Admonition to a goat

 

AN ADMONITION

 

Goat.  Your tether's outside -- not here indoors

among the canine, feline, rodent loves.

They can be mostly harmless with their paws.

Please do not clamber on me. You have hooves.

This is another poem written in response to a prompt from Jo Bell's book 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  Chapter 51 -- the penultimate chapter -- noted that very few poems had been written on the subject of goats, and encouraged readers to make good that deficiency.  It is now six years since the book was published, and we may hope that the deficiency no longer exists.

I have very little experience of goats.  I met one in 1979, whose behaviour was as reproved in the poem.

The poem's washed up here on the blog, having been deployed by me in a Twitter conversation in March 2021.  I can't remember what that was about, but it renders the poem ineligible for entry in most competitions, and thus entitled to this present place.

Four songs by Samuel Barber

 

FOUR SONGS BY SAMUEL BARBER

Arpeggio flare. The nun's high cry that springs not fail. The swell quietened, the unseen swing of the sea.

A jaunty solitude. Madge and what her friend dared not think when young. Margery with them, tight-lipped at the knowing.

A smaller rolled chord. Weep for wonder, in a life disputed decades afterwards, at the kindness, the wholeness, of this shining night.

The fourth song has a lot of sharps and naturals all over it. Sometimes, to be clever, I've compared our diet to music with a shifting tonal centre, "like something by Samuel Barber". I was surprised that the first three songs of the set, when I looked at the music, didn't have that many more key changes than songs by other people. Barber said the music for this fourth song just popped out – not laboured, then – but admitted he wasn't all that keen on the text.

The first three songs are jaw-dropping.

The above was written in 2018, when I was working my way through Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  The brief for this particular one was chapter 22, calling for a prose poem.  It was a new departure for me, who use rhyme and scansion as a rule, but there's no law of nature dividing prose from poetry.  I had a go.

The piece was published in the online journal RIC.  They used another of mine, at about the same time, which has also appeared in this blog; one with similar origins to 'Four songs by Samuel Barber' above, and of the same kind, which I haven't made a habit of in the years since 2018.

Are you familiar with Samuel Barber's 'Four songs', op.13?

New words to old tunes

Here are two campaign songs I wrote during 2021 and sang at demonstrations.

The first was in connection with Global Justice Now's campaign for the dropping of patents on vaccinations against Covid19.  The demonstration was outside AstraZeneca's Cambridge premises, during their AGM in May.  The tune is Vaughan Williams' 'King's Lynn', which became for me the signature tune to Lockdown 1 in March 2020.  I wrote an article about the tune's story for the online news outlet East Anglia bylines, and am following that up with explorations of other hymn tunes.

THE ASTRAZENECA SONG




(to the tune King's Lynn)




We call on AstraZeneca

to make their patent free.

It's funded by the taxes

of folk like you and me.

The firm met the occasion

to get the vaccine done.

Now let it be their doing

but not a thing they own.




We call on AstraZeneca

to make their price pledge fair.

We hear what's outsourced to Pune

gets higher prices there.

We hear of countries with three times

their needed vaccines stored,

and others where vaccine's a thing

nobody can afford.




We call on AstraZeneca --

they're short of engineers --

to have more sharing of knowledge

in world health with their peers.

Think COVAX and its makers,

think Salk who long ago

gifted his treatment to the world

and conquered polio.




We call on AstraZeneca

to take Joe Biden's lead

and waive their rights in the vaccine

according to the need.

We see the Covid-19

Technology Access Pool.

We ask big pharma, ask this firm

to let the pool be full.




We call on AstraZeneca

and others in the field

to see more in their drugs than

the profits that they yield,

to listen to the protests

today outside their door.

Poor sort of wealth it is consists

in keeping others poor.



For Cambridge's demonstration on the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice, in November, I wrote a song to a tune by the seventeenth-century composer Henry Lawes.  It's a fine, strong, angular tune. The link at the tune's name, below, will take you to its entry in hymnary.org , and you'll find a recording there.  I took it somewhat faster than that at the demo (50’28” in the film).

The song lists the outcomes we hoped for from the COP26 in Glasgow, which was running at the time.

Anyone who can tell me how the tune came by its name will be listened to with great interest.  Farley Castle near Reading was built about two centuries after Henry Lawes' time.  The name might refer to Farleigh Hungerford Castle in Somerset, which saw action and changed hands during the Civil War.  Was Lawes ever there?  Or was the tune named retrospectively by a hymnbook editor?  Or is there some other story?


COP26, HERE'S WHAT WE WANT TO SEE




to the tune 'Farley Castle' by Henry Lawes 




COP26, here's what we want to see.

Unblock the route to cleaner energy!

Corporate courts must never own the rules!

Cut them away, those harmful bosses' tools!




COP26, wherever oil is found,

coal, fossil gas, let them stay underground.

Earthquakes and fires have been the warning signs --

fund the transition, all who funded mines!




COP26, we want more jubilee!

Debt locks the global south's dependency,

debt saps green work, saps every healthy spend,

some debts are bad and doubtful. Have them end!




COP26, unmake the harm we made,

hold the UK to useful climate aid,

rich countries' reparations and our share,

small to our GDP and only fair.




COP26, write new rules that will bind.

See those with power hurting humankind,

see how their years have left the planet scarred,

hard work to tie them, work to tie them hard!




CC BY-SA 2.0
Arising from campaign demands presented at https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/our-campaigns/climate/

Earlier fruits of my interest in places that have given their names to hymn tunes are my Google Maps list of those in the British Isles and my retextings of 'Trentham' and 'Little Cornard'.  Another person who shares this interest is Mark Browse, whose book O little town: hymn-tunes and the places that inspired them I strongly recommend.