short of engineers --

to have more sharing of knowledge

in world health with their peers.

Think COVAX and its makers,

think Salk who long ago

gifted his treatment to the world

and conquered polio.




We call on AstraZeneca

to take Joe Biden's lead

and waive their rights in the vaccine

according to the need.

We see the Covid-19

Technology Access Pool.

We ask big pharma, ask this firm

to let the pool be full.




We call on AstraZeneca

and others in the field

to see more in their drugs than

the profits that they yield,

to listen to the protests

today outside their door.

Poor sort of wealth it is consists

in keeping others poor.



For Cambridge's demonstration on the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice, in November, I wrote a song to a tune by the seventeenth-century composer Henry Lawes.  It's a fine, strong, angular tune. The link at the tune's name, below, will take you to its entry in hymnary.org , and you'll find a recording there.  I took it somewhat faster than that at the demo (50’28” in the film).

The song lists the outcomes we hoped for from the COP26 in Glasgow, which was running at the time.

Anyone who can tell me how the tune came by its name will be listened to with great interest.  Farley Castle near Reading was built about two centuries after Henry Lawes' time.  The name might refer to Farleigh Hungerford Castle in Somerset, which saw action and changed hands during the Civil War.  Was Lawes ever there?  Or was the tune named retrospectively by a hymnbook editor?  Or is there some other story?


COP26, HERE'S WHAT WE WANT TO SEE




to the tune 'Farley Castle' by Henry Lawes 




COP26, here's what we want to see.

Unblock the route to cleaner energy!

Corporate courts must never own the rules!

Cut them away, those harmful bosses' tools!




COP26, wherever oil is found,

coal, fossil gas, let them stay underground.

Earthquakes and fires have been the warning signs --

fund the transition, all who funded mines!




COP26, we want more jubilee!

Debt locks the global south's dependency,

debt saps green work, saps every healthy spend,

some debts are bad and doubtful. Have them end!




COP26, unmake the harm we made,

hold the UK to useful climate aid,

rich countries' reparations and our share,

small to our GDP and only fair.




COP26, write new rules that will bind.

See those with power hurting humankind,

see how their years have left the planet scarred,

hard work to tie them, work to tie them hard!




CC BY-SA 2.0
Arising from campaign demands presented at https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/our-campaigns/climate/

Earlier fruits of my interest in places that have given their names to hymn tunes are my Google Maps list of those in the British Isles and my retextings of 'Trentham' and 'Little Cornard'.  Another person who shares this interest is Mark Browse, whose book O little town: hymn-tunes and the places that inspired them I strongly recommend.

Tongues

 

TONGUES

I thank my God, I speak with tongues more than ye all --

glad my reading of Mr Gloucester in Mr Shakespeare's play was liked so much by that paper --

yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding,

I'd rather read 5 words that would go in a flier about throwing bottles away,

that by my voice I might teach others also,

if this will help others understand,

than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue --

than 10,000 in the tongue of 400 years ago.

(Bible reference 1 Corinthians 14. 18-19, Authorised Version; other lines made using Up-goer Five Text editor http://bit.ly/1lfezKI )

This poem is another written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week.  The prompt, by guest author Philip Gross, was for a macaronic poem -- one written in two or more languages, or two or more registers of English.  So I took a direct quotation from the Authorised Version of the Bible, and rendered it into the 1000-word vocabulary of Up-goer Five.  I wrote more about Up-goer Five in February 2013.

The poem has now found publication in the Indian magazine RIC.  The magazine title is an acronym for Red In Corner, one of its tenets being "No sublime human creation is perfect; it’s the little failed detail, the RIC, that turns it into a masterpiece."

Counter protest

COUNTER PROTEST 

I do not want to take part in this rally. 

Us against them.  Which one is an Aunt Sally? 

I hope, noticing me and this placard, 

they will not come across and kick me hard. 

I hope no stage will need me to decide 

whether to rescue someone on our side, 

and none remind me, every year I live, 

I was cowardly or provocative. 

I hope for space to let my bladder settle 

not in a crowd, not in a police kettle. 

We'll make the point against the wretched man, 

and get away as early as we can.

This poem was written in July 2018, a response to prompt 38 in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week.  The brief was to write against something.  Reluctance to take part in a counter-protest is about as against as anything can be.

I went on the counter-protest I describe, and my anxieties proved, as usual, to be groundless.  I can supply details of the causes on request.

The poem found publication in the booklet All together now from Babylon Art Gallery, Ely.  The gallery ran a competition for poems to be made into a comic book.  Mine wasn't the winner, but All together now gave a print opportunity to all the submitted work.

Poem about Royal Victoria Dock

 

AUGUST 2020

Harbour. Geese crowd on something almost submerged

and rhyme the pulley tackle close aloft.

Human swimmers enthuse the water, them

and cable cars more safe to view than mix.

The reach between Millennium abandoned

and Excel’s mothballed Nightingale, with bridges,

lifts, bridges engineered to swing, less swum.

Covid turns high summer to out of season.

The star circle is of another time.

The above was my contribution to 'A common place', a project organised jointly by the writers' group 26 Characters and Eames Fine Art.  Looking back to '26 prints', an earlier co-production (my contribution here), they invited writers and artists who'd participated in that to pair up, identify a place that mattered to both partners, and produce work in response to it.  My assigned project partner was the printmaker Anita Klein.  The common place we identified was the Royal Victoria Dock in London.  For me, it was a place much imagined in childhood, when I had an overwhelming interest in ships and fantasized about the docks over the river that was in walking distance from my grandparents' home in Lee Green.  For Anita, it was a recent discovery with the joys of open-air swimming.  Clare and I had a good day out there, and this poem came from that.

Poems to hymn tunes: 'Trentham' and 'Little Cornard'

 

SAM HUGHES (1824-1898)

(To the tune 'Trentham'  .  Acknowledging 'A lament for Sam Hughes: the last great ophicleidist' by Trevor Herbert  )

Trentham where he was born,
Three Mile Cross where he died,
these framed the triumphs of his breath:
he played the ophicleide.

Fanfares, chromatic runs --
he played not only these,
but gentle phrases softly breathed
to bands' strong harmonies.

He could have stayed in Wales,
grown Welsh, you say, secure
in comfort and admirers' love,
a champion and more.

He could have learned the new
smart-prized euphonium,
cheaper and easier, and lived
rich with well-earned income.

Footnote to Trentham's tune.
Not Wales, nor progress, he.
Your prose undims his instrument.
He died in penury.

LITTLE CORNARD

(to the tune ‘Little Cornard’)

Sing of a breaking world!
Nations to strive and part,
points of the compass spin,
nothing is found at heart,
and what you mean by south and north
and west and east has lost its worth.

Sing of a breaking myth!
Dragon on dragon fight!
How did the tale arise,
shouts in a Suffolk night?
No dragon-real time’s known to be,
not even fifteenth century.

Sing of a breaking rule!
Derailment injuries,
horrible grandeur fail,
nothing of that in these:
van bearing matter for a drain
smashed with a level crossing train.

Sing of a breaking sea!
Deep, deep and deep their call,
waves that are high for waves,
boats and a hard landfall.
Our voices falter praying for
all those in peril on the shore.

I mentioned in my blog post on Boxing Day 2019 that I had a Google Maps list of British Isles places with hymn tunes named after them.  The Places of Poetry map, where I'd posted some of my work, was re-opened briefly for posting in October 2020, and I nipped in and put these two poems of mine on it. 

But henceforth my ignorance shows.  I'd like to know why Robert Jackson, a church organist in Oldham, chose to name a hymn tune after Trentham in Staffordshire, some fifty miles away.  Similarly about Martin Shaw and Little Cornard in Suffolk.  Come on, Aidan, you're a librarian.  There's a wealth of published material about these chaps, especially Martin Shaw.  Have a look.