Red (Westminster Bridge)

Red (Westminster Bridge)

“Earth has not anything to show more fair.”
Our bridge, from decades after Wordsworth wrote,
still sees triumphant uses of that quote —
marathon meets demo, Parliament Square.
Red London bus routes level by the ride.
Let’s think of them as one vast playing field.
Duchess Loelia stole a phrase to wield
(but would confess this guilt before she died),
linking red bus and failure. Yes, to her,
whose ducal marriage failed, that was a thing.
Not to me, pensioner, kidlike venturing
red routes across the Thames at Westminster,
her duchy. Red souvenirs gleam on a stall.
Red hearts mourn Covid levels from their wall.

Loelia Lindsay (1902-1993; Duchess of Westminster 1930-1947) is believed to have popularised the aphorism, originally coined by Brian Howard and often misattributed to Margaret Thatcher, “Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.”

This is another of my colour poems, and also another of my poems written for projects from 26 Characters. 26 Bridges celebrated the bridges over the Thames in London. Participants contributed written work, and were invited to choose artistic collaborators who would produce visual work to go alongside this. 

My artistic collaborator was Clare Trowell, and she made a fine print of Westminster Bridge with a red London bus crossing it. Early in the project I had noticed that Westminster Bridge was crossed by five Transport for London routes. I explored these, making a list of bus-coloured things I'd seen on them.

The poem took its present direction after conversation with Clare T., and with my wife Clare. I'd been there before. And it developed, as 26 Characters poems are wont to do, in discussion with its project editor, in this case Wendy Jones.

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.

Poem about Royal Victoria Dock

 

AUGUST 2020

Harbour. Geese crowd on something almost submerged

and rhyme the pulley tackle close aloft.

Human swimmers enthuse the water, them

and cable cars more safe to view than mix.

The reach between Millennium abandoned

and Excel’s mothballed Nightingale, with bridges,

lifts, bridges engineered to swing, less swum.

Covid turns high summer to out of season.

The star circle is of another time.

The above was my contribution to 'A common place', a project organised jointly by the writers' group 26 Characters and Eames Fine Art.  Looking back to '26 prints', an earlier co-production (my contribution here), they invited writers and artists who'd participated in that to pair up, identify a place that mattered to both partners, and produce work in response to it.  My assigned project partner was the printmaker Anita Klein.  The common place we identified was the Royal Victoria Dock in London.  For me, it was a place much imagined in childhood, when I had an overwhelming interest in ships and fantasized about the docks over the river that was in walking distance from my grandparents' home in Lee Green.  For Anita, it was a recent discovery with the joys of open-air swimming.  Clare and I had a good day out there, and this poem came from that.

26 Trees

COMMON/PRIVATE

Paired, my trees mark gates of the old workhouse
(now private residential streets, like many),
surround themselves with (I’ve just learned this word)
suckers – new growth that gardeners control.
Their bark is grey. Not photo grey but live,
gnarled and with recent branches offering
leaves greenfly have holed. The trees stand tall,
one bent. The tree book keeps them with X rating.

This was my contribution to the 26 Trees project, one of many from 26 Characters that have stimulated me since 2015.  My brief was to write 62 words of prose or verse about an individual lime tree (a pair of them was acceptable) in Cambridgeshire, plus 400 words on the background to the species.  Click on the project link above, then follow your nose.

The ex-workhouse is that of St Ives, Cambridgeshire -- across the River Ouse from the town, and now on the eastern edge of the village of Hemingford Grey, whose manor house drew an unrelated poem from me in 2018. 

The X rating is the mark given to the Common Lime in Alan Mitchell's The trees of Britain and Northern Europe, which rates the gardenworthiness of trees as follows:

I -- first-class

II -- good

III -- mediocre

X -- little or nothing to commend it.

And one question in the 400 background words remains unanswered.  Who was this elusive French chemist Missa, and in what century did they live?

26 Trees was a joint project with the Woodland Trust, who generously presented participants with saplings of their species.  What I did with mine is this:

It's in! For TreeCharterDay, my 26trees lime from @WoodlandTrust. Planted in the grounds of @WorksopPrioryCE by their kind permission, and with help from @hughcrispin & other green-fingered kin. Dedicated to parents Ivon & Barbara Baker (1928-2011 and 1932-2008). 

How I learned to ride a bike

THE WALL AND THE STABLE DRIVE AND THE LANE AND THE NEXT VILLAGE

I learned biking late, and later still

heard how aged six, not understanding brakes,

I'd crashed against a wall. Eleven years,

while that unlearn eluded memory,

cycling balance eluded me too, made

bicycles a phobia. But –

"Rode Hugh's moped" is in my diary.

Not why, or who came up with that idea.

A stable drive was long enough for me,

longer than any pushbike I could fear.

For months, I risked no balancing on wheels.

Urged to a Christmas job some roads away,

too far for bus or walk, and to these skills,

I tried my sister's bike on Boxing Day.

The moped ride had not been fluke or fake.

I whizzed to the next village down the lane.

Uphill I found was harder. It would take

longer and the straight line was extra strain.

My ageing feet now say "Walk bad, bike good."

The prequel crash continues to elude.

The above was my contribution to the 26 Memory Maps project.  The map I drew for it is this:

The 26 Memory Maps project was the brainchild of Neil Baker (no relation).  Taking part in it did me a lot of good as I convalesced from a knot of health problems in the summer of 2017.  At the time of blogging, cycle journeys are again out of bounds for reasons of convalescence.  I have been putting this time to good use by following another creative project.  Work produced under that other project will be blogged, according to my usual rule, as and when it gets published.

Meanwhile, take a look at 26 Memory Maps.  50 contributions besides mine!

This is the night

This is the night

Later the weight of wood, the darkened sky,

those who will see strange things, those who deride him.

We do not see Jesus enthroned on high.

The picture's clustered soldiers almost hide him.


Blindfold, he singles out no captor's fist.

The childhood-nasty blares from the horn

deafen Jesus. Worn, he does not resist.

This is the night. We must pray for dawn.

'This is the night' is my response to Albrecht Dürer's print The mocking of Christ.  It's my contribution to the '26 prints' project organised jointly by the writers' group 26 Characters and the Eames Fine Art Gallery. The Dürer and my poem are on display in the gallery, along with 25 other prints and 25 other writers' responses to them, until 16 April, and all the works are reproduced in the exhibition guide.

Fuller information about the print is on the site of American dealer Masterworks Fine Art and in the book Albrecht Dürer: woodcuts and woodblocks by Walter L. Strauss (New York: Abaris, 1980), p. 360.

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.

The hang of the stones

THE HANG OF THE STONES 

The archaeologist, seeing the child brought here  for healing, sadly remembered the excavated child sacrifice. “Not cast in stone,” people say. They muddle casting the first stone and commandments cut in stone. Stonehenge was thirteen centuries in building, every change perhaps an altered purpose. And this was long before the Bible retold kings, rebounded transgression lines, gave new fulfillings of the law.



This, like 'Kirkconnel's bard', was my contribution to a project from 26 Characters: 26 Postcodes asked each participant to produce a 62-word composition inspire by the address corresponding to a specified postcode.  My postcode was SP4 7DE; the corresponding place was Stonehenge.

The rest of the creative journey is described on the project's post, which went live on 19 December 2015.

Kirkconnel's bard

KIRKCONNEL'S BARD

(The bard is Alexander Anderson ('Surfaceman'), 1845-1909)

Kirkconnel's bard sang progress, engines' strength
made greater by the discipline of rails,
his rhymes and grammar sound, his metred length
of line hard-fixed as ever was with nails.

Nick Drake sang questions, ways lost, light flown, blue
of waves and sky the video shows grey,
gates waited at in hope of looking through,
a plea for somebody to show and say.

Kirkconnel's bard praised Whitman's free lines, praised
his fellows, wrote in voice of the bereaved
mothers.  Read in our day, is he appraised
with more along the track than he believed?

Would he have prayed, trusting in God to hear,
that Nick Drake's heaven-signal stood at clear?

The above poem was my contribution to the 26 project 'Under a northern sky' -- the brainchild of two 26 members, Sandy Wilkie and Michelle Nicol , one from Glasgow and one from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and both fans of the singer Nick Drake.  Michelle's account of the proceedings is at http://bit.ly/1PeKO91 .  Project participants were assigned one song by Drake and one station on the Carlisle route from Newcastle to Glasgow, and asked to write poetry or prose, performable in under 3'44", that linked the two.  My station was Kirkconnel and my Nick Drake song 'Way to blue'.  And on 25 April 2015, as many of us as could made that journey by train, reading our own contributions, and those of the people who couldn't be present, at or near the stations in question.

I was lucky in that Kirkconnel has a literary figure of some note in Alexander Anderson.  I won't link to all the poems of his that I allude to, but I should perhaps say that my last line picks up on 'Stood at clear' from his collection Songs of the rail.  A train driver is questioned after a rail crash:

"Speak to him-quick!" they bent and said,
"Did the distant signal stand at red?"

Broken and slow came the words with a moan,
"Stood—at—clear," and poor Jim was gone.

I turn'd my head away from the light
To hide the tears that were blinding my sight,

And pray'd from my heart, to God that Jim
Might find heaven's signals clear to him.

I believe the narrator is deeply disturbed by the probability that signal didn't stand at clear, and that a much-loved friend has died with a lie on his mouth.  Is there more to be said on this by readers who know Alexander Anderson's work better than I?