Four haiku and a tanka

GLUM HAIKU 

Doubly sad to see
long-buried hatchets dug up
with such clumsy haste.

LIBRARY GRIEF 

Sno-pake whites out "Ice"
in the index to one class
of the Bliss schedule.

LIFE-PROCESSING BUGS 

Wrong ends, touchiness,
perverse mutability,
and amnesia.

MUSICAL ALLUSION 

"Those farewell chords are
from Strauss' Alpine symphony"
 -- your note, twelve years back.

COUNTING BATS

Dusk in the garden;
the house like a photograph
of murders or ghosts.
Dimly grouped amid midges
we murmur, thirty-three, -four...

Today, according to the hashtag, is Haiku Poetry Day.  The haiku above were written in an access of them in the autumn of 1995, and published in Cou-cous 10.  Follow the label for others from the same batch.

The "farewell chords" referred to are the mountain theme of Richard Strauss' Alpine symphony. What I, synaesthetically, see through them is a red sun, probably rising not setting, over a very steep city -- Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds -- and a small group of people mourning a visionary who has just died. 

Another hashtag tells me today is Bat Appreciation Day.  The tanka 'Counting bats' is of the same vintage as the haiku.  A kinsman had at that time a great enthusiasm for bats, and gathered a number of us in the garden to count them as they flew out from the roof at nightfall.  Murders and ghosts, I'm happy to say, were completely lacking from this event, and their presence in the tanka is excused solely by poetic licence.  Remembered dusk is two spaces for the imagination.

AYMESTREY TO BYTON

AYMESTREY TO BYTON

Camera, action.

Steep climb, slip, grasp stakes, barbed wire –

won't do that again.

Level streamside path,

climb, the half woods' length ridgeway,

nearing Byton now.

But we're going north,

shadows say, and waymarks gone,

no landmark certain,

no mobile signal.

Stumble on that steepest climb

we'd not do again.

Slippery, barbed wire

again down, walk unfinished;

back to start point. Wrap.

This poem was written for a project from 26 Characters, as were two pieces by me in 2015: 'Kirkconnel's bard' and 'The hang of the stones'.  The 26 Steps project behind the present poem was edited by Sandy Wilkie and Michelle Nicol.

26 Steps marks a hundred years since the publication of John Buchan's novel The thirty-nine steps.  The project identified 26 short walks in the UK between places whose names began with alphabetically adjacent letters.  I landed the walk from A to B, Aymestrey to Byton, a stretch of the Mortimer Trail.  Clare and I did this walk, partially, on Saturday 16 April 2016.  

It had its pains.  I take great pride in map-reading, and errors such as that described here are rare.  Also, since 1997, my feet have been happier cycling than walking; I took diminishing pleasure in a trek whose length was eventually some 12 miles.  But the weekend also led to my first visit to Tewkesbury Abbey, and lunch in Tewkesbury with friends and kin.  And some good tweeting from the train on the way home. 

The project has its own posting of 'Aymestrey to Byton', complete with photograph and sketch map.

Two haiku

These are a fruit of Haiku Poetry Day 2016: a response, during a long train journey, to stimuli received via Twitter.

Firstly, one about QR codes -- those things like crossword puzzles that you see on some notices or packages.  My take on them, from the 23things course I pursued in 2011, is at http://bit.ly/nFFqnz . Some maintain that the life of this technology is already limited, but you can follow http://bit.ly/1Vwl7sn for a story about the codes' use on gravestones.  My response was:

QR codes to stay 

on, enshrined by enshrining, 

half a life longer?

And then there was this.  http://bit.ly/1NJEZAr takes you to photographs of a royal train arriving at Brecon, in South Wales, in 1955.  Brecon Station closed many years ago.  One afternoon in 1975 or 1976 (I've checked both diaries; the incident isn't mentioned in either), on a family holiday in Brecon, my parents, my sibs and I mistook the disused railway track, as shown on the map, for a footpath, and followed it.  Despite that foundational map-reading error, we made it back to where we were staying.

20 years apart:

royal train, Brecon Station; 

brambles, barbs, no path.

Three more music poems

These poems were written at various times, and entered in a competition organized by Rhyme and Reason, the poetic fundraising arm of Rennie Grove Hospice Care. They didn't win any prizes, but they were published in the charity's 2016 desk diary.

JAUCHZET, FROHLOCKET

honk and five drum-knocks

flock of strings in flight and dive

voices crunch the snow

MUSIC IN ST EDMUNDSBURY

This church, wool-rich East Anglian, half-built
at Reformation, lit like Dutch paintings,
cathedralled 1914, recomposing,
hears Ulysses awake, hears Europe's strings
sombrely weave, unweave. The programme note
is the composer's own. It gives bare facts.

PHANTASY QUINTET BY VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The Alla sarabanda's slow rise shows
smoke from a woodland cottage, early morning,
a thin grey line. It fades against the sky.

Can smoke be guiltless? after cattle trucks?
people at stakes? hell and its mirrors? sati?
cancer? emphysema? culled herds? carbon,
carbon we need but get more than the cycle?
carbon too much? carbon a weight, a choking?

That's smoke from fire. So smoking's lately banned.
But smoke without fire, from a sarabande?
Should that line rise, or is it one that ought
to go down with its freight of perished thought?
Maybe; but after worse of our devising,
I hope I see the thin grey line still rising. 

'Jauchzet, frohlocket' evokes the first movement of Bach's Christmas oratorio: "Jauchzet, frohlocket! auf, preiset die Tage" -- "Shout for joy, exult! Rise up, glorify the day" says one rendering I can't improve on.  The image of voices crunching the snow was used by conductor Tim Redmond in a rehearsal exhortation to us of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society, and worked by me into a haiku early in 2011.

'Music in St Edmundsbury' was written after hearing a performance of John Woolrich's Ulysses awakes by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in St Edmundsbury Cathedral in 2002.  Yes, I stoop to pun on the composer's name.  Wealth from wool played a great part in the building or extension of this and many other medieval churches in East Anglia.

'Phantasy quintet by Vaughan Williams' dates from 2007 and arises from a very strong visual image that was suggested to me by the opening phrase of the quintet's Alla sarabanda movement.

Trees and virtual teaching

This post contains two poems.

I entered the first one in the Guardian Poster Poem competition for March 2014, in which the mode of entry was to upload the poem among the blog comments.  The poem was written in 2004, as my entry in another competition -- to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Joyce Kilmer's poem 'Trees'.

TREES AGAIN, BEFORE THE HURRICANE

So the poem by Joyce Kilmer

adds trees to what we remember

1914 for. Another year --

of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster,

of the Hungerford massacre,

of the underground King’s Cross fire,

of no summer -- I read from cover to cover

Mitchell and Wilkinson’s Trees of Britain and Northern Europe;

and the way its entries trace

lines between the names of place

and evoke the scent of trees

marked it with poetic grace. 

The second poem is by way of a makeweight: a haiku.  Clare gave a presentation, at the March 2014 Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds Inter-Disciplinary Project conference in Prague, on her report Higher education teaching in virtual worlds.  Conference participants all rose to the informal challenge to write haiku on their presentations.  Clare is tweeting hers, and she suggested that I, though unconnected with the conference, might like to have a go.  This is it:

SL failed to blaze 

every candle at both ends 

but it can help teach. 

First poem of 2013

My first of 2013 is a haiku, written out of a Twitter conversation with school librarian Nicky Adkins and, would you believe, BBC Radio 3.  I don't know who does Radio 3's tweeting.

You can look on Twitter for the entire conversation.  I had recalled that BBC R3 had become my home station even amid my teenage explorations of Radio Tirana and such.  Radio 3 replied with thanks and a recording of  Radio Tirana's sign-on, at http://bit.ly/UzY1xB , as I remember it from forty years ago.  This has just drawn  from me the following lines:


Tirana's trumpets
rise from 70s shortwave
like Titanic rails


and I have duly tweeted them.

Those of you who don't remember my 1970s addiction to foreign radio listening might be interested to read this article I wrote about it long afterwards.

Haikus

I thought, Why not blog something seasonal over Christmas?  Cannot currently lay hands on Christmas poem from mid-90s, but here are some haikus that I wrote at around that time.  They were published in Cous-cous in 1995.


STATUS

So much self-deceit's
called in to guard that story
anything stands now.


NEW HOBBY I

Worst Christmas -- unreal
as the first dream episode
in ageing sitcoms.


NEW HOBBY II

Doubly sad to hear
the old reasonable voice
used for this madness.


POSITIVE HAIKU

It's not wishful thought
or a verbal sleight of hand;
see, the new house works!


My life is a lot less glum now than it was in the mid-90s.  Current work in progress, or projected, is for the 'What's your history?' competition from Holland Park Press.  A competition entry I wrote under similar circs last year, and entered by email from my brother's house on New Year's Eve, was a great success; I'm not expecting that history will repeat itself, but I can have fun imagining.