Sonnet for Ledbury

Last year Robin Hiseman asked me for something from my back catalogue for the Ledbury Carnival https://ledbury-carnival.co.uk/ programme, with its 2024 Golden Jubilee theme of 'Going for gold'. I was able to oblige with 'Bus home from working Sunday', written way back in 2012. I blogged this as the third poem in my post 'Bears and gold', which I put up on the the day of the carnival. 

This year Robin asked again, the 2025 theme being 'Wonders of the world'. I didn't have anything in my back catalogue for that, so I wrote a new one.

SONNET FOR LEDBURY

Wonders of Ledbury. They've printed some --

Ledbury clock tower, Ledbury market hall,

Ledbury viaduct, Ledbury carnival --

stitched to world wonders like Rome's Colosseum.

If wonders come in sevens, Ledbury,

adding St Katherine, Elizabeth

Barrett Browning, John Masefield, in one breath

reaches its quota. It's got seven, see?

But Ledbury doesn't stop counting there.

Its church in Jenkins' England's thousand best,

its annual poem contest and fest,

plus those four cricketers and one darts player

and lots more Wikipedia's noted down.

Wonders of Ledbury. Wonderful town!

Clearness in England

Clearness in England

Humbler than lodestar claims:

citizens fossicking

for water standards,

where it’s made worse than brackish

at each profitable flush,

look downwards for truth

in such a sickly pickle.

Citizens writing,

not verklempt but using words

best true to the findings,

not parrot anger.

The glossy rag now carries

such stories. Let’s be

rational, rational. Let’s

be rational, rational.

The above was my entry in last year's CV2 competition. Some readers of this blog may remember that that competition requires entrants to make a new poem, in a single weekend, that must contain ten specific words emailed at 06:00 Saturday morning, UK time. In other words midnight Winnipeg time, as people living there slip from Friday to Saturday. Have fun guessing which the prescribed words are.

My entry got no success in the competition itself, but it has now found publication in Carole Baldock's poetry magazine Orbis. The work has had a measure of editorial improvement by Carole.

Here's some citizen journalism reporting on sewage, from East Anglia bylines. EAB is one of a network of similar outlets around the country; fun in the same way as the Places of Poetry online map that I've praised before.

Greengrocers and the apostrophe

 

GREENGROCERS AND THE APOSTROPHE

To stop us looking down our noses

at greengrocers, the man proposes

to phase out the apostrophe,

so cuke's and strawberry's will be

no worse than Kings Cross, Potters Bar,

Harrods or Boots. The answer's Ah,

they would. Metric correctness may

deserve to be the light of day;

the niggling point whose rules confuse

by more case law at every use

unclear contraction and possession

may well be ripe for supersession;

apostrophe-free writing might

by twenty years of school be right.

Correct non-users would therefore

look down their noses all the more.

As for greengrocers, they'd maintain

stubbornly their right to remain

writing their way, and stand their ground

to their last tittle-jot and pound.

I appear to have written this poem in the spring of 2001, probably in response to a Guardian article advocating as summarised in the first few lines. I published it over a succession of tweets in December 2019. I occasionally feel the urge to throw it into some online discussion or other, so it might as well be made available here.