Street collection

This was my entry in the competition for the 2017 desk diary published by Rhyme and Reason, a fundraising arm of Rennie Grove Hospice Care.  The theme was 'Magic and mystery'.  My contribution is based, with minimal poetic licence, on an encounter my wife Clare had while collecting house-to-house for the charity Christian Aid.

STREET COLLECTION

The street's sunny side --
evens – housed one who opened
an odd-side door.
His reason for not giving
was his distrust of money.

His volunteer work
had ended when volunteers
fundraising called him.
"Data protection", I said.
He'd fit a children's story:

all those oddities, 
and he had a Gandalf beard.
Would you like to try?
Neither copyright nor -left
stops your riffs on an idea.

Money from the street
a magically large sum?
Something's redemption?
His peace with those volunteers?
I don't write for kids myself....

As in previous years, my poem won no prizes, but was among those published in the diary. £5 via this link.

Three more music poems

These poems were written at various times, and entered in a competition organized by Rhyme and Reason, the poetic fundraising arm of Rennie Grove Hospice Care. They didn't win any prizes, but they were published in the charity's 2016 desk diary.

JAUCHZET, FROHLOCKET

honk and five drum-knocks

flock of strings in flight and dive

voices crunch the snow

MUSIC IN ST EDMUNDSBURY

This church, wool-rich East Anglian, half-built
at Reformation, lit like Dutch paintings,
cathedralled 1914, recomposing,
hears Ulysses awake, hears Europe's strings
sombrely weave, unweave. The programme note
is the composer's own. It gives bare facts.

PHANTASY QUINTET BY VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The Alla sarabanda's slow rise shows
smoke from a woodland cottage, early morning,
a thin grey line. It fades against the sky.

Can smoke be guiltless? after cattle trucks?
people at stakes? hell and its mirrors? sati?
cancer? emphysema? culled herds? carbon,
carbon we need but get more than the cycle?
carbon too much? carbon a weight, a choking?

That's smoke from fire. So smoking's lately banned.
But smoke without fire, from a sarabande?
Should that line rise, or is it one that ought
to go down with its freight of perished thought?
Maybe; but after worse of our devising,
I hope I see the thin grey line still rising. 

'Jauchzet, frohlocket' evokes the first movement of Bach's Christmas oratorio: "Jauchzet, frohlocket! auf, preiset die Tage" -- "Shout for joy, exult! Rise up, glorify the day" says one rendering I can't improve on.  The image of voices crunching the snow was used by conductor Tim Redmond in a rehearsal exhortation to us of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society, and worked by me into a haiku early in 2011.

'Music in St Edmundsbury' was written after hearing a performance of John Woolrich's Ulysses awakes by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in St Edmundsbury Cathedral in 2002.  Yes, I stoop to pun on the composer's name.  Wealth from wool played a great part in the building or extension of this and many other medieval churches in East Anglia.

'Phantasy quintet by Vaughan Williams' dates from 2007 and arises from a very strong visual image that was suggested to me by the opening phrase of the quintet's Alla sarabanda movement.

Memory stick

MEMORY STICK

You're piecing who said what to whom and when,

to understand a new experience

and make the telling of it a less pain.

Remembrance isn't living in that sense.

Then, of course, I remember. And the day

clouds over at this knowing what you've lost,

the clouding not the greatest price you pay.

Remembrance isn't living at that cost.

Every moment jabs with old silliness.

Remembrance isn't living so. It goes

its round with shared meals, bonfires, poppies. Yes,

remembrance lives where much has reached a close.

But there are injuries on Bonfire Night.

And grouped remembrances will start a fight.

This poem was written for a competition organized by Rhyme and Reason, the poetic fundraising arm of Rennie Grove Hospice Care.  It didn't win any prizes, but it was included in the longer list of works published in the charity's 2015 desk diary.  The theme of the competition, and of several others in 2014, was 'Remembrances'; highly suited to publication in a desk diary.  I'm buying one. Unlike a pocket diary, whose purpose -- prospective memory --  is far better fitted now by an online calendar, the desk diary goes well with retrospect, with noting the day's events after they have happened.  The 2015 Rhyme and Reason diary will continue the record I have kept every day since January 1969.

The quotation in italics is from C.S. Lewis' A grief observed.  Also feeding into the poem, undoubtedly, is the reading I did in 2014 for 'Heritage wars', the Haddon Library's contribution to Cambridge University's Alumni Festival. 

Poems in Orbis

These poems are about to appear in Orbis 158. They have had the benefit, as Orbis poems tend to do, of editorial suggestions by Carole Baldock.

'By degrees' was my entry in the 2008 Keats-Shelley competition, whose theme that year, I seem to recall, was the word 'lost'. Keats-Shelley has a way of giving its entrants one-word themes that are very stimulating. 'A sentence' was written in 2011, probably for the Rhyme and Reason competition on the theme of 'time'.

The competition pattern re-asserts itself!


BY DEGREES

Soon it will be a twelvemonth since you lost,
whether by jump or push, your livelihood,
and ran to earth your heat in online post,
recycled Booker, climate science booed.
I lack much science, but, ad hominem,
am consoled, although saddened, when I see
your posts, the different ways of signing them:
two of them, a matter of geography.
For readers living in the USA,
you sign as ‘Dr’ at your new address;
for audiences here in the UK,
who know you, you still sign doctorateless.

Is this the old tradition of the prophet
honoured abroad, at home less well regarded?
Well-meaning, earnest? Other readings of it
spring up like Jack, and will not be discarded.
I cannot say what method’s best to measure
the profit of this title that you use,

not money, true, but cachet, psychic pleasure,
against what, as it’s false, you stand to lose.


A SENTENCE
The phrase ‘a prisoner doing time’,
tautologous, suggests the hand
of a sub-editor – ‘prisoner’
taking the place of ‘pervert’ (banned)?

I have no proof. Editing good,
censorship bad, I know. What time
changing ‘pervert’ to ‘prisoner’ took
was at worst a minute’s waste, no crime;

if hours, a background process, not
the trial months, the years of jail,
the decades from his bullying
strictness to this shock. And those measures pale

against the time he’s doing time for
against the lives he’s doing life for
against the time against the lives
against against against the lives
against against against against

against against against against