A Manchester chaplain

 THE REV. JOSHUA BROOKES 1754-1821

(to the tune 'Manchester' by Thomas Ravenscroft https://bit.ly/3AN0foh )

The writer stressed how like they were --
the antiquated pile
with weathered points and mouldering stones,
the chaplain in the aisle.

Obituary fondness for
the chaplain's gaffes and rage.
It seems the chaplain read the tale;
he marked the printed page.

The chaplain died within the year.
The church lived on to do
its work among the things that set
its city with the new.

This poem was my entry in Manchester Cathedral's 600th Anniversary Poetry Competition.  Before Manchester Cathedral was a cathedral, with a dean, it was a collegiate church with a chaplain, and the Rev. Joshua Brookes was of that line.  He was something of a character, the subject of what you might call a 'pre-obituary': a profile article entitled 'Brief sketch of the Rev. Josiah Streamlet' in Blackwood's magazine 8(48), 633-637, March 1821.  That's the starting point of this poem.

And it has now been sung in public!  By me, at an event to raise funds for rebuilding work at St Martin's church in Cambridge.  They let me sing several of my hymn tune retextings, and these benefited much from accompaniment by Mike Cole.

The tune 'Manchester', by the way, is also known as 'Ely'.  In time I will find out which came earlier.  But I felt its qualities well suited Joshua Brookes.  Synaesthetically, it made me see bushy eyebrows.

Three tree poems

 

Picture by Clare Sansom

HAVING BANANAS

Vexed by the appeal's

planting banana seeds line,

our botanist friend

would donate no cash that year.

Someone wrote to Christian Aid.

Wikipedia's

'Banana' discoveries,

rich like one per line:

seeds spiky, hard, cracking teeth,

genes too same, vulnerable,

nomenclature skein,

name-calling for republics,

handy for preaching,

sometimes hanged to make a point,

sometimes matter for fair trade.

SINCE KILMER

Since Kilmer knew he’d never see

a poem lovely as a tree,

and trees get felled, and poems penned,

why have a contest that will tend

to make the skew worse?    Bards, why bother

competing to compose another?

The answer is that words are good

for people who have missed the wood,

or seen the wood and missed the tree.

Maybe you see them both.    Not me.

Faced with a woodland scene, I need

programmes, subtitles I can read.   

TOUCHES OF EARTH

Earth-wild: a tangled query when she'd heard
of fennel children but not seen the word,
and wanted books from this fool who had read
assuming fear in how the word was said.

Earth-soiled: a soiled sheet brought Wilde down.  They cleanse
soil from carrots by acid.  Changing lens,
you see the carrots in their acid skin
endangering the eat of what's within.

Earth-rooted: what I mean by this is not
the waste of being rooted to the spot,
but roots to anchor, roots to store soil food,
roots you can almost hear grow in that wood,
holding the earth as deep as making height,
trees striving from it into air and light,
proud in a mode of growth those who know tell
plants came at independently and well,
neat, robust way through eco-stress.
I'll stop before I wish the trees success.

Earth-bound: not -using, as in house- or bed-;
serious earth, cue Larkin's many dead.
The end of all that rootedness and growing.
Let's call it homeward bound, but it's a going.

I read this set of three poems at an open-air event in Cambridge University's Botanic Garden.  This had originally come to my attention via my wife Clare, who'd seen an announcement on one of her science journalism email lists.  

'Having bananas' is new,  and was written specially for the event.  

'Since Kilmer' was written in 2004, for a competition celebrating the 90th anniversary of Joyce Kilmer's poem 'Trees'.  

'Touches of earth' was written in 2014 for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association competition, whose theme that year was the Tennyson quotation "Who loves me must have a touch of earth".  Guinevere, in the Arthurian romance Lancelot and Elaine, is scorning Arthur's perfection.  But I made no reference to the original context in the poem.

'Since Kilmer' and 'Touches of earth' were previously published in the booklet for the 'Remarkable world of trees' exhibition at St Albans Museum.

The Botanic Gardens event was the brainchild of Anne Thomas, and others whose work featured there were Rosalind Moran, Ann Gray, and Matt Howard.  An illustrious company to find myself in!