The Amazon song

 THE AMAZON SONG

(tune 'Besançon' https://bit.ly/3G2JjhT )

Amazon, pay your workers right, 

have things safe on every site,

have the unions organising,

jobs as jobs, with no disguising.

People, today's Buy Nothing Day --

come and let's make Amazon pay.

Amazon, pay your tax in full,

where you work, and pull no wool.

End your games of profit-shifting

and tax havens' legal grifting.

People, today's Buy Nothing Day --

come and let's make Amazon pay.

Amazon, cool the world that burns,

take less from it as it turns,

open Just Transition trial,

fund no climate change denial.

People, today's Buy Nothing Day --

come and let's make Amazon pay.

Aidan Baker

CC BY 2.0

Written in support of the Make Amazon Pay campaign https://makeamazonpay.com/

For Buy Nothing Day, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Nothing_Day . If singing on some other day of the year, end each stanza with

People, each day's a boycott day --

that's how we make Amazon pay.

This was sung by a small group of us at two demos for Buy Nothing Day, 24 November 2023. The demos were small but successful -- one with placards and singing in front of Amazon's Cambridge office, one on the city's pedestrianised Burleigh Street with other groups marking Buy Nothing Day.

While we were getting our act together for the Amazon one, we were approached by the site custodian, who asked what our intentions were. We told him we'd be staying outside and singing. "Any chance of a good Christmas carol?" he asked. In fact the tune for the above words is from an old French carol, but I don't know if he was there to hear it.

Burleigh Street involved an extraordinary slow procession through the Grafton Centre, led by members of the Red Rebel Brigade (who dress in that colour for such occasions). Their protests are silent and very dignified. I think they'd have made some impact on me if I'd been a mere spectator, and I hope shoppers felt the same.

We didn't attempt to sing during their part of the proceedings, but we gave the Amazon song a couple of times before and after, while we were out in the sun.

An imagined community

AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY

Where does the SMERD community exist?

Smokers, Meat-Eaters, Religious and Drivers made

a tactical alliance to resist

the Council in the year the Council had

a Secularisation Task Force. Now

that's morphed to Faith Concerns Committee, some

joke of SMERD Officers and wonder how

any could march to such a plural drum.

Is SMERD the future of the city? Or

is it, so far from being here to stay,

a common cause there's no more reason for?

The Mayor's mourning his son. He cannot say.

We get their leaflets in our neighbourhood.

Good neighbours. It's a tangle being good.

I wrote this sonnet in December 2009, for a competition from 'Many Hands' whose theme I have forgotten. I self-published it in September 2023, as a quote-tweeted response to an observation by the political commentator Chris Grey:

"I'm genuinely puzzled by the emergence of 'the motorist' as a political identity, as if people who drive cars have distinct set of priorities and values."

It's now been retweeted by Kent and Surrey bylines.

Fording the Humber

FORDING THE HUMBER

Dad said a bowler-hatted gentleman
in 1953 had traced a path
across the River Humber, two wet miles.
Dad was a trainee minister in Brough
in the mid-fifties. Was he an eyewitness
of the flamboyant lord’s achievement? Was this
old news that went on yielding stones for sermons
in his day? Since then, a few feet have trod
the Roman path the peer inferred amid
prevailing depths. And in another distance
the bridge’s towers scare you with their height.

I wrote the poem for a 2022 competition on the theme of byways. I don’t know why that theme stirred half-memories of my father’s recollection, which I must have heard five or six decades earlier. Dad died in 2011.

Revising my memories for the competition entry, I found that the man who’d forded the Humber was Rufus Alexander, 2nd Baron Noel-Buxton of Aylsham (1917-1980). He was invalided out of World War 2 and became a forces lecturer. Other day jobs he held were as radio producer and co-editor of Farmers’ weekly.

His book Westminster wader (1957) has much stream-of-consciousness writing and many overlaid visions of places at different times in history and prehistory. And accounts of his wadings in the Thames and the Severn.

The Aylsham of his peerage title is in Norfolk and he lived in Essex. He was therefore on what is now East Anglia bylines‘s patch.

And I, since 2021, have been a member of East Anglia bylines's editorial team. It seemed to me that the achievement of a man from our patch, in its 70th anniversary year, was worth an article.

The article I wrote was a diary of the brief cycle tour that Clare and I made in April 2023, from Woodall in South Yorkshire to Brough near Hull. And my peers allowed me to get away with including the poem in it.

If you don't already support the Bylines network of publications -- you should. They carry river information far more important than who's walked through the Humber.

Poems in The punch

My appearance in The punch is unconnected with Punch or the London Charivari, the humorous magazine that died twice round about the millennium. The punch is an Indian magazine published online, and it has a poetry issue once a year. 

The contributions of mine that they accepted were all written in response to workshop prompts from Jo Bell.

Aired

The ionosphere's

temperature changes spurred

me in my teens: Europe's

Cold War hate to listen to,

pocket radio by night.

Greenhouse gases lie

miles below that: troposphere,

closest to earth, smeared

with our heat and travelling.

Our smoke turned to a blanket.

See me reading up

which of those two things is which,

the Cold War long gone.

Radio's ways to listen

are more, and the hates they air.

Answers

No, not unlisted, listed in a spreadsheet.

They had to filter lines and hide columns.

They had to copy to a data stick.

They crouched over the screen in a guesthouse bedroom.

They crouched over it Darlington to Peterborough.

They crouched over it in two waiting rooms.

They got the sums ready for off in time.

Best not admonish them to keep spreadsheets

in strict perspective, means to a workplace end. 

On Attempting to Transcribe the Calls of Birds

Sea! Sea! ship ship ship ship

Gulls deep inland feel the nip.

chopakaching? chipakachong!

Phonemes, spelling, away from song.

teeoo chapacheecheechee

The kite sounded like that to me.

teeoo wintu

shwipu shwipu

What birds sound like that to you?

chibatchbrrrrr

Not nailed accurate but nailed tear.

shfwh shfwh shfwh shfwh

The wipe sound has not rhyme enough.

 

Reality Check

Is it rope, or a repurposed something,

hose, say, or heavy-duty power cable?

It’s grey, with thin green line, and holds those bushes

back from the path.  People don’t turn hoses

or power cords to that.  But the reel’s mount –

yes, rope reels can have mounts.  They say at sound

of hoofbeats think horses not zebras.  Mounted

rope reels are horses.  Not real horses, no.

Mounted rope reels horses, repurposed power

cables zebras. Hose repurposed to hold

bushes zebras stroke unicorns.  That’s not

zebras stroking unicorns.  They wouldn’t.

It’s between zebras and unicorns, 

or both zebras and unicorns together.

And reading this are many who have seen

mounted thick grey rope with a stripe of green.

 

Stones

Something to do with photocopying.

Something to do with tapping babies’ noses.

Something to do with social distancing.

Something to do with singing in the street.

“There’s been an allegation made.”

Something to do with bikes and toucan crossings.

Something to do with things on the computer.

Something to do with money, with work money.

Something to do with that self-service checkout.

“There’s been an allegation made.”

Something to do with church and the young people.

Something to do with fifty years ago.

Something to do with social media.

Something to do with XR friends and demos.

“There’s been an allegation made.”

Looking up

 

LOOKING UP

Wearisome at-poem acknowledgements --

not "After X" but "hub-gear reference

from X's 1997 play 

The track" -- displagiarise the work, or may.

But if I read with search to hand online,

I joy at how much learning becomes mine:

the play's plot, and its failure, X's switch

from plays to teaching, X's crowd-fund pitch

in 2015, where the scent goes cold,

the 20s German models who first told

the stories in the play, the engineers

they mocked, the fireless basis of their fears, 

the 40s seeming vindication of

the kludge in post-war rebuild some still love,

the 60s doubts.  With all these I withdraw

my charge the lengthy credits were a bore.

This was another poem written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. The prompt in this case was number 47, for a poem about learning, though the poem is wholly fictitious.

It reached self-publication when I posted it as three tweets among the replies to one by Nina Parmenter on the subject of references in poems.