Exhibit at 'Inside'

 

EXHIBIT AT 'INSIDE'

Exhibit at 'Inside: artists and writers

in Reading Prison': old release-day shots

of men and women with their hands spread tight as

identifiers, not expressing lots.

The place with the glass roof he thought for taking

photographs, Margate-fashion, later, said

Oscar Wilde, grew hideous on breaking

the news it was the execution shed.

He recognised his poem over-used

'fearful', 'dreadful' for water-closet drab.

His boys were boys. We know, but don't refuse

his door its honoured place on cell-size slab.

We saw his cell, too many there at once,

and some took photos on their mobile phones.

======================================================

This was my entry in Cannon Poets' 'Sonnet or not' competition in October 2016.  I think it's pretty self-explanatory.  The online promotion of the exhibition referred to has long disappeared from the web, but its text began:

"HM Prison Reading opens for the first time to the public as artists, writers and performers respond to its most notorious inmate, Oscar Wilde."

I went round it with my wife Clare and a kinswoman.  The poem was triggered by an observation among us, on how many of the visitors had been taking photographs there.  For whatever reasons, none of our small family party felt any wish to do that.

The best part of the exhibition, for us, doesn't get into the poem at all.  It was a 5' conversation with one of the information people, who'd worked for the prison as a locksmith.

Following a well-established pattern, the poem was unplaced in the competition for which it was written, but has now found publication in another outlet. It's appeared in the Fringe999 poetry forum.

An imagined community

AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY

Where does the SMERD community exist?

Smokers, Meat-Eaters, Religious and Drivers made

a tactical alliance to resist

the Council in the year the Council had

a Secularisation Task Force. Now

that's morphed to Faith Concerns Committee, some

joke of SMERD Officers and wonder how

any could march to such a plural drum.

Is SMERD the future of the city? Or

is it, so far from being here to stay,

a common cause there's no more reason for?

The Mayor's mourning his son. He cannot say.

We get their leaflets in our neighbourhood.

Good neighbours. It's a tangle being good.

I wrote this sonnet in December 2009, for a competition from 'Many Hands' whose theme I have forgotten. I self-published it in September 2023, as a quote-tweeted response to an observation by the political commentator Chris Grey:

"I'm genuinely puzzled by the emergence of 'the motorist' as a political identity, as if people who drive cars have distinct set of priorities and values."

It's now been retweeted by Kent and Surrey bylines.

Final places of poetry

I put thirteen poems on the Places of Poetry map, and have so far blogged ten of them. Here are the remaining three.


LOOKING BACK

Centuries to keep
this castle state-of-the-art
that saw no action
till a Civil War slighting
felled its walls into the ground.

Our visit didn't
find the same guidebook as mine
nineteen years before,
but we both together thought
ruins of Cair Paravel.

I liked that guidebook's
leading me through room by time
then on to ramparts
for a vista of the whole.
That was in a work-bad year.


The castle in question is Helmsley Castle in North Yorkshire, and the guidebook that had so pleased me on an earlier visit is by Glyn Coppack.  

The poem was written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  The prompt, in a chapter contributed by Helen Mort, was for a poem about a significant place out of doors.


MICHAEL DRAYTON AND I

(on reading Michael Drayton revisited by Jean Brink)

They tell us now that Polesworth never was
remembered village to the poet Drayton.
Move just a little, read him cause by cause,
and see the Goodere idyll first unstraighten,
then vanish like cloud-streets. I spurned the good
in my remembered village at first dare,
age five or six: replanned it new Nutwood,
gave people roles round me as Rupert Bear,
and told them so. But nobody enjoyed
co-option in this way by such a lad.
My parents were embarrassed and annoyed.
I had some explanation from my Dad.
Patrons miscast in myth and golden age;
Drayton did that, older than I, little more sage.


Polesworth is the Warwickshire village where Michael Drayton (1563-1631) may or may not have grown up. In 1580, he was in service to Thomas Goodere at Collingham in Nottinghamshire. Nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars, on the basis of scattered allusions, in his poems and dedications, to Polesworth and its River Anker, conjectured that he might have been intimate with the Polesworth branch of Goodere's family. Jean Brink's book, published in 1990, casts doubt on those speculations.

The poem was written in 2008, my entry in a competition for work to be included in the Polesworth Poets' Trail. Entering a poem on doubts about the basis for that enterprise wasn't really a good idea.

The third poem is a piece of reporting, written in 2004. 

AN ACCOUNT ON A TRAIN

The boys quizzed him about his family:
his sister, twenty-one, brother in prison
for murder, fifteen years, somehow missed thirty,
for a debt of around five hundred pounds –
a gang from Milton Keynes, and gypsies. Who owed whom?
which was which? "Gypsies, they're hard," the boys said.
That on my left, across the carriage. Rightwards,
window, and tracks, and other tracks disused,
with gantries over them, hanging no cables,
then trees between the gantries, then big trees.
Welcome to Northampton, home of the Saints.

An anti-Adlestrop! OK,
I know it happens every day,
but commonly when I'm not there;

excuse my noting it as rare.


I imagine I would irritate readers if I included explanations of Cair Paravel, Rupert Bear, and Adlestrop.  If you're reading this online, you can look them up there.

Illegal deposits

THE SEARCH

dare spend night condemned flat.  Online I found
no July game of public schoolboys scaling
a tower block's Heras fence, grazed to the ground,
hot on the concrete steps, higher each railing;

no afterwards: not ninepenny rainbow,
not weeping for the darkness in man's heart;
no record of the night -- what aged them so,
a great adventure from or at the start?

No bad deposits made in lack of water,
no newspaper, eerie from being old,
no noises for the night not getting shorter,
no one they met, and nothing they were told.

So probable, this tale, not mine to break.
Do you remember it? What is your take?

UNFESTIVE

The phrase "a lot of food"
means more food in the sentence
"We've laid in a lot of food for Christmas"
than in "He'd spilt a lot of food down his jersey."
Poignant the difference in tense.

A SPURIOUS CRIME

Ears pinch "e-legal", and the users know
libraryspeak's not theirs to understand,
when copyright means something else.  They go
and make do with the beige-flagged contraband.

CURIOUS

Deposit -- deposition -- kings invite
put-down, counter-claim.  Did your sudden flight
involve such terrors?  Had someone had sight
of things you'd done that didn't match your fight?
What came?  Visit, phone, email, small-hours fright?
Still mystery, twelve years on -- day of night.

The above poems are my contributions to Illegal deposits, a small anthology of writing by staff at libraries within Cambridge University and the colleges.  The anthology was the brainchild of Simon Halliday and features cover artwork by Clare Trowell. It includes a contribution by Adam Crothers, whose debut volume Several deer (Carcanet, 2016) won the 2017 Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize. 

To get your copy of Illegal deposits, contact Simon Halliday on snjh2[at]cam.ac.uk.

Kirkconnel's bard

KIRKCONNEL'S BARD

(The bard is Alexander Anderson ('Surfaceman'), 1845-1909)

Kirkconnel's bard sang progress, engines' strength
made greater by the discipline of rails,
his rhymes and grammar sound, his metred length
of line hard-fixed as ever was with nails.

Nick Drake sang questions, ways lost, light flown, blue
of waves and sky the video shows grey,
gates waited at in hope of looking through,
a plea for somebody to show and say.

Kirkconnel's bard praised Whitman's free lines, praised
his fellows, wrote in voice of the bereaved
mothers.  Read in our day, is he appraised
with more along the track than he believed?

Would he have prayed, trusting in God to hear,
that Nick Drake's heaven-signal stood at clear?

The above poem was my contribution to the 26 project 'Under a northern sky' -- the brainchild of two 26 members, Sandy Wilkie and Michelle Nicol , one from Glasgow and one from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and both fans of the singer Nick Drake.  Michelle's account of the proceedings is at http://bit.ly/1PeKO91 .  Project participants were assigned one song by Drake and one station on the Carlisle route from Newcastle to Glasgow, and asked to write poetry or prose, performable in under 3'44", that linked the two.  My station was Kirkconnel and my Nick Drake song 'Way to blue'.  And on 25 April 2015, as many of us as could made that journey by train, reading our own contributions, and those of the people who couldn't be present, at or near the stations in question.

I was lucky in that Kirkconnel has a literary figure of some note in Alexander Anderson.  I won't link to all the poems of his that I allude to, but I should perhaps say that my last line picks up on 'Stood at clear' from his collection Songs of the rail.  A train driver is questioned after a rail crash:

"Speak to him-quick!" they bent and said,
"Did the distant signal stand at red?"

Broken and slow came the words with a moan,
"Stood—at—clear," and poor Jim was gone.

I turn'd my head away from the light
To hide the tears that were blinding my sight,

And pray'd from my heart, to God that Jim
Might find heaven's signals clear to him.

I believe the narrator is deeply disturbed by the probability that signal didn't stand at clear, and that a much-loved friend has died with a lie on his mouth.  Is there more to be said on this by readers who know Alexander Anderson's work better than I?

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. 

Men at arms

MEN AT ARMS

(reflecting Evelyn Waugh's novel of that title)

The thunderbox, where Apthorpe sat to judge

his fellows, pulling all he could of rank,

the box he pulled with Guy, for all the grudge

of charges, and for all it stank,

one morning, in a corner of a field

("obvious what had happened" gives the drift

another novelist would have revealed),

being spiked, blew up under Apthorpe. Biffed.

The thunderflash, the scaled-down training bomb,

and 80s Apthorpe, bored as a cadet –

don't ask me where a dare like this came from –

who mooted and who meant is to forget –

but thunder flashed in 80s Apthorpe's face,

and fixed his shadow till his end of days.

Waugh's novel and its sequels were lent to me by a kinswoman in the summer of 2012, and gave me much relief during the stresses of a project at work.  I wrote the poem rather later, for the 2013 Cannon Poets competition, which favours sonnets.  The poem is now posted on the PoemPigeon site.  PoemPigeon runs a new poetry competition every month, always with a thematic or formal requirement, and the requirement for July 2014 is sonnet form.

Readers of this blog may know all about my penchant for themed or formal poetry competitions.  I don't see myself going for PoemPigeon every month, as that would leave me with no time or creative juices for anything else.  But my poetry card index has, by now, quite a few eligible sonnets in it, and I liked the idea of pulling a recent one out and sending it off.

Science fiction

This poem is one of the sonnets I wrote for the Radio 3 sonnet competition in 2001. See my post of 30 May 2011 for more on that. The poem found a home online at www.mywritingworld.org.uk , a not particularly prestigious site that has since been taken down.


SCIENCE FICTION

With this hand-held device that has the power
of drawing moisture from the atmosphere,
to concentrate it in a mobile shower,
what happens next? Round its first pioneer,
we find the gadget game for innovating.
Fear that the water is unfit to use
is the most-cited factor militating
against acceptance. But the few enthuse,
till the complaint is carriage seats awash
with watered flesh, and people shower in church.
Then mobile showers are linked to the new rash
of sunspots, hurricanes and ghosts. Research
goes on, with altered frames of reference,
in deepest Wilts., and funded by Defence.

A sonnet and a villanelle

These two poems are six years apart.  'The exorcism of limping' was written in 1998 and published in The Poetry Now book of villanelles, edited by Heather Killingray (Peterborough: Poetry Now, 1998), p. 10. 

I appeared in a number of Poetry Now anthologies in the 1990s.  Be it admitted, I sometimes felt a tad embarrassed about the company I found myself in.  But there was good stuff there as well.


THE EXORCISM OF LIMPING

Three things will soothe my twisted ankle best,
soothe it and strengthen it, if not repair –
massage by Clare, turns on the bike, and rest.

Since the chiropodist – please be impressed –
said "Crikey!", waived the cost, and stood to stare,
three things will soothe my twisted ankle best.

Clare lays in it her lap with manifest
enthusiasm to fulfil her share –
massage by Clare.  Turns on the bike, and rest,

happen at other times.  The bike's a test
of sight, quick thought, and turnings yelled to Clare.
Three things will soothe my twisted ankle best.

Rest blurs the role of invalid and guest –
a fault to keep in mind should I compare
massage by Clare, turns on the bike, and rest.

Rest's the most trouble, bike's the readiest,
Clare brings most happiness.  But, to be fair,
three things will soothe my twisted ankle best:
massage by Clare, turns on the bike, and rest.


Another admission to make is that all those three methods of soothing the ankle had to yield place, shortly afterwards, to physiotherapy.  I am ashamed to say I have forgotten the name of the medic who gave me a set of exercises in April 1998.  Their application brought the ten-month agony of my left foot under control in a few weeks.  But massage by Clare, turns on the bike, and rest still have much appeal.

'Take' was written in 2004 for the Spire competition on the theme 'Welcoming strangers', and published in Poetry Nottingham 62(2), 2008, p.3.


TAKE

So take Aziz – Christian in flight, with grounds
for flight – and think of how he used your phone,
unbidden, to run up eight hundred pounds
of calls to Tehran in one bill alone.
Take Charles and Sharon, whose bizarre eloping
stretched a tea invite to a six-week stay
in a North Midlands vicarage, and hoping
goodwill had somehow not been worn away.
Or take the woman who told everywhere
that everybody hated me.  I waited,
anxious, and hoping she had not been fair,
to see if I’d drawn hate for being hated.
All these were welcomed strangers once; but so
were you, was I, was everyone I know.

Constructs

This poem was written for Radio 3's 2001 'Sonnet Tree' competition, taking its cue from the competition's working definition of a sonnet, but not entered there. It finally found a home in the Ver Prize 2009 anthology, p. 42.

CONSTRUCTS

A sonnet's any stretch of fourteen lines,
a church is any group of thirty people,
a garden's any ground that has a fence,
a surgeon's anyone using a scalpel,
marriage is any stay for two or more,
victory's yours whatever the event,
a lecturer's a person you can hear,
a student's anybody under twenty.
Perhaps those bring a sense of things deficient,
the estate agent's way of talk run wild.
But you must grin and use such definitions,
and find in them the space to dig and build:
though they may seem inadequate to you,
no law of nature renders them untrue.

The blurtmeter

When I posted the Blurts poem a couple of months ago, I mentioned another poem that I had posted on Facebook. The Facebook post was to a poetry competition run by the British Science Festival 2011. Not for the first time, I account publication of that sort as excuse enough for inclusion in this blog. Here comes the poem in question.


THE BLURTMETER

(first weeks of an experiment)

Motivation. To count the blurts
jabbed by the jangle of bad memories;
to make them less by x percent;
to unstep the cycle of embarrassment.

Method. A stopwatch on one finger,
with lapcount button in stretch of my thumb.
I set it running when I start the day,
thumb it for every blurt, then write the tally;
and the percent reduction that I seek,
twenty, a moving target week on week,
will be rewarded, on the days it's met,
by an entitlement to chocolate.


Results

20 June 2006: 945 blurts in 7 days
Target for 27 June 2006: 756 blurts in 7 days
27 June 2006: 643 blurts in 7 days


Discussion

I play at science. How define a blurt?
How can my self-reports be verified?
What if repeated thumb-stretch comes to hurt?
What if the madness stacks up more beside?

What are the benefits? I reckon three:
first, something new each time I look. The art is
to wear the stopwatch unobtrusively
(though guaranteed to break the ice at parties).

Second, think fifty blurts for twelve hours eight.
The jabbing jangle of remembered gaffes
is sidelined by the urge to calculate,
its importuning baffled in the maths.

Let's make the third rhyme ho, throw, go, grow, glow:
to have planned anything and found it so.


The poem was written for the Keats-Shelley Association competition in 2006, the theme of which was 'The experiment'. I found myself treating the competition brief as a kind of miniature research project. The experiment described in the poem is one I had long wanted to try. I continued it, with a succession of lap-counters, over three years, and it generated several further poems. But I intend to stick to my rule with these, and not blog them until they have achieved publication elsewhere. Any editors willing to give them a go?

Blurts

This is the sequence of poems I mentioned back in February, the one about the "fragmentary vocalisations, unconnected with their immediate circumstances, that one utters in response to awkward memories." At that time, I made a link to another online manifestation of the work, but that manifestation seems to be not always there when wanted.

'Blurts' was not conceived as a sequence, but written as the individual parts suggested themselves to me in 2003-2004. It was published in the language quarterly Verbatim 30(i), Spring 2005, p. 17, following one of the fastest acceptances I've ever had. 2004 was like that.

Blurts turn out, or at any rate their driver, the sense of living in a perpetual jangle of remembered gaffes and peccadilloes, turns out, to be more widespread than I once thought. I have shown the below sequence to people and found, gratifyingly often, that the response is one of recognition. On the other hand, the counting of blurts, by means of a stopwatch, appears to be an idiosyncrasy of mine. I call it blurtmetry, and have used its name again for the present blog. For an account of the genesis of blurtmetry as a hobby, see the British Science Festival 2011 poetry competition, 15th post; however, it found no other enthusiasts, and my family were relieved when I abandoned it after three years.

Verbatim is in abeyance at the moment, and greatly missed.

BLURTS

(i)

Some gaffe has bubbled in my memory.
"You idiot!" I mutter, meaning me.
Somebody overhears me and feels meant.
Another bubble's on its long ascent.

(ii)

Whispering “DEATH!”
is a waste of breath.

(iii)

My rule -- Don't talk to someone you can't see --
may help me see that one or other hears.
It doesn't stop blurts of apology
to teachers I've not seen in thirty years.

(iv)

Solo,
I bark Sorry! staccato
for an old peccadillo –
a sort of self-vendetta.

Recalling what I can’t recall
finds cracks of resolution
in battering the party-wall
edgeways with noise-pollution.

(v)

A blurt of the usual sort,
in a prayer, would stick out like a wart.
So in church, when an old thing went off in my head,
I converted the blurt to a silent stop dead –
and “The man’s half-asleep,” people thought.

(vi)

Another wordless blurt's the thick-blink wince.
Perhaps it was your music that set ringing
the trigger memories, laid down long since;
I did not mean a slight upon your singing.

(vii)

Treading two steps in ten on words that trigger
the sort of memory that stops me dead,
I'm glad to find the English language bigger
than lists of what I wish I hadn't said.
Indeed, if I went through the dictionary
on purpose to stain every word with me
and PowerPointed® the resulting story
to seminars on lexicography
(“CLEUGH I illiterately mispronounced,
NOUP I wrote in exams, under-prepared,
PORRET accompanied a cheque that bounced,
DRAN and I've just now realised why she glared”),
the words I'd left unstained would make the thing
so gappy as to be embarrassing.

Three more music poems

Yes, I've no excuse for blogging these, except that I've been at work all this bank holiday.

The first dates from 2004, and was published in the 2007 Ver Prize anthology from Ver Poets of St Albans.


TWO SETTINGS OF A.E. HOUSMAN

Vaughan Williams. An upland slope
as steep as team can plough,
a cloud of gulls, a hillside's
sliding shadow.

Butterworth. The sport along
the river-shore, the flow;
and slow chords match the silence
of old film, now.

The second is one of the earliest poems of mine to be be still getting much of an outing, having been first published in the Durham student magazine Palatinate in May 1977.


MAGNIFICAT IN B MINOR BY THOMAS TERTIUS NOBLE (1867-1953)

Banks of black cloud climbed up the sky;
the cathedral became Noah's Ark:
the striking afternoon sun held her straight
against the boomy dark.

But, down in the body ecclesiastic,
something was rotten and soft:
there were intrigues in the vestry that year,
and A CORPSE IN THE ORGAN-LOFT.



Finally, a sonnet -- one of several I wrote for Radio 3's sonnet competition in the autumn of 2001, though I was allowed to enter only one, and this was not it. It was published in Perimeter 11, 2003.

It's not evocatively musical, as the other two poems in the blog try to be. It namechecks Britten. The Radio 3 indiscretion mentioned in ll. 5-8 was triggered by Britten's Gemini variations. Social mores and Radio 3's presentation style have both changed since 1989; the word awesome has changed its meaning since 2001. But I think it's still the case that a loved one's privacy is not yours to dispense with.


OUT

Wilfred Pickles bade Britain Goodneet. The red
light closed. Out at Moorside Edge, sporting no light,
the mast faithfully relayed the way he said
the word. The shock, under the wartime night.

Buoyed up by Britten, one presenter on
Radio Three announced another as
not his twin but his companion,
in '89. The red light stopped. There was

an awesome silence. Out, brief candle; out,
damned spot; an outing and a half! Judas went
out; and it was night. Light out, from twent-
y years of seance failed. Lamps going out

all over Europe. More than going out.
Out, fallen out, down and out; a rout, a rout.

Twenty-first century kids

I don't know much about twenty-first century kids, but I've occasionally, in poems, used the figure of supposing that this or that commonplace thing is one that C21 kids know not to exist.

Here are three such poems. All have had prior appearances in Streetwise, which from 1990 to 2007 was the magazine of St Matthew's church, Cambridge.

The first takes its inspiration from an article I saw in another parish magazine.


DUMMIES

(a Yorkshire tale, with due acknowledgement to Maurice Ransome’s article in the Pickering Beacon)
Seen from a ladder,
right next to the high window
in daylight, it’s fine:
a glove-stand in the window,
and a dressmaker’s dummy.

Seen from street-level
at night, matter for a dare:
walk past the high house,
past the window with the hand
and dim figure, not look up.

Seen for the first time,
the hand-window must have lit
mainly puzzlement;
needed rumours, darkness, dare,
to drive terror through the blood.

The high house came down yonks ago.
More modest dwellings fill the site.
The garden wall still stands.
The street I see is stone and light.
Twenty-first-century kids know
there’s no such thing as hands.


For the second -- well, there's been a royal wedding today. That led me to think of blogging this brief squib from 2001, and that led me to think of blogging all these three.


HENRY VIII: A POLITICALLY CORRECT VIEW

Women today don’t need to pay
for kings’ frustrations with their lives:
twenty-first-century kids know
there’s no such thing as wives.


Finally, here is a poem that had had adventures before its appearance in the church magazine. 'Types of advocacy' won a merit award in the 2004 Nottingham Poetry Competition, and a subsequent appearance in Poetry Nottingham (now Assent).


TYPES OF ADVOCACY

Type one plays inside-out with guilt:
I beat my face in and it's all your fault.
Type two finds footing on a raft:
I beat my face in as a human right.
Type three is pride, drum-banging through
a badge: I beat my face in, why don't you?
(sometimes with scripture in its praise:
I beat my face in to obtain the prize).
Type four’s political correctness,
the trick that only naming conjures:
twenty-first-century kids know
there's no such thing as faces now.

I’ll look for more, but it’s amazing
you’ve had that lot and still not started bruising.

A typology of river poems

For National Poetry Day, here's one I penned in late 1999. It won a prize in the 2008 Sefton writing competition.

A TYPOLOGY OF RIVER POEMS

Downstream, or riverside: Oxus forgetting
the bright speed it had, the edges not now close
or fresh, but flat as Sohrab’s sand, embankments,
workaday wharves. The high adventure’s gone,
or aching with the sense of what has gone.

Upstream: the source, but there’s not much to see.
The backward quest’s unlearning comes to this:
near fields, and baffled which of two or three
almost-remembered streams the true source is.

Across the river: trusting that he went
into it with Where is thy sting? and going
deeper, said, Grave, where is thy victory?
and thus passed over, and the trumpets sounded
for him the other side, we can describe it so.
But the crowd flowing over London Bridge –
“I had not thought death had undone so many”?
To say nothing of being very sorry to say
that ninety lives have been taken away
on the last Sabbath day of 1879,
which will be remembered for a very long time.

The litany of river names: there’s power
in lists. The list of two that has for third
and fourth Er… and That’s it stands like a tower
aborted, but the list of three’s a cord
not lightly broken, and the list of four
drives the point home and hammers it some more,
and if you list upwards of five or six –
Ursula Fanthorpe’s lines that end in Styx –
you’ve got it made, and if for want of heaven
you list the cloudburst-sobbing streams of Devon,
the Tamar under fifty miles of drumming,
the salmon lit, again lit, with rain coming,
no one, it’s true, is guaranteed to weep,
but I saw one man’s eyes begin to steep.