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.
