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.

Sophia

 SOPHIA AND SOPHIA AND SOPHIA

Sophia, and Sophia, and Sophia.

My love. Before my tale of twisting folk,

before joke turned to wound and wound to joke,

before the Merry Andrew's puppet plays,

before night Mazard, down and up and maze,

before the games with cash and with desire,

I was found, a breathing baby in a bed.

I played in many beds, found you, and wed.

This poem was my contribution to the project '26 orphans', which the writers' group 26 Characters mounted in the autumn of 2022, in collaboration with the Foundling Museum. Participants were invited to choose a famous orphan from a list and write in the orphan's persona. 

My choice was Tom Jones, the hero of Henry Fielding's 1749 novel of that name. For those not familiar with the novel, which I read for the first time in pursuit of this project, I can summarise it thus:

"Foundling Tom is set on winning the hand of Sophia. After a trail of comic adventures, misadventures, blunders and crimes between Somerset and London, they marry."

I had better say that the poem owes much to editorial suggestions by Wendy Jones.  I read the poem to a small gathering in the museum in October 2022, and it seemed to go down well.

The energy debt song

 THE ENERGY DEBT SONG

(tune 'St Anne' https://bit.ly/3V2mgJm )

O government, the cost of gas
and electricity
soars in your power.  We pray you slash
the bills for energy.

Your people's debts for heat and light
grow darker through your reign.
We pray you write them off today
and see us thrive again.

Pray insulate the nation's homes
and cheapen keeping warm.
Pray own the firms whose profits cast
these shadows to our harm.

(arising from campaign demands by Debt Justice at http://bit.ly/3OhIBRa )

This was sung by self and other activists at a street stall in Cambridge in November 2022.  It versifies a petition arising from the cost-of-living crisis.  The tune is William Croft's splendid melody often used for 'O God, our help in ages past'. I like to hope it lends the present words a little of its dignity.

The loss and damage song

THE LOSS AND DAMAGE SONG

(tune ‘Personent hodie’)

Climate change and its wounds —
what the world needs is funds,
funds of billions of pounds,
more than just a bandage,
more than I can manage.
Come COP27,
work to make things even,
put those pounds on the grounds,
mending loss and damage.

Let’s make sure our UK
is among those that pay.
We have dirtied our day
with our years’ pollution.
Here’s a resolution —
match the ash, ash, ash
pounds with cash, cash, cash.
It’s a wash, and a bash
at a best solution.

Should this nation pay more
when its people are poor?
Let the burden be for
dirty corporations.
Wipe them with taxations!
Tax ’em hard, hard, hard,
double-starred, starred, starred —
make their guilt and their gains
climate reparations.

We of Global Justice Cambridge sang the above song as our contribution to a day of action in support of such a fund as the song describes.  See our blog post for a view of the day's activity.

A movement

 

A MOVEMENT

Does there exist, and

has there ever existed,

a movement to make

the muddy plain strewn with wrecks

and lost goods west of Lisbon,

that people witnessed

some time All Saints' Day morning

1755,

the new Atlantic normal

all oceans should aspire to?

In less than an hour

sea came back, racing horses,

smashing all it touched.

Normal for when plates collide.

Not normal for living by.

This poem was written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's workshop 'Try to praise the mutilated world', which she ran as a closed Facebook group in November 2020.  The workshop was for the duration of the UK's second Covid-related lockdown, and the prompt that led to this poem was #7, on the theme of cataclysm.  I can't now remember why I made it the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.

'A movement' has now found publication in Acumen #104, September 2022.