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.

Bears and gold

Here are some poems that made it to publication in August 2024.

East Anglia bylines colleague Kate Moore drew my attention to the imminence of Poetry Bears' Picnic Day 2024. I responded with an article showcasing poems I had written at various times between 1985 and 2018 on the subject of bears. Some of them had featured in this blog already.

Allow me to present a couple that haven't.

BEARS

True, bears are solitary and not lovable.

True, I stopped buying teddy bears as the window sill filled up.

True, we did not meet the bears we saw in their sunken field at Whipsnade.

True, most bears live rather a long way away.

True, bears do not cater, and cycle only under duress.

True, 'The 59th bear' by Ted Hughes includes a cautionary tale.

True, Christopher Milne's story casts shadows on tales of Pooh.

True, Britain's way with foreigners, in 1958 and in 2018, adds to the implausibility of Paddington.

True, my childhood behaviour jars on my childhood identification with Rupert Bear.

True, confusion may arise from saying bear to mean lover, partner, or on that spectrum.

True, I wearied colleagues by the conceit.

BUT

It also remains true that Clare rhymes with bear.

I like this sort of bear.

'Bears' was written in 2018 as my response to prompt 26 in Jo Bell’s book 52: Write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. The brief was actually for an erotic poem, but as chapter author, Neil Rollinson, went on to explain:

Let’s write an erotic poem that’s about other issues: illness, growing old, familial and domestic disappointment perhaps…Let something else carry the focus, or energy, and let the erotic take a back seat.

So, that’s what I did. The conceit in the final five lines explains the other poems presented here. I do not have a fetish about bears, but they supply a vocabulary. Clare, as most readers of this blog will know, is my wife, the lecturer and science writer Dr Clare Sansom.

CLARE CONTRASTED WITH A BEAR

Bears do not cook the food I eat;

bears have enormous claws on their feet;

bears dance to the pain of a metal beat.

Bears cannot bike, or teach, or write;

bearskin offers no gleam of barelight;

and an ursid bear would not incite

a poem to compete.

The idea of exploring the contrast between a bear in our sense of a lover, partner, or on that spectrum, as in the first poem, and a genuine ursid bear, came about after Clare suggested I enter a Valentine poetry competition, I think run by BBC Radio Three, in 2007.

If you read the article, you'll see that Clare herself contributed a recipe to it, for flapjack to feed to participants in such a party as was envisaged. From the golden brown of flapjack and most teddy-bears it's a short step to the gold of jubilees.

Ledbury Carnival celebrated its golden jubilee in August 2024, and Robin Fortune-Hiseman, who was responsible for designing and printing the programme booklet, asked if I had any poems about carnivals or gold that he could use. He wasn't commissioning a new poem, just asking me to search in my poetry back catalogue. I sent him this from 2012, which was written originally for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Competition and satisfies the requirement for gold if not  carnivals. 

BUS HOME FROM WORKING SUNDAY

A golden purchase:

honey cashews bought to draw

pound coins from a note,

with first-class stamps included

as if to be virtuous,

and tweets from the bus

about rules against working

Sunday and against

writing self-impositions.

Twitter's golden not guilty

for exploration

of the gold in little things,

gold found while thinking

of something else; grain harvest

by-product of the searched earth.

Some of you may discern a kinship, in the use of the 'gold' motif, between that piece and Robert Horan's poem 'The queen's face on the summery coin', known to me through Samuel Barber's setting. I believe my use of the motif is different enough for this not to be a matter of plagiarism.

Poems in The punch

My appearance in The punch is unconnected with Punch or the London Charivari, the humorous magazine that died twice round about the millennium. The punch is an Indian magazine published online, and it has a poetry issue once a year. 

The contributions of mine that they accepted were all written in response to workshop prompts from Jo Bell.

Aired

The ionosphere's

temperature changes spurred

me in my teens: Europe's

Cold War hate to listen to,

pocket radio by night.

Greenhouse gases lie

miles below that: troposphere,

closest to earth, smeared

with our heat and travelling.

Our smoke turned to a blanket.

See me reading up

which of those two things is which,

the Cold War long gone.

Radio's ways to listen

are more, and the hates they air.

Answers

No, not unlisted, listed in a spreadsheet.

They had to filter lines and hide columns.

They had to copy to a data stick.

They crouched over the screen in a guesthouse bedroom.

They crouched over it Darlington to Peterborough.

They crouched over it in two waiting rooms.

They got the sums ready for off in time.

Best not admonish them to keep spreadsheets

in strict perspective, means to a workplace end. 

On Attempting to Transcribe the Calls of Birds

Sea! Sea! ship ship ship ship

Gulls deep inland feel the nip.

chopakaching? chipakachong!

Phonemes, spelling, away from song.

teeoo chapacheecheechee

The kite sounded like that to me.

teeoo wintu

shwipu shwipu

What birds sound like that to you?

chibatchbrrrrr

Not nailed accurate but nailed tear.

shfwh shfwh shfwh shfwh

The wipe sound has not rhyme enough.

 

Reality Check

Is it rope, or a repurposed something,

hose, say, or heavy-duty power cable?

It’s grey, with thin green line, and holds those bushes

back from the path.  People don’t turn hoses

or power cords to that.  But the reel’s mount –

yes, rope reels can have mounts.  They say at sound

of hoofbeats think horses not zebras.  Mounted

rope reels are horses.  Not real horses, no.

Mounted rope reels horses, repurposed power

cables zebras. Hose repurposed to hold

bushes zebras stroke unicorns.  That’s not

zebras stroking unicorns.  They wouldn’t.

It’s between zebras and unicorns, 

or both zebras and unicorns together.

And reading this are many who have seen

mounted thick grey rope with a stripe of green.

 

Stones

Something to do with photocopying.

Something to do with tapping babies’ noses.

Something to do with social distancing.

Something to do with singing in the street.

“There’s been an allegation made.”

Something to do with bikes and toucan crossings.

Something to do with things on the computer.

Something to do with money, with work money.

Something to do with that self-service checkout.

“There’s been an allegation made.”

Something to do with church and the young people.

Something to do with fifty years ago.

Something to do with social media.

Something to do with XR friends and demos.

“There’s been an allegation made.”

Looking up

 

LOOKING UP

Wearisome at-poem acknowledgements --

not "After X" but "hub-gear reference

from X's 1997 play 

The track" -- displagiarise the work, or may.

But if I read with search to hand online,

I joy at how much learning becomes mine:

the play's plot, and its failure, X's switch

from plays to teaching, X's crowd-fund pitch

in 2015, where the scent goes cold,

the 20s German models who first told

the stories in the play, the engineers

they mocked, the fireless basis of their fears, 

the 40s seeming vindication of

the kludge in post-war rebuild some still love,

the 60s doubts.  With all these I withdraw

my charge the lengthy credits were a bore.

This was another poem written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. The prompt in this case was number 47, for a poem about learning, though the poem is wholly fictitious.

It reached self-publication when I posted it as three tweets among the replies to one by Nina Parmenter on the subject of references in poems.

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.

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?

A letter to the Second World War

A LETTER TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Dear Mrs War,

the one middle-aged Britons hanker for,

you happened, so you're not there any more.

Why do we lack, 

seeing your legacies, the will to hack

them for our own day and not want you back?

What should I say?

Not being there, you cannot go away.

Please fade.  Napoleon's did. They had their day.

This poem was originally written in response to one of the prompts in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week.  It was for number 20, to write a poem in the form of a letter. 

It has attained no publication higher than self-publication as part of a social media conversation.  I tweeted it in response to colleague Clare Trowell's disquiet, working from home on a rainy day, at the sound of a Spitfire beyond the clouds.

This song of gladness

This Song Of Gladness

Beautiful Saviour by Stuart Townend

Verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, greater chorus –

yes, a structure to fit the song’s ideas:

verse worship, work, ordinary time,

and chorus echoing something more.

Less sung now than it used to be in our church,

unexpected that Sunday in the Spring.

New out of hospital, I sang it loud,

loud as recovery let me sing.

Biblical language, resonant names of God,

let’s say clear day, let’s say vista,

let’s say journey which has made.

We felt it raise us, we felt it let us see,

with our gathering, yes, our gathering

flying higher than before.

True, nothing inherent in this structure,

which I’ll call A A B A B B dash.

It will not beautify each pairing known

but may serve others, like this song.

Biblical language, resonant names of God,

let’s say clear day, let’s say vista,

let’s say journey which has made.

We felt it raise us, we felt it let us see,

with our gathering, yes, our gathering

flying higher than before.

Biblical language, resonant names of God,

let’s say clear day, let’s say vista,

let’s say journey which has made.

We felt it raise us, we felt it let us see,

with our gathering, yes, our gathering

flying high, high over all.


This poem was originally written in response to one of the prompts in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week.  It was for number 42, to write about a song.  I chose to write about Stuart Townend's worship song 'Beautiful Saviour'.  After the rediscovery described in the poem, Clare and I spent a Sunday lunchtime talking about the song's structure.

"It will not beautify each pairing known" -- we thought a bit about whether the structure in its most basic terms -- AABABB' -- would have much effect on every pair of things put into it. We tried a couple:

• Portugal, Portugal, Finland, Portugal, Finland, Finland in winter
• 60s nurse film, 60s nurse film, cement mixer, 60s nurse film, cement mixer, cement mixers

and concluded that the structure had no magical power to be inherently uplifting.

The poem has now found publication in Orbis 191, spring 2020.  It has benefited somewhat from suggestions by editor Carole Baldock.

Regarding church music more widely, I continue to add to my Google Maps list of places in the British Isles that have given their names to hymn tunes, with 273 at the last count.  During lockdown I have developed an addiction to Ralph Vaughan Williams' tune King's Lynn.