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.

Poems from the hobby that gave this blog its name

BLURTMETRY AFTER A YEAR

Yes, capturing the blurts. The first fine power
of bringing down went with blurtmeter one.
The day came when I took the counter off
to turn a key, and dropped it on hard stone.

I don't know where the count had got. The impact
logged one more blurt, a false one. And the ten
seconds elapsed and my lapcounter, my first
blurtmeter, did not start timing again.

And neither pressing buttons, either button,
nor lapse of minutes, hours, let it move on.
The power that went with my first blurtmeter went
no more, after the stone floor. It had gone.

Now, flaunted less, and worn on belt not finger
and keeping up the log's blurtmeter three.
But the blurtrate fumes, rages (not soars -- nothing
soared when its essence was so fidgety).

BLURTMETRY ON WHEELS

Keeping track of blurts
during a white-knuckle ride
in a forest night,
not daring the blurtmeter
so finger-counting through grip

of the handlebars --
over the handlebars light
finds the pale earth track
by the darkness to each side.
The bike bends to the pale line

unexpected, fast
at the steepnesses and turns.
No moon, no water,
but the pale line recalls such
and I keep track of the blurts.


A YEAR AFTER BLURTMETRY

Blurtmeter 4, with self-clip plastic strap,
on day one hit its terminal mishap.
Bright August morning. I biked north and found,
mid-journey, my kit must have hit the ground,
miles back, perhaps. Enough. The game died thus.
Facebook friends wrote: "This is hilarious!"
One more year, and blurtmetry's overgrown
(as in path not schoolboy). The name lives on
in my new blog, the story should I need
to neutralise odd speakings, and instead
of blurts I mark each day's peak breathing flow,
or roads I've gone and how I chose to go.
Knowledge somebody else requires to know.


Yes, blurtmetry. The name of this blog. It's a hobby I invented in 2006, and followed for a little more than three years. The above poems, written between 2007 and 2010, give it as much chronicle as it needs. They have had public utterance insofar as I read them to an online meeting of Enfield Poets, who had us of Ver Poets over as guests on 4 August 2022.

The blurts themselves were the subject of an earlier sequence.

A Manchester chaplain

 THE REV. JOSHUA BROOKES 1754-1821

(to the tune 'Manchester' by Thomas Ravenscroft https://bit.ly/3AN0foh )

The writer stressed how like they were --
the antiquated pile
with weathered points and mouldering stones,
the chaplain in the aisle.

Obituary fondness for
the chaplain's gaffes and rage.
It seems the chaplain read the tale;
he marked the printed page.

The chaplain died within the year.
The church lived on to do
its work among the things that set
its city with the new.

This poem was my entry in Manchester Cathedral's 600th Anniversary Poetry Competition.  Before Manchester Cathedral was a cathedral, with a dean, it was a collegiate church with a chaplain, and the Rev. Joshua Brookes was of that line.  He was something of a character, the subject of what you might call a 'pre-obituary': a profile article entitled 'Brief sketch of the Rev. Josiah Streamlet' in Blackwood's magazine 8(48), 633-637, March 1821.  That's the starting point of this poem.

And it has now been sung in public!  By me, at an event to raise funds for rebuilding work at St Martin's church in Cambridge.  They let me sing several of my hymn tune retextings, and these benefited much from accompaniment by Mike Cole.

The tune 'Manchester', by the way, is also known as 'Ely'.  In time I will find out which came earlier.  But I felt its qualities well suited Joshua Brookes.  Synaesthetically, it made me see bushy eyebrows.

Three tree poems

 

Picture by Clare Sansom

HAVING BANANAS

Vexed by the appeal's

planting banana seeds line,

our botanist friend

would donate no cash that year.

Someone wrote to Christian Aid.

Wikipedia's

'Banana' discoveries,

rich like one per line:

seeds spiky, hard, cracking teeth,

genes too same, vulnerable,

nomenclature skein,

name-calling for republics,

handy for preaching,

sometimes hanged to make a point,

sometimes matter for fair trade.

SINCE KILMER

Since Kilmer knew he’d never see

a poem lovely as a tree,

and trees get felled, and poems penned,

why have a contest that will tend

to make the skew worse?    Bards, why bother

competing to compose another?

The answer is that words are good

for people who have missed the wood,

or seen the wood and missed the tree.

Maybe you see them both.    Not me.

Faced with a woodland scene, I need

programmes, subtitles I can read.   

TOUCHES OF EARTH

Earth-wild: a tangled query when she'd heard
of fennel children but not seen the word,
and wanted books from this fool who had read
assuming fear in how the word was said.

Earth-soiled: a soiled sheet brought Wilde down.  They cleanse
soil from carrots by acid.  Changing lens,
you see the carrots in their acid skin
endangering the eat of what's within.

Earth-rooted: what I mean by this is not
the waste of being rooted to the spot,
but roots to anchor, roots to store soil food,
roots you can almost hear grow in that wood,
holding the earth as deep as making height,
trees striving from it into air and light,
proud in a mode of growth those who know tell
plants came at independently and well,
neat, robust way through eco-stress.
I'll stop before I wish the trees success.

Earth-bound: not -using, as in house- or bed-;
serious earth, cue Larkin's many dead.
The end of all that rootedness and growing.
Let's call it homeward bound, but it's a going.

I read this set of three poems at an open-air event in Cambridge University's Botanic Garden.  This had originally come to my attention via my wife Clare, who'd seen an announcement on one of her science journalism email lists.  

'Having bananas' is new,  and was written specially for the event.  

'Since Kilmer' was written in 2004, for a competition celebrating the 90th anniversary of Joyce Kilmer's poem 'Trees'.  

'Touches of earth' was written in 2014 for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association competition, whose theme that year was the Tennyson quotation "Who loves me must have a touch of earth".  Guinevere, in the Arthurian romance Lancelot and Elaine, is scorning Arthur's perfection.  But I made no reference to the original context in the poem.

'Since Kilmer' and 'Touches of earth' were previously published in the booklet for the 'Remarkable world of trees' exhibition at St Albans Museum.

The Botanic Gardens event was the brainchild of Anne Thomas, and others whose work featured there were Rosalind Moran, Ann Gray, and Matt Howard.  An illustrious company to find myself in!

The statue

 

THE STATUE

The panels round the plinth, to shield
the sponsor's vanity,
embed his moving in the herd,
confer impunity,

say Bristol citizens erected
Colston's memorial.
But Arrowsmith had to make up
fifteen percent shortfall.

A longer fall had it come down
to cheers and denting crash,
be rolled along the street logwise,
bigger than common trash,

to railings of the waterfront
and river-plunging shock.
It lies on wood with perspex shield
now, and some tried to block

the show with human shield no-show.
Deleted tweets distil
that phase.  Others, not blockers, wish
the fall were longer still.

The above was written in June 2021 for a competition on the theme of shielding, and then not entered, possibly from a misreading of the competition rules.

It has found publication in the online journal _Sledgehammer_.

It owes something to Thomas Ravenscroft's hymn tune 'Bristol', though I don't advise singing it to that tune.  It owes rather more to Roger Ball's post 'Myths within myths -- : Edward Colston and that statue' and Dan Hicks' 'Let's keep Colston falling'.

The forgettory

 

THE FORGETTORY

Prove they were in, twelve years ago, a craze

they claim they've always shunned? Or let the phase

lie back? “I never went there” was more sad

than “You won't let that go” after I had.

This is another poem whose only claim to publication is that I threw it into a Twitter conversation.  That was in 2019, and I have already forgotten what circumstances triggered the action. 

I wrote the poem in 2010, and I've forgotten the reasons for that now, too.  My half-memory is that it was for a competition, and written on a bus journey with the rules out of sight, so that the poem turned out to be in some way unsuitable when I looked at them again.

My memory is not what it was, but I don't see much value in a forgettory. I grew out of nostalgia a long time ago; I regard state-sponsored nostalgia as an abomination; and I consider memory to be a valuable corrective.