Green

I had an access of poetry-writing in 1991, following a change of flat.  This one was published in Cambridge University libraries information bulletin 35-36, 1994-1995, p. 10.  The carpet tiles in question were in a library.  CULIB's online presence doesn't go back that far, but is worth following.


GREEN

The green of the new carpet-tiles
so lightly matches that on dull
days it appears a windowful
of wan sunlight has smiled this pool

into the room.  The edges are
so finely trimmed you're never sure
if they lap at a fixture or
have moved its rising from the floor.

The thought

This poem was written in 2000. It has been published temporarily (15-22 April 2012) by the24project.

THE THOUGHT

(After Humbert Wolfe; concerning one who no longer appears publicly in a wheelchair.)

You need not tell her story again.
Recycled stories, even the curiest,
with no new data in the pen,
dilute and stir what should now rest.

Nor need you beat her for a fraud.
We all use props. A tic, a fear,
a stammer, can grow hard as board,
then fall apart and disappear.

But you may hold in thought the day —
ending who knows what span of days? —
she chose to throw her prop away,
and found that there was no such place.

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

The fight

This poem of mine appears in Cambridge University libraries information bulletin 69, 2011.


THE FIGHT

Crowded theatre, people burned next --
why, of all books, was this the cause
the question had become so vexed
that they fired off their metaphors?

Self-published, yes, discarded, yes,
elsewhere, but duplicate not shame;
praised by near-experts. Who could guess
this book would be the one to flame?

What could have kept the tinder out?
You'd need more knowledge than you had
if you could smell the spot and doubt.
Asbestos taints. Firewalls go mad.

Authenticity

This poem of mine from October 2000 was a fourth prizewinner in the 2007 Kent & Sussex competition. It appeared in Poetry folio 61, 2007, p. 13.


AUTHENTICITY

The story where she will not wash
because of solidarity
with the poor is a later version.
In that tale’s first appearance she

disdains the use of soap because
only the lower orders get
dirty. The legend will go through
who knows what permutations yet

if poor is clean and filthy rich
becomes all things’ unspoken meaning,
or if, conversely, dirt is good,
and nameless problems spring from cleaning.


And, while I'm at it, here's one from 2006 that was a runner-up in the 2008 rhyming competition from Early Works Press.


ACTS OF RESISTANCE

I will not invent weapons before one in the morning.
I will not go to war before I pray.
I will not mislead the House while sitting down.
And I will tell at least five truths a day.

The just's umbrella

I was having lunch in Costa Coffee today, when the lady on the next table -- a complete stranger -- asked me to lend her a pen. I lent her one, and she set about filling in an eight- or ten-page application form. I decided that I would ask for the pen back if I had to leave for work before she'd finished. In the event, I didn't have to ask.

Allow me to blog a poem that I wrote some years ago on the subject of lent pens. It was published in Popshot 1 (2009), p. 34, with an accompanying illustration by Matt Dent. The poem's title draws on a squib by the nineteenth-century judge Charles Bowen:

The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just's umbrella.


THE JUST'S UMBRELLA

Redistribution of the air
means weather-frights and asthma, true,
too much air or too sick, but few
complain they do not get their share.

Redistribution of the cup
means visible hands' work. Someone
must drive cup, saucer, plate and spoon
across the node of washing up.

But will you please give back again
that borrowed biro, mine, not yours,
seeing nor gales nor nodes will cause
redistribution of the pen.

Farewells to cars

I myself do not drive, and probably cannot be taught to. My reaction times are fast enough for cycling, but no more. However, I like the challenge of writing poems to order, and the order has occasionally included a request from a friend grieving for a car. Two such elegies were published in the church magazine Streetwise 16, October 1994, p.25.


TWO ELEGIES FOR CARS

(i) In memory of Amy Dolomite Triumph-Ettrick, died of rust, January 1993

A much-loved car may turn more pain,
passing away, than should be true:
it had the life it had from you,
and cannot give it back again.

The business of the parting (make
internment to interment, led
for Amy, long already dead)
is after Christmas, and grey ache.

Here is the yard where every state
of wreckage -- loss of faces, hearts --
waits rusting, gives up fewer parts,
continues to disintegrate.

Leave her poor corpse for fifteen pounds,
fifty of which will have to go
towards the new car's tyres, which blow
bathos in those appalling grounds,

and see the roads keep pumping life
mechanically through the town,
racing or jammed or slowing down,
stoppable, yes; not for this grief,

and kids notch pencil gates, five bars,
adults, parked oddly as the Ark,
click little counters as they mark
the passing of the vans and cars.

(ii) To Clare on the loss of her Metro

Awkward, you were, at the acquisition --
flushed, almost as for a dishwasher,
as much as for a man,
lots more than for a television --
high-minded to make a healthy
reduction in your use of the road:
by trains for cross-country travel,
buses in the city, or your bike,
and where the streets are steepest, walking,
paying to go green as the policy
insures drivers against driving and its embarrassment,
anxious to justify journeys, or excuse them,
ashamed of leadening the Leeds air.
Well, the stained air can be said to have won:
August, and work is all washed up,
beachedly dull like decaying boats,
and moist has crept through the car's metal,
rendered its body brittle with rust.

THANKS FOR THE JOURNEYS TO CHURCH AND STATION,
THANKS FOR PRAISING MY NAVIGATION,
BEARING MY MISTIMED SPECULATION
ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE'S ORIENTATION,
BIT OF A HARD AND KNOTTY CLUMP
TO PULL UP AND THROW AT YOU ALL OF A JUMP
SHORT OF A TRAFFIC-LIGHT, DRIVING THROUGH RAIN
AND LEEDS' ONE-WAY SYSTEM IN TIME FOR A TRAIN.
AND KNOWING THAT YOU AND I GO BACK AS FAR,
MORE OR LESS, AS YOUR Y-REGISTERED CAR,
I THANK GOD, HEARING SOME OF THE THINGS I HAVE SAID,
THAT ONLY THE CAR IS CORRODED AND DEAD.


A more recent elegy is for a car that was stolen from outside our house in the night of 27/28 April 2004, and discovered, even before we knew it had gone, in the grounds of Soham Village College. The poem was published in Orbis 135, Winter 2005, p. 61, and includes some amendments suggested by Orbis editor Carole Baldock.


OUR CAR, ABANDONED NEAR THE SCENE OF AN OLDER CRIME

(to Clare, again, on the loss of a Metro)

Deep in ancient embarrassments,
I did not see
that I'd put my bike through
where our car ought to be,
and I could not recall,
when you rang with the question,
if I'd seen the car then
or mere auto-suggestion.
But before you rang,
the car had been found,
fourteen miles away, early,
in a school ground.
So before I pushed bike
through car-space and mind's nettle,
the car was already
a wreck of burnt metal.

Perhaps, like a churchyard,
the grounds of that school
are marked for outrageous
breakings of rule.
I can’t tell if that’s so
from my tiny self-knowledge,
full of my idiocies
at school and college.
But after the breakings,
do the breakers find
they can silence the growth
of nettles in the mind?


The car's replacement is still with us, but we have for many years been following the advice in the book Cutting your car use by Anna Semlyen. In 2003, we drew up a pledge form for others who might wish to make a thing of cutting their car use. Feel free to download....

THE ANTIDOTE

I have a work in progress on the Haddon Library's blog. It's a page for the products of the writing workshop that was the library's contribution to Cambridge University's Festival of Ideas.

That workshop was a collaboration with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Workshop leader Sue Butler asked participants to write imaginatively in response to books from the Haddon and objects from the Museum.

As of this posting, the blog is a lot thinner than the work Sue led us to. But here's something I prepared earlier that goes with the subject of museums. Written 2002, published in St Matthew's parish magazine Streetwise in 2005.

THE ANTIDOTE

Simple procedure you may use
if you are minded to reduce,
when looking at another age,
the psychic risks of heritage:

nostalgic thoughts are well cured when
you know the way things were back then
is more than half the way that they
took to the way they are today.