‘Industrial Legacy’
Now joint-oil curdles
in our knees and elbows
and fingers of decay
lick at our creaking heels
you suggest valves
propose grease nipples
vaunt the possibilities
of replacement parts
in recycled plastics
while I in my muddled head
just crave lubrication
and the cooling mind fog
of being left alone.
-John Hawkhead
The Directions Speed Takes
Speed shakes the line between
the lights rooting their shapes
and the shadows that imitate
the beginning from the end.
Slow down! We already reached
where we would live a life
we are meant to lead. Slow down.
It is our midlife crisis.
The lanes hiss. The signals blink.
Fogsome night coils a carol
for the fag-end of the month.
Corde natus ex Parentis. I murmur.
-Kushal Poddar
My submission to this month’s issue of Visual Verse is published today. Thanks to the editors!
Ruins
When a civilisation falls, we observe these
events from distance; see reflections, find fragments
of lives that leave ghost-shadows. Lives that you or I
can’t comprehend, rocks and dust and skeletons that have
stopped dancing. We fail to see ourselves; we have shored
our own minds against death. We try to push against
the forces of time and space. Where is my
salvation now? What thoughts are left but ruins?
Chickens
So.
You wanted so much
to see the Himalayas. Your mind depends
on stimulation, upon
the lived experience that only a
trip to the mountains, or a red
desert can fulfil; the constant turning of a wheel.
On seeing the long barrow,
your eyes glazed
with tears, you said I should never have come with
you, that I brought only rain
where sun should be. And here we are; a glass of water
with the many pills on the table beside
the bed where I lie, where you lie. You say that the
sheets seem very clean and white
but you have to go; you need to feed your chickens.
How Did It Go?
The first has a line from The Waste Land as its inspiration and and the second uses all of William Carlos Williams’ Red Wheelbarrow.
Tree beauty
There are old men trees and some I call she,
wild women trees, shelter where the hind walks.
Breathe out and breathe in.
Tree-breath is powerful, and tree-beauty,
the powerful beauty of nature, like
mountains and rivers, ice-caps, the
lungs of the world, pumping day and night.
How did it go?
I tried this form several times before I got a poem that I was satisfied with. I picked some favourite lines and realised that, like most phrases, they contained several articles and conjunctions, none of which make good end-of-line words. The result of my first attempts looked arbitrary in a contrived way. I got there in the end and will try this form again, though I will never be persuaded that ending a line with ‘the’ or ‘a’ is poetic.
Leftfield Questions
How is an Osprey like a fridge ?
What mundane task would a living Osprey do in a home?
How would a fridge be rewilded?
For Paul Brookes’ December challenge. I really couldn’t answer these questions about shower-cleaning voles, so here’s a cop-out poem about a water vole just being clean and tidy.
Water vole
Wild in the water,
no more home than a hole
in a muddy bank,
a spick and span round hole
above the flood line perhaps
and perhaps not.
Out of sight of slit-slant fox eyes,
the ferreting marten,
the heron’s beak.
Ripples run, a V of silver
from nose apex,
ephemeral disturbance
of the silken skin of the stream.
Still returns, spick and span,
wild water unruffled,
wild water vole homed.
Leftfield Questions
How is a water vole like cleaning the bath/shower?
What mundane task would a living water vole do in a home?
How would cleaning the bath/shower be rewilded?
This superb collection of poems, each one accompanied by Chris Humphrey’s impressive colour photographs, comprises observations about different walks written in sections that are linked by landscape, small journeys, reflections and moments of vision that are ‘undramatic and intangible but real’.
With ‘Words Inside a Birthday Card’ the poet begins his journey with a choice, for one ‘can go three ways’: alongside a wall, into a churchyard with yew trees or straight ahead towards the river although time is too short and the weather too cold to appreciate the mallards ‘swimming, flying’. Yet he does stop for a robin is singing ‘and going on singing’, a continuity that brings in ‘other birds singing’ so that anyone watching will find they need to listen and go on listening.
A description of insects, halfway to wasps in size, introduces a hint of heaven for they are like ‘a ladder of angels ascending…
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This is for Paul Brookes’ December challenge.
Turning on the light
On the pond, boatmen skim,
insect skiffs, leaves dry-curled,
red on green water,
and the dimples are silver.
In the sky, clouds lower,
ragged laundry, waiting
to be rain-washed
and hung to dry.
A wind gusts,
ruffling tree heads,
pushing though the billows,
and through the rent
in the sodden cloud-fabric,
suddenly, the sun—
light falls through the trees
onto still water, red leaves,
skimming insects,
and the dimples turn to gold.
Leftfield Questions
How is a water boatman like a changing a lightbulb?
What mundane task would a living water boatman do in a home?
How would changing a lightbulb be rewilded?
The Wombwell Rainbow 