More poems of mine in _The punch_

I explained, when blogging an earlier appearance of poems by me in The punch, that this online Indian magazine, with a poetry issue once a year, has no connection with the London-based humour magazine of past centuries. My new appearance there was on 19 October last.

'As we were' was written in November 2018, when I was working my way through Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. Prompt 50 in the 52 book was for a poem about violence. It begins with a quote within a quote.

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AS WE WERE

"'Fight to uphold it, it's the status quo!'

When I taught, boys defended the career

they'd planned themselves in the armed forces so.

We're here because we're here because we're here."

Newspaper letter, 1982.

Read over someone's shoulder, to my shame,

Stoke Newington, the 73 bus queue.

And then I recognised the writer's name.

Thought of his teaching, and how he hauled one

boy by the hair or ear out from his place,

asked him I forget what. We all looked on.

Each answer got a punch in the boy's face.

Perhaps two teachers shared the name. I'll not

fuss joining dot to thirteen-year-off dot.

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'Beacon Hill' was a response to another prompting from Jo Bell. During Lockdown 2, in November 2020, she led an online poetry workshop called 'Try to praise the mutilated world'. This time, the prompts were for a poem a day! They ran for the four weeks of lockdown, with a 29th and final prompt on Christmas Day.

Participants were invited to post their poems to a closed Facebook group. I succeeded in making something of all the first 28 prompts, albeit over 6 weeks rather than 4.

The first prompt was for poems on the subject of fire. Jo's blog as a whole is at http://jobell.org.uk/ . But 'Try to praise the mutilated world' seems to be now represented there only by the post announcing its launch, and individual prompts have disappeared.

My response to the fire prompt was a poem about Beacon Hill, an
earthwork at the eastern end of the village where I grew up, Gringley
on the Hill, in Nottinghamshire. When I posted it, the setting was
recognised at once by another group member, Seth Crook, who'd spent
holidays in the village as a boy and accounted Beacon Hill one of his
favourite places.

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BEACON HILL

Those towers twenty miles away -- you claim
as I see them they must have seen your flame.
Right. But these towers fifty miles away.

You don’t need them. You had your glory day
when the message was flared across the Trent
in the great Armada alert they sent
nationwide. More than I’ve done, ever. That
should do you. Embroidered, it’s all tat.
You're an earthwork to hold fires on your top.
No, not a volcano either. Stop.

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'Chichester 950' was penned on Clare's and my bike tour in the summer of 2025. We rode west from Brighton along the south coast, and took a ferry to the Isle of Wight. One of the places we passed through was Chichester, where the cathedral was marking its 950th anniversary.

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CHICHESTER 950

The signs advise entry by the west door 

that's round the campanile to its north.

We walk the church's length in West Street, for 

the city's grid names keep their ancient worth.

My bearings flip cathedrals, see them lie

anti-parallel to most parish churches.

Not here. The tower stands into the sky

per childhood graveyards. How soon done the search is!

Evensong, then the conflict-ridden timeline:

the spire's collapse in 1861

and the abuses later come to light.

We walk the city walls. Scott's spire design,

louvreless windows open to the sun

and space. They're still an unexpected sight.

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'Entitled' is another from 2020. It was my entry in a Holland Park Press competition on the theme of royalty, the deadline being King's Day in Holland.

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ENTITLED

The stately-home guide said the take technique
brought to a fine art by the late Queen Mary –
praise it till it’s a gift – was deemed such cheek
the Firm warned hosts of this through an equerry.

And did they warn Queen Mary? Truth to power?
Power’s excuse is Weak, hide your temptations!
I cannot help myself as I devour.
It is my gift to eat the wealth of nations.

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'Gurney' was written, like a number of my poems, for entry in the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association competition. The theme was 'Exile'. Do I need to explain that Will, in the first stanza, is F.W. Harvey, and Jack, in the second, is C.S. Lewis?

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GURNEY

1916-1917: Ivor Gurney made a song of F.W. Harvey's 'In Flanders'.

From Flanders' huge low prison Will

looked back to years above the war,

homesick for high, and blue, and hill,

kings' cloudlands of the time before.

1913-1914: the Gurney Library sheltered C.S. Lewis from Malvern College.

Malvern Hills healed Jack's England pain;

but a fagged, flogged newbie (the day

stung forty years), again, again,

he begged father take him away.

Three places in Nottinghamshire

These poems were written at various times, and are so closely attached to places that I posted them on the Places of Poetry map. I make that point now, because the place names don't appear in the poem titles.

The first place is Gringley on the Hill, where I grew up. The poem was written in 2004, for a competition organised, my card index says, by Pedal Power. Several relevant bodies bear that name, and I can't be sure which of them it was.


THE BIKE RHIMES


Imagination? Oh, for me,

with one bound Jack was always free.

When I was ten, I planned a fleet

of home-made go-karts down the street,

no, down the hill, down the A1,

sail-driven, with tin-telephone,

each kart wood-covered, a land-ark.

A good idea that might not work.

Truth is, I was late learning to ride a bike.


For my eighteenth, the choice I had

was typewriter or bike from Mum and Dad:

that's typewriter to exercise

my play-writing fantasies,

or bike, the more since biking skill

for me was six months brand-new still,

with view to riding out thus wheeled

to earn typewriter's cost in field.

I chose the bike, and hoed the weeds,

and typed the plays with the proceeds.

The plays were rubbish, I admit,

but bike -- I've not regretted it.


Truth is, I was late earning.


So now we do our long bike rides,

planned with good-bed-and-breakfast guides,

self and wife (I was late marrying)

and mobile phones, not tins and string.

And is the bike the bound or free?

If not, what should the question be?

With one bound, Jack was out of bounds.

The bike best covers solid grounds.

Let's be smart-kitted, then: the bike

rhimes are round, sound, bound and the like;

the bike through turn by turn of wheel

strengthens the work of getting real.

The second place is Walkeringham, a few miles from Gringley. The poem is one of those I wrote while following Jo Bell's splendid book 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. It was my response to that book's prompt number 30, for a poem on the theme of friendship.



WALKING


A little out of synch. You'd graduated,

I'd had my year abroad, this was the Christmas

vac of my final year. You visited

us (me, parents and sibs) after some weeks

teaching at an experimental school.

You joked you were a retired schoolmaster. The day

would fade, but we set out that afternoon

walking the three miles I had often walked.

The next village had trains and a closed station.

Beyond the tracks, a lane and the big Trent.

There the lane stopped, matching the other bank.

An ex-ferry. Later, a shared joke had

a girl of nine write to a retired colonel:

lure trendy lefties here with bogus demo,

stand to one side, watch the procession drown.

Was this when you told me you'd introduced

people to your inseparable pet

Gozo, a wodge of folded newspaper?

Walkeringham, the village. The road home

passed a wood on a low hill. You took off

coat and jersey, walked in shirt sleeves. Less light.

The third poem is another 52-driven piece. The book's prompt 33 is for writing about machinery. I responded by reporting a conversation Clare and I had had, riffing on a that shared joke referred to in the poem above. It was a spoof I had self-published in more than one place before. The place -- the scene of the hypothetical mass drowning achieved by the use of a bogus demonstration -- was Walkeringham's Marsh Road. The ex-ferry is Walkerith Ferry, dead under so much water that even Wikipedia's list of River Trent crossings offers no date for when it closed.



UNCLE MARK’S TYPEWRITER

“Dear Colonel Sixty-Biff,


“I refer to your recent letter to the Daily Telegraph.


“I have got a plan to help you to get rid of all the trendy left-wing sociologists in your letter. I have thought the plan up myself, but am doing it on Uncle Mark’s typewriter. About three miles from our house there is a bit where the road comes down to the river and it comes to a dead end. If you say you are having a protest march, all the trendy sociologists will want to come with you, and when you get to the river, you can stand to one side and they will all walk over the edge.


“Best wishes

“Sonia Bingham (age 9)”


That was my spoof, from around 1980.

Here in 2018 we speculated

on Sonia and her now nine-year-old daughter.

We found the variations generating

so fast the film stopped. Of course we started

with the typewriter. Would that be a laptop?

Borrowed now? Or the girl’s phone, or smarter?

Also, we did a spot of calculating:

nine-year-old daughter or grand-daughter?

And would Sonia today, in her forties,

cringe at her childhood project of mass slaughter?

And/or is she the sort of Brexiteer

that studs their talk with calling people traitors?

And reading that eighties Telegraph letter –

her parents’ choice, or seen while visiting

Uncle Mark? The only certainty

was 2018 has no typewriter.

Not even pushbike-versus-car metrics

(car gives six bikes’ worth, takes a cost far greater)

can plea-bargain away the typewriter’s

limiting against e-possibilities.


Past the ex-ferry’s dead end has been much water.



News at the time of blogging is that Places of Poetry -- currently a rich read-only source of poems, a thing to lighten long journeys -- will re-open for posting during a fortnight in the autumn of 2020.  News from me is that my Google Maps list of places in the British Isles with hymn-tunes named after them has borne its first fruit, a poem by me to be sung to the tune and with passing reference to the town in question.  No details at this stage, as I want to preserve the poem's anonymity in case I enter it in competitions.  But Places of Poetry and my list of hymn tune places might well be brought together.

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!

The remembered village

THE REMEMBERED VILLAGE

After Mum and Dad's Golden was our first return.

We drove through steady rain uphill but missed

the turn, entered the village further west

by the school, followed the S-bend past

hall, vicarage, cross. Walked up the steepest

north-sloping churchyard path. It was mid-August.

In church, the numbers since Dad's time reduced.

After I reached fifty was the second.

Late at night, we drove uphill, northward, turned

in by the school, the village western end;

again the hall-and-vicarage S-bend.

The missed B&B; the phone call, turn round.

Next morning, in dampness, we were shown around

the church, the steep north-facing slope of ground.

We left the village at the eastern end,

Beacon Hill, water tower; homeward bound.

Dad's memorial service was the third.

In a bright March morning, we drove westward,

took the right turn; the water tower, crossroad,

again right, swooping north and down, past wood

gates, left, and left again into the farmyard.

The party walked the unpavemented road

west, south, uphill, the cross, the village grid,

the steep north-facing path in the churchyard.

The plaque unveiled, and many kind words said.

Then path, cross, downhill, left at chapel, led

west to where the Borstal had once stood.

We saw the new-built road named after Dad.

So my lines. They'd make an incomplete

map, lacking streets and homes once known inside.

Returning took from memories no heat,

and the troubled return dreams have not died.

The poem was written in December 2013 for the Holland Park Press 'What's your place?' competition.  It has now found publication in Orbis 180 (p. 6).  It has benefited, as poems in Orbis tend to do, from suggestions by the editor Carole Baldock.

You might like to read my earlier poem 'Wikipedia on the village' and the village's own web site.

Wikipedia on the village

This poem was written for a 2008 competition on the theme of crossroads. It has been published in Sunrise , the magazine of the East of England branch of my professional body.

No one's yet taken me up on my offer of chocolate for the name of the archaeologist whose memoirs I commented on in that previous post. I hereby offer chocolate similarly for the name of the village, though I reserve the right to award it only to people who couldn't be expected to know my remembered village from knowing me.


WIKIPEDIA ON THE VILLAGE

You could see York and Beverley, it stated
(across the Wolds? the Humber?), on clear days.
It said the market cross was desecrated
"some thirty years ago" (how's that for haze?)

-- stones taken to mend roads. (The 1970s?)
It smelt Victorian in every word.
1853, with the history's
claim: "I wikified this till I got bored."

So I have turned the village to my own
site of first wikifying. I stripped out
landmarks that weren't, and bailiffs' names long gone,
all 1853 that was in doubt.

I listed beacon, cross and windmill, showed
where you could find more data with ArchSearch.
Of course I scrapped the tale of cross and road.
I kept the paragraph about the church.

It was my church, when younger. Hence I knew
what you could see and not see from the ridge,
the broken cross, flat northward carrland view
beyond. I grew up in the vicarage.

Dreams that I'm back feel late, disturbed. They are.
By day I run a subject library.
Books, e-books, ArchSearch, Wikipedia
form a crossroads that's work enough for me.