Challenges by Hall Writers

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The Hall Writers’ Forum The Hall Writers’ Forum was launched online in 2013 with a view to fostering dialogue, collaboration, and creative writing. Its members include current and former students of St Edmund Hall, members of the Hall’s academic and non-academic staff, and associates from outside the college who have been nominated by Forum members.

First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Chough Publications St Edmund Hall Oxford OX1 4AR This collection © 2018 Chough Publications Copyright for the individual contributions remains with the authors except where otherwise indicated Drawings © 2018 Jude Montague 1

Table of Contents (click on the page number for quick access) Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 5 Modernising Æsop .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 6 Christmas 2013 ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 7 Manifestos ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 10 Elegies for Mandela ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 12 Riddles ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 14 Responding in Writing to a Photograph .............................................................................................................................................. 15 Christmas Carols 2014 ............................................................................................................................................................................... 17 Flash Fiction: Passion ................................................................................................................................................................................. 18 Bridges to Business ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 21 Quango proposes wholesale destruction of robins’ nests ............................................................................................................. 23 Ekphrasis ........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 27 Essay ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 29 Prophecy ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 33 Point of View ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 34 Money .............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 37 Originality and Imitation .......................................................................................................................................................................... 39 Gambling ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 41 Autumn ............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 43 Social Media ................................................................................................................................................................................................... 47 Unconventional Sonnets ............................................................................................................................................................................ 48 Elegy or Obituary ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 51 Purple .............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 53 Sorry ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 55 No Word .......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 56 60s ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 58 Advent ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 61 The Fine Line between Comedy and Tragedy .................................................................................................................................... 63 Modern technology ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 64 2

Protest ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 65 Ciphers ............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 67 Signs of Spring .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 69 Anniversary ................................................................................................................................................................................................... 71 Misunderstanding ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 75 Cold War ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 77 Wilderness ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 79 Up with the lark ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 81 Scum ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 83 Summer ........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 85 Sub-culture .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 87 Tempo .............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 93 Childhood ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 95 Things My Soul Is ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 99 Work ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 101 Three Pigeons ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 103 First Aid Kits ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 105 Re-hash ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 107 Ghostly Villanelles .................................................................................................................................................................................... 109 Villanelles .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 111 Haikus ........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 113 Pantoum ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 115 Ottava Rima ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 117 Rictameter ................................................................................................................................................................................................... 119 Blake’s Tyger for the 21st Century ..................................................................................................................................................... 121 Religions ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 123 Nonsense ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 125 Scripture ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 126 Greed ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 128 Ancestry ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 129 Daily Bread ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 131 3

Interim Challenge ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 132 Breaking News ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 134 Shame ........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 135 Flash Fiction: Migration .......................................................................................................................................................................... 136 Drama: Recriminations .......................................................................................................................................................................... 137 Definitions of Poetry ................................................................................................................................................................................ 138 Valentine’s Day Ballad ............................................................................................................................................................................ 139 Despotism .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 141 Evil Eye ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 143 Animal .......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 145 Sonnet Sequence ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 146 Shakespeare ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 148 Election 2015 ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 149 An Awkward meeting .............................................................................................................................................................................. 156 Wole Soyinka .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 159 Impressions ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 172 Compass ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 173 Witness ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 174 Migration ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 176 System .......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 179 Radio Drama ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 183 Romance ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 189 “I Hate Christmas” .................................................................................................................................................................................... 190

4

Introduction

Introduction This anthology has been assembled to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the formation of the Hall Writers’ Forum in February 2013. It contains the winning entries of the all the challenges that have been issued since the Forum’s foundation until the end of December 2017. In some instances, there have been more than one winner; in others, the challenge has been of a collaborative nature so that every participant is a winner.

These challenges represent one of the most important purposes of the Forum: to get people to marshal their thoughts in some poetic form, be that free verse or moulded into the demands of verse forms both familiar sonnet, sestina and villanelle - and unusual - than-bauk, pantoum.

These entries have been included because fellow members of the Forum thought they best rose to the challenge, though doubtless every entrant considered their entry to have best risen to the occasion; nevertheless, these selections can very probably be multiplied by at least ten in order to give some idea of the volume of effort - and fun - that is typical of the Hall Writers’ Forum.

We hope you will enjoy reading the contents of this volume.

February 2018

5

Modernising Æsop

Modernising Æsop The challenge is to take an Aesop fable and ‘make it new’ - by which I mean, bring it up to date, giving it a new twist and making it relevant to contemporary life.

If you choose to write in prose, your fable must be no longer than 300 words.

If you choose to write in poetry, you must use terza rima.

If you are Darrell Barnes, you will interpret the rules just as you like, and entertain everyone.

Lucy Newlyn The Slow Cooker and the Microwave A Cooker Slow, which made not much demand on time or patience or the National Grid, was used one day to cook a dinner grand.

Tough meat and veg were pressed beneath its lid; the thing switched on, it set about its work.

A Microwave nearby asked it “did No one ever say you look a berk?

You’re plain and ugly - what a dreadful sight!”

“I’ve no redeeming qualities; there lurk no bells and whistles round my case. You’re right: I’m slow and simple, but I’ll tell you what I can be safely left to work all night.”

“What a loser! Unattractive pot!

See what I can do: rewarm, defrost with other features which you haven’t got.”

“That may be so, but count th’enormous cost of what it takes for you to cook a quiche.

What happens if your user guide is lost?”

The moral of this kitchen tale? Let each appliance serve its dedicated niche.

Darrell Barnes

6

Christmas 2013

Christmas 2013 Members of St Edmund Hall are invited to write their own Christmas carol, offering a new take on the traditional Christmas story.

Sacred or profane, straight or parodic - the carol should be no longer than 28 lines. It can be written collaboratively.

Accompanying music is optional.

The prize for the best carol will be a bottle of champagne plus a hardback copy of Chatter of Choughs: An Anthology celebrating the return of Cornwall’s legendary bird, which contains much wonderful poetry and prose written by Aularians and their associates.

Lucy Newlyn That night …

Gasp in the darkness, shudder and fall, Bloated flanks heave in an oxen stall, Restless hoofs that trample the straw Anything less? Anything more?

Sharp scent of terror, stench of new life, Calloused hands gripped by this carpenter’s wife, Salt on our foreheads, blood on the floor Anything less? Anything more?

Startling arrival, piercing the night, Squalling red face and a fistful of light, Laid in a manger, urgent and raw Anything less? Anything more?

Unlikely visitors, near-born and far, Summoned by angel choir, led by a star, Wise men and simple men, rocked to the core Anything less? Anything more?

Bowing and scraping and weeping and praying, Stamping and snuffling and lowing and braying, Clamour of man and beast, deafening roar Anything less? Anything more?

Caught in the crossfire, trapped in the glare Of a son born as mine that another calls heir.

Stumbling before him, I kneel and implore: “Anything less? Anything more?”

7

Christmas 2013

I am the father, silent and wild I cradle the mother, I hold fast the child Anything less, anything more, Leave it outside the stable door.

Kate Fawcett

8

Christmas 2013

Cleaning out the stable Living bags of bone and blood Gathered in a stable Some the feeders, some the food All players in a fable Three more arrive, one more is born One more mouth for weaning In the house, the farmer knows His stable will need cleaning And what are we to make of this Generations later?

The son of God made flesh, perhaps Born for something greater And so each year the death knell sounds To give a turkey meaning And as we sleep before the Queen The dishes will need cleaning Stuart Estell

9

Manifestos

Manifestos Over the last week or so, a few of us have been posting examples of manifestos on the ‘Anniversary Challenge’ thread, to inspire the HWF in its competition. (‘Manifesto’ has been used loosely - ‘credo’ might be a more accurate word in many cases.) The range has been extraordinarily wide.

Speaking strictly for myself, the decision to post something on the ‘Anniversary Thread’ has quite often been prompted associatively - by reading a post elsewhere on the Forum and being reminded of something I have wanted to track down and recommend. As a consequence, the thread has a wild, haphazard texture, and is utterly un-systematic.

There’s evidence that readers have been looking at this thread; but so far no-one has commented on any of the material - though I think we can see some dialogic interactions inside the thread, if we read it from beginning to end.

In the run up to the deadline for our competition, I suggest we try to pull some thoughts together about what the examples on our Manifesto thread teach us; and that we try articulate the criteria we are using when it comes to voting for the best HWF Manifesto.

So, in response to this post, I challenge you to do the following: 1. Say which of the manifestos on the thread labelled ‘Anniversary Challenge’ is the best.

2. Give your reasons for selecting it.

3. Name the 3 key ingredients of a good manifesto.

Lucy Newlyn Manifesto for an end to self-interest I dream a world where humans have evolved to see their course was frozen by a thought, that hunger was a sum they could have solved and greed was just a virus minds had caught; where life is exploration, not a race, no more a lonely gauntlet through the mud, where hopes are things to grow instead of chase and no more talents wither in the bud; I dream a future not propelled by threat, the constant need to barricade the heart, where birth is more than tumbling into debt, and working pulls us closer, not apart; where people share this dream, and none denies a truth refused, or seen through shuttered eyes.

Tom Clucas

10

Manifestos

On writing poetry It’s always broken.

Get used to it. it never speaks in the voice you’re waiting to hear. it’s always in the wrong time a little bit too late, off kilter, the wonky output of a cocked industry.

But you must love it after a fashion.

Keep it close, the child you will not let go even though the wind rages and your cheeks are cut like ribbons and it struggles against force feeding in your Wellsian workshop.

We’re moulding mutants in a devil’s lab; how they shine in dreamy half-life.

Let the hares scamper away over the whinny.

You, back to your books.

Jude Cowan Montague

11

Elegies for Mandela

Elegies for Mandela To honour Nelson Mandela, I feel it would be appropriate for Forum members to post elegies as they come to mind over the Christmas break. And perhaps - in order to draw more people into the activity of writing their elegies - it will also be fitting to offer a prize for the best one, to be donated to charity? This is such a serious subject; perhaps it will prompt some really wonderful contributions which the forum can be proud of.

The challenge, then, is to write an elegy for Mandela over the Christmas vacation. It can be in poetry, prose, or song, accompanied by images if you like. I am not setting any kind of restrictions on length - this would not be appropriate in the circumstances - but please bear the formatting of the forum in mind, and think about what will work best for this medium. (Please also give some thought to how your contribution would work as a performance -- how it would sound if read aloud.)

Lucy Newlyn Us Hunt them down, round them up, tie their hands behind their backs, stuff their screaming mouths with rags for this their coronation.

Bring the pick-up’s balding spares, halo them, anoint with oil, fill the rim then strike a match, for this their coronation.

Rubber blisters, skin explodes, the stink of melt gets everywhere, singe and burn and fuse and boil, for this their coronation.

Them and us, them and us, tribe and gang and black and white, we blame them, they blame us, no king, no coronation.

Then: a man whose grievances might lead to slaughter, transformed his anger, pain and grudge - to love! for this our coronation.

A man with friendship in his hands for tribe and gang and black and white: he changed the them and us to us, for this our coronation.

12

Elegies for Mandela

Coda Witness these my sandals sold in any market, leather thonged and soled with tyre, I wear to join the congregation.

Tony Brignull

13

Riddles

Riddles You’re invited to write a riddle in no more than twenty lines of verse. You can use any form.

Lucy Newlyn Riddle My first: field-fenced, four-bellied, flatulent, and fearsome.

My second: porcelain-pooled, passed over, prim-privied, and pungent.

My whole: contest-cast (when desiccate); delivered dry in academic discourse.

Peter King

14

Responding in Writing to a Photograph

Responding in Writing to a Photograph

Love, you have carved my face in wood, And taken half my substance, to become This dark trophy to your darker power.

Thinned to a tribal mask of ebony I am the ornament of all your charms, Sold at the roadside by mocking girls Who sit by the glimmering townships, and dispose Of love’s doomed trinkets at the cheapest price.

Wrapped in newspaper, unpacked in cooler halls, We are hung, from nails, on white museum walls.

Nicola Harrison

15

Responding in Writing to a Photograph

Tom Clucas

16

Christmas Carols 2014

Christmas Carols 2014 This year, the challenge is to write a Christmas carol which really sounds like a Christmas carol, and can be sung.

Secular themes are welcome. You are invited either a) to take the tune of a traditional carol and give it your own words; or b) to submit the lyrics of your carol together with an original tune of your own making. If the latter, please submit the score, and/or a recording of your voice singing.

Yes, the carol challenge is a Hall Writers’ Forum tradition. And yes, there is a prize: a bottle of champagne, plus one or other of the Hall’s poetry publications. (This will be selected by the winner from what Stuart Estell would endearingly call ‘our box of tat’.) Furthermore, the winner will have the opportunity to read or sing their carol at the college’s Carols in the Quad on 4th December.

Lucy Newlyn Hark the Little Baby Wails To be sung to the tune of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” Hark the little baby wails, See his face all scrunched and red, Chubby arms and legs he flails, Baby will not go to bed.

Joseph steals some more duvet, Mary gets up right away, Hushes baby back to sleep, Shoos away some errant sheep.

Such is a normal family, In which was raised our deity.

Baby will not eat his tea, Mary says that Joseph snores.

Baby gurgles happily, Watching Joseph do his chores.

He carves wood for baby’s manger, Mary welcomes in a stranger.

He names Babe the “Promised King”, Babe doesn’t understand a thing.

He is sick on the guest’s face, Mary scolds him in disgrace.

Baby’s scribbled on the wall, Mary tells him he’s been bad, Joseph says “It’s just a stall”, Mary turns on him quite mad.

“We must teach him to behave”, Joseph’s face then turns quite grave, “You are of course my dear quite right, Baby is grounded for tonight!”

Thus our Lord is sent to bed, He who will come back from the dead.

Matthew Carter

17

Flash Fiction: Passion

Flash Fiction: Passion You are invited to submit a short story (no longer than 250 words) on the theme of PASSION. Lucy Newlyn Inigo Swales Most Passionate Work Astrid knew her father’s work would kill him. Aged 47, he found an unfinished manuscript by an unknown author, Ingo Swale, which changed - many said ruined - his life. The text ran to 4.5 million words, less than a quarter in sentences, with no plot, no characters, and more than fifteen thousand points of view. John said it was a masterpiece, the most passionate work he had ever read. Over twenty years he lost everything trying to edit it: his job, his friends, his reputation.

‘Face it, John,’ said Bert, who stayed loyal to the end, ‘Swale was clearly mad.’

‘It’s stream of consciousness.’

‘But there are no characters, John. The second page is narrated by a sunbeam.’

‘That’s why it’s brilliant, beyond Joyce, Woolf, Proust - they get mired in minds, but Swale writes with omniscient ink.’

Most days, John would work from dawn till midnight, forgetting to eat or drink and often just adding confusion.

The doctors said he needed rest, but Astrid - named after a blue cat that appeared once in the seventh ream knew this was impossible.

‘Such a waste,’ she said a few days before he died. ‘No one will even see your work.’

‘Does the world need to know all of our passions?’ he asked.

After John died, Astrid resolved to burn the manuscript, but she found herself reading the opening: ‘and to begin anywhere is to dishonour everything else - break this wave built crossing an infinite ocean.’

It could stay in his drawer for now.

Tom Clucas

18

Flash Fiction: Passion

Lady Spens at the Window It’s black and bitter cold, and the wind’s up. The child won’t sleep. I’ve had her in my arms for hours, singing, piecing together old songs of cats and kittens, rolling down hills and the like. No songs of love and passion.

They catch in my throat.

He’s been gone two weeks three days, not that I’m counting. The new moon is holding the old faded ball of last month’s. ‘‘ve put the child down. The singing has stopped her crying at least.

I stare past the lantern on the windowsill, mute now. My hair is in knots from winding it round my fingers again and again and again. *** His shoes have washed ashore.

Stuart Estell

19

Flash Fiction: Passion

Pass the Passion I knew I’d feel his warmth on my legs under the badly ironed table-cloth, even without touching. Anna told us she’d leave it up to us to introduce ourselves and I initiated the tingling hand-shake. Simon was stuck with Natalie, again, but she had buttoned herself up and he was uncomfortable, looking for a place to rest his eyes.

There were twenty-one of us stuffed around the table. Marco’s heat fidgeted up my legs and into my stomach. I asked him about his work at the cement factory, picturing him kneading some vast machine, and forgot to listen to the “deficits”, “expenses” and “liabilities” of his answer, nodding poignantly as I smelt his breath brush my face.

Simon’s eyes were safely wedged between Natalie’s stomach (was she pregnant?) and her chin, so I created closeness and rested my head on my hand. I sighed. “Don’t you like the wine?” he asked. I thrust a lasso of a smile at him and slurped at my glass, leaving a trickle of yellow on my dress. “Lovely,” I replied. “You’re lovely,” he said and moved his burning thigh closer.

Anna was toasting her guests, when our legs touched. They strayed together frequently during the main course and I christened the experience “ardor” in my mind. Considerations of divorce and elopement went grubby though when Simon stuck his head through our joint airflow. “Pass the passion will you?” he said, grabbing the salt and pepper and ruffling my hair Natasha Walker

20

Bridges to Business

Bridges to Business The collective curse begins with Roy’s [Sellars] starter. When adding your couplet, please can you copy and paste the already accumulated lines into the next post, so that we get longer and longer posts. More like a tower than a bridge? I propose that someone - who? Perhaps a rapper? - be elected by popular vote to read the Curse in its entirety.

Lucy Newlyn Curse Worse; Rehearse The verse; Reimburse The night nurse Not the cutpurse, Their worths inverse Effing and blinding At work face grinding Little hope of reward With complete disregard From those in higher estate Who force her to work so late Reprobates in burgundy suits Parasitic peers, in cahoots...

What! even so early an upstart has spoken: The rules are flouted; the tower is broken.

"I’d rather rot in a fecking hearse Than labour away at your terse verse-curse"...

Shame! Get back to that Bridge and forget the people.

Syllable by syllable, you must build the steeple.

“Corporate hell-fire and its check-box minions upend The unwary. Work weekends! Achieve grey things! Not I, friend.

Put no gag on my words, I’ll endure not your juju.

Say, go fuck oh frabjous day; jug jug, bloody cuckoo.”

Hark! A wordsmith speaks! A new prose-poet has spoken!

The curse will build again, its timorous silence broken By this ‘fuck-you cucko’’ juju song, in the blue-sky spring awoken.

“Wait: this blue sky’s painted on! Business-bridge brains are here too, telling us how To imagine. Give me aerosols to brighten the bridge with a purple cow!”

Unreal City! the blue-blurred brightened bridge becomes the base of surrender: ‘Enlive Mil’’, crooned by a cretinous cow, coruscating ... Do you remember The night-nurse? Scuttling beneath the Volvos, on the heath? “That cow” spits she “invariably Disrupts my winter walk.” She scowls, flicks a finger and the screen dims. She weaves wearily.

Oh, let the night nurse return to a flaking flat, aching back. Let her achieve grey things. Let her simmer, curse.

Worse.

“Eheu! A word’s fell off the bridge there, bab. Arl afta ger dowun an gerrit.” “Eh? no nurse From the nighted provinces, babbling away comme ça, should be on this bridge - nor in its curse...”

“Alrite, gerra move-on, we’re late ...”

Back in the flat, asleep, she babbles in Cornish, Romany, Erse Her sighs are rhyming slang-words for ‘corporate’, ‘transparency’, ‘commerce’’.

21

Bridges to Business

She dreams of a top-down management tower, a bull on a bridge and a purple nurse Then wakes to forty-nine shades of grey, her night-shift, no raise in pay, and the monthly curse.

May she retaliate, in many tongues. May the dark tower-bridge be undermined and shaken.

Mes den hep travas a-gollas y dyr: ‘the tongueless man gets his land taken.’

22

Quango proposes wholesale destruction of robins’ nests

Quango proposes wholesale destruction of robins’ nests Polly Marshall wrote “Natural England is proposing to legalise the destruction of robins’ and other birds’ nests”. Lucy Newlyn proposed “Should we try to write another HWF collaborative ballad - a modern take on ‘Who Killed Cock Robin’?”

Who killed Cock Robin?

I, said the crony, With my quango baloney, I killed Cock Robin.

Who saw him die?

We, said the nation, So keen on conservation, We watched him die.

Who’ll catch his blood?

I, said the field, It’s for my sake he’s been killed, I’ll catch his blood.

Who’ll make his shroud?

I, said the speculator, For I’ll profit by it later, I’ll make his shroud.

Who’ll dig his grave?

I, said the banker, For I’m well used to rancour, I’ll dig his grave.

Who’ll be the parson?

We, said Sun and Mail, By whom the truth does pale, We’ll be the parson.

Who’ll be the clerk?

I, said Parliament, For the law’s there to be bent, I’ll be the clerk.

Who’ll carry the link?

I, said the internet, Quicker than you, I’ll bet: Let me carry the link.

Who’ll put it on YouTube?

I, said the cat, It’ll seem cute if I wear a hat, I’ll put it on YouTube.

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Quango proposes wholesale destruction of robins’ nests

Who’ll be chief mourner?

I, said the crocodile, My tears will hide my smile, I’ll mourn him well.

Who’ll get rid of the nest?

We, said the bin men, We’ll dispose of the hen, Then we’ll recycle the nest.

Who’ll smash the eggs?

I, said the council, With my official pencil, I’ll smash the eggs.

Then who’ll be my breakfast?

Thus cried the hawk With a horrified squawk: Who’ll be my breakfast?

Who’ll cry for such Anglo stupidity?

I, plunked the banjo, With my bump-a-diddy-ti, I’ll cry for such Anglo stupidity.

Who’ll toll the bell?

I, said the hand wringer, A bell will be a humdinger, I’ll toll the bell.

Who’ll sing the psalm?

I, said the vicar, I’m loud with lies and liquor, I’ll sing the psalm.

Who’ll bear the pall?

We, said the Tories, With our flimsy cover-stories, We’ll bear the pall.

Who’ll carry the coffin?

I, said the Government hearse: In exchange for the final verse, I’ll carry the coffin.

But all the tweets of the net Fell a-ranting and a-raving When they heard the murder plot To do in Cock Robin.

24

Quango proposes wholesale destruction of robins’ nests

Envoi To see a robin in a grave Puts right-minded folk in a flaming rage.

Who stood by and watched him die?

Not you, sisters and brothers, not you and I. This Anglo-idiocy is a mere proposal; We must overcome earth-killing bulldozers.

Natural England, know we think it’s such So Hen Robin can raise her clutch.

25

Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis Tom [Clucas] and I have teamed up for this challenge. You are invited to write a response to ONE OR BOTH of the two paintings which are posted below. The first, chosen by Tom, is Sickert’s ‘Ennui’; the second, chosen by me, is Magritte’s ‘The Lovers’ [not reproduced below]. You can link the paintings if you like. This challenge is called ‘Ekphrasis’ because we are interested in description, commentary and interpretation. But if you would prefer to use the paintings as prompts for more independent pieces of writing, that will also be welcome.

Your responses can be in any written medium.

Lucy Newlyn

Ennui “The cook and housemaid down with ekphrasis, I really cannot see how I can cope.

Food?” she added in parenthesis, “self-service tills I find beyond my scope.

‘Unexpected item in the bagging area’ that disembodied voice proclaimed to all queuing up behind. Shopping’s scarier remember when the baker used to call?

Look at this dust upon the mantelpiece!

It really makes me mad and quite depressed.

I think I’ll have to let her service cease 27

Ekphrasis

(her references weren’t good - I should have guessed).

When we were newly-weds (do you recall?) our lives were bright and gay. Why, every night I’d entertain the troops - there on the wall my portrait hangs. ‘What a lovely sight!’

I heard you say. I’ve had to pawn the ring (your railway pension only goes so far), and you just sit there, saying not a thing, stinking out the place with your cigar.

You know the doctor said you drink too much look at you now! Is that a two pint glass?

I’ll soon be dead, no longer be your crutch to wait on hand and foot and wipe your arse, supper on the table every night.

You’ll be sorry then, you wait and see!

When we were young I thought the future bright but, as it is, life’s become ennui.”

Darrell Barnes

28

Essay

Essay We are all such poetry junkies on this forum; I think it’s time to see if we can rise to the challenge of writing excellent essays. I don’t mean essays about works of literature or art, but essays about life. I have been reading Barthes’ miraculous collection, Mythologies, where the subjects range from ‘wrestling’ to ‘the writer on holiday’ to ‘wine and milk’. They are short and sweet and profound. Also wry, witty, amusing and political. Just as good as William Hazlitt or John Berger, in my opinion.

The challenge is to take an ordinary thing in your life - it could be a boiled egg, a cup of tea, a spade, a radio, a window, a cellar, a cupboard, a fridge, anything that you know well, and have thoughts about - and write an essay on it in no more than 800 words. Your prose must be wonderful.

Lucy Newlyn Polemic Soon it will be impossible to live in this world. It will be impossible to predict that children will enjoy a higher quality of life than their parents. It will be impossible to assume that governments and citizens will continue to defend the principles of equality and freedom. It will be impossible to expect that technological innovations will be used to improve, rather than debilitate, the human condition. In every facet of public life, the tide of progress is turning: the civic values of tolerance, compassion, and mutual respect are being vilified by large swathes of the media and an increasing proportion of electorates worldwide.

It is easy to dismiss these claims as the self-interested alarmism of western, middle-class privilege. In the wake of globalisation and the financial crisis, the argument runs, previously comfortable members of the middle class are being forced to fledge from the nest-box of preconception and confront the extremities of surfeit and scarcity that co-exist around the globe. Compared to their grandparents, who lived through the industrial nadir of two World Wars, this generation is still comparatively lucky. History is cyclical and the current drift towards nationalism and political division is a temporary blip in an upward trend.

The problem with this argument is that it fails to comprehend the changing conditions of human life.

Technological developments in weaponry, surveillance, and the mechanisation of labour have outpaced society’s ability to process their implications. When history repeats, the twenty-first-century apparatus of tyranny and destruction will be unlike any before. Those in the humanities have been arguing this for at least two centuries the locus classicus being Shelley’s ‘Defence’ - but have been met with a marketised response which derides their importance and slashes their funding. The result is a world where on-screen dystopias converge exponentially with reality for millions, if not billions, of individuals.

Economic competition has systematically eroded the human values of fairness and fellow-feeling. Markets are naturally pyramidal in structure and continually fill in from the bottom as those deemed weakest topple from above. Aware of this, the individual’s purpose - often to the exclusion of all others - has become the struggle of upward mobility. As a result, even those living in relative luxury now feel insecure: people taking home a sixfigure salary to a house that ancient despots would have massacred to obtain rightly feel their position to be tenuous. They develop a false sense of scarcity, which prevents them from entertaining other perspectives.

No wonder, then, that large sections of humanity have grown either dismissive or insouciant when confronted with the suffering of others. The word suffering should startle thoughts like birds from a gunshot, but now it is read like any other. Homo economicus has grown brave, even arrogant, in the face of other people’s suffering.

The attempts of generations of writers, artists, and philosophers to avert this course lie scattered around like spent matches, the fruits of humanism remaindered in soon-to-close bookshops.

Coupled with this, the modern individual grapples with a unique burden of stress, anxiety, and anger.

Bombarded with irreconcilable images of affluence and abjection, exhausted by each day’s stampede up the 29

Essay

ladder, working people have no time to entertain alternative perspectives. Every thought, every sinew must be directed towards the singular self-improvement demanded by the market: everyone’s pressing concern is his or her mortgage, résumé, or promotion. Even those who should be protesting have grown tired of rejection letters and taken the path of least resistance to the top of the bestseller list with feel-good plots and anodyne prose.

Of course, this headlong career down the career path provides at least a simulation of accomplishment and progression. But, for all this, many people sense a vacuum in their spare moments. Their days’ ends do not meet: like the thread of a screw, they drive further into the joint of some creaking contraption, an engine that feeds on human endeavour and spews forth pollution. Sometimes, even the most successful individuals wonder how it has happened—how they have become a vessel that pours its blessings to the wind? How can it be that humans take the miracle of existence, consume its beauty, yet make none in return?

Still more feel excluded from the entire competition, shut out from the moment they enter the underfunded classroom to the moment they retire in social housing. Too many people are made to feel disenfranchised from everything: from the discount shops, the run-down streets, the society they live in. Casting around for explanations, they oversimplify and blame newcomers, those who appear or behave differently, when the true sower of discord is the mind-set that multitudes inhabit. It is vital that everyone works to perceive it, to halt history’s trajectory towards an industrial state of nature, before the vultures of human brutality come home to roost.

Tom Clucas

30

Essay

Callback Interview Shoes off, coat off. Disassemble, reassemble.

Green mountains fall out from under me, and I open my wallet to find her image wrapped in my social security number. Pale, broad, chinless, circle bridges and golden rectangles and don’t follow proverbs blindly. Proverbs don’t apply to white. A one step jump is never a bad move, but the arc that brings hope to fulfillment always tears lover from beloved. The togetherness of the mid-autumn festival is not a celebration but a suspension of life, an exception inconstant as the moon, fleeting as mooncakes.

How noble, that we now climb the sky afraid not of falling to earth, but of creases and spots and falling in the eyes of our colleagues. Our lives are so light now, so full of spirit and truth, and so fragile, no more than the thoughts leaping cloud to cloud and changing channel and dissolving into strings of numbers and truth functions and silence. How we live not in the world that is, but in counterfactuals, in a web of could and would and should and might, appointments, to-do lists, explanations, excuses. The hum of turboprops draws me to sleep and visions of weiqi superimposed on Madison who tells me the freedom of exercise is also a federalism provision and likewise resists incorporation and he laughs while Isaac is given as a burnt offering that airplanes, they carry us to New York, they carry us to heaven. I wake with a stiff neck.

The Financial District has none of the sequential, ninety-degree predictability of Midtown, and soon I am lost among pine and cedar, an ant in a forest of swaying, leafless trees. So flexible, so strong, the worker ants scurry to this and that and other, talking at cell phones, and if purity of heart is to will one thing, this like any anthill is a pure city, an island.

Monkfish liver, butterfish, yellowfin carpaccio blood sunset waning south-by-southwest, fat-covered kuaizi masking and mingling the flavors, served discretely, consumed without respect to distinctions, destroyed in combination, equality, as ever, achieved only in the unctuous surrender of identity to fleeting pleasure, extinguished in hojicha anachronisms. Now feeling vaguely ill, but no longer so empty. There is a fiery shame that numbs like huajiao. There is a bland shame that numbs like blowfish. Bland shame, flabby, flaccid, and rendered dribbles down my shirt, enters my belly and heartbeat by heartbeat spreads out over my body, as heavy as gravity scales my aorta, spreads over my face. When the waitress returns, articulacy trips over novacaine expressionlessness and falls flat against the curtain of air guarding the holy of holies, the precious common aloneness that flits before me only one of any number of signs before the eye of my mind and only my own mind and only in my mind. What could I say to her if I could say to her anything and everything that could be said? Could I ask for a whisky? But on the firm dollar, the receipt should say as little as possible, lest it fall in the hellish sphere where sight extends beyond touch, the only bridges that span our islands engineered with judgment and shame.

Floors shine, Florsheims, silk and pinstripes. A glass tower yearns towards heaven and security stares through my things. A man tags me and lets me through a metal gate like an abattoir. And all is smiles and papers and people in boxes, papers in boxes, boxes in boxes, boxes in papers.

“Tax is both the what and the why.”

“We describe the law. To state publicly what the law should be would be inconvenient for our clients.”

“I thought law school was a waste of time.”

Talisker ten-year, burning evaporates into smoke.

Shoes off, coat off. Disassemble, reassemble.

A velvet curtain of deep black-purple punctuated by orange dots in the distance reaches down to the tarmac, which falls out from under us and gives way to East River, strewn with shards of moonlight flying to the right 31

Essay

and out of the frame. But the full moon remains perfectly still in the upper left, cradled but not crowded by the soft corner pointing towards reunion.

Jared Campbell

32

Prophecy

Prophecy The Oxford term has restarted and with it the weekly challenges! I’ve been reading William Blake and so this week we’re doing prophecies. I liked how Blake wrote both some of the most beguilingly simple poems in English in the “Songs of Innocence and Experience” and some of the most overwhelmingly complex poems in his longer prophecies. So feel free to approach this challenge either with something very simple or very obscure.

Alexander Bridge The Song of the Twinless Twin I had a little twin He was my mortal foe.

I killed him in the womb so I was born alone.

All right and law was mine as mother’s only child.

I sucked at both her breasts and winsomely I smiled.

Yes I was born alone so he would never see the sunshine and the flowers.

They were all for me.

Yes they were just for me, with all the fire and sword that I could wield in all the world and mother could afford.

Who shall be spared from death?

No one in the end, but long as I draw breath, no man will be my friend.

Jude Cowan Montague

33

Point of View

Point of View The challenge is to write about a well known situation or character from history or literature but from a different point of view, the thoughts and feelings of a bystander perhaps, an onlooker, or a secondary character whose story has not been told at all, or you feel told inadequately, so that with your help we may see things and people in a different light.

Choose poetry (40 lines max) or prose (750 words max).

Some characters spring to mind at once. Herod, for example, Hardy, the naval officer Nelson asked to kiss him (or did he say ‘Kismet’?), Joseph Severn who was with Keats when he died in Rome. If you feel a touch of humour might help, what did Baldrick really think of Captain Blackadder, and how about the post-death thoughts of the shark Damien Hirst put in formaldehyde? But these are just my ideas, I’m sure you’ll have plenty of your own.

We hope you’ll be inspired to see this as an exercise in Life Writing and to try to make your alternative POV’s as historically accurate and empathetically plausible as the facts allow. And if there are no facts? You can make them up.

Tony Brignull Bathsheba and Abishag Bathsheba “Bathsheba bowed and paid homage to the king ... and she said to him, ‘My lord, you swore to your servant ... ‘” 1 Kings 1:16-17.

Words of the mother of wisdom: spotless life is not a human life. Integrity is vain, naïve of flexibility for righteousness, like “soldier”, “king”, or “wife” is but a temporary role. Death is permanent. When power speaks, obey.

Impurity can soon be washed away; the honor of the dead is merest breath.

Don’t close yourself to life. When it is time for mourning, mourn. Take comfort where it lies.

The righteous end up lonely, cold, awake the wise have open arms and open eyes and patience. Eat and drink and wash. The crime should be postponed. When power is offered, take.

Abishag “And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not.” 1 Kings 1:4.

My love is honey, milk and warmth. My love exults in only what is possible, together as we are. My eyes are doves behind a veil - I’m dark, desirable 34

Point of View

and free. My love is presence, not possession I am my beloved’s, he’s not mine.

Desire is kin to murder, so the question for the peaceful lover - milk, or wine?

I am an orchard blooming - better this, the fragrance, not the fruit of love, than caught in webs of intrigue. Many fail, one throne condemns them all. Better to claim one kiss, enjoy some warmth, and then to die forgotten and unstained. My vineyard is my own.

35

Money

Money We are due to celebrate our third anniversary on 9th February [2016] and we must celebrate it in style!

The ANNIVERSARY CHALLENGE this year is to write on the theme of MONEY. The suggestion that we write on this theme emerges from reading and thinking about recent developments in our immensely long thread on the Rhodes statue. I hope the idea will appeal!

A maximum of 300 words of prose, or 40 lines of poetry.

Lucy Newlyn For Richer (Not Poorer) It sure was love when first you caught my eye.

There’s nothing that my love is equal to.

You look a million dollars all the time So I shall give you credit where it’s due.

I love you more than any man I’ve met You took me to have champagne at the Ritz That surely was a date I can’t forget, And you brought me that diamond ring that fits So perfectly it almost made me cry!

I couldn’t wish for more; I can’t pretend That anyone could love you more than I, but There’s only so much time we have to spend.

You need to know, you’re my heart’s one desire Until you, my darling credit card, expire.

Amelia Gabaldoni

37

Originality and Imitation

Originality and Imitation Tabitha [Hayward] and I have decided that the first challenge we are setting is to write a poem, piece of prose, piece of drama or something entirely new on the topic of “Originality and Imitation”. This is an intentionally wide topic, so here are some ideas to prompt your imagination: • • • • •

A poem which is highly original, or one which is deliberately clichéd or imitating A poem in an unrecognised form or one which conforms very strictly to form A poem which is very different to your usual personal style A poem about the difficulties and uncertainties of being original Or, of course, a poem about the subjects of Originality and Uncertainty themselves

Alexander Bridge Two Chough Poems by T...H… Chough My imbricated cloak spreads wide.

My flight is against sea-slick rock face, unyielding granite, over your heads, out of sight.

You watch me in wonder But I am indifferent impervious.

Unaware of you.

I perform for myself alone.

The sea’s spray grabs for me, the green edge tilts, the vertical displaced at my swoop’s command.

Cliffs as high as England beneath my twig feet.

I dare.

Chough Flying I heave up the painful ascent, baulked by humps and tussocks to the vibrating edge, cling appalled vertiginous, as rocks smithereen the sea’s orderly advance, as bullet spray flies and ricochet pocks the cliff.

The salt wind and the rusted plough desolate the machair to coarse grass, gnarled broom, and sea pink, but the Chough persists, unconquered.

Undependent on current, pressure, or oxygen.

The tips of his primaries find chords on the keys of the air.

Rain-lashed, gale-buffeted, wind-ruffled, he defeated the Irish Channel, and colonised this headland.

His sapient eye, his crowing call proclaim it.

39

Originality and Imitation

Now his curved bill plumbs the story of Cornwall; opens veins of beetle and tin that bleed his feet red.

His strong down-stroke a self-applause, the up-swing an acclamation.

Sandie Byrne

40

Gambling

Gambling Maybe you’ll want to write a story about a poker player in a high stakes game.

Or a poem about taking calculated risks.

Or a piece about putting it all in the line for a shot at a better outcome.

However you want to approach it this week’s contest is on the theme of “Gambling”!

Alexander Bridge Anchors Anchorites, like Julian of Norwich who I have read about recently, would stay in a tiny room attached to a church and pray, study and worship God all day.

Anchors Between four stone walls Beneath the heavy roof The anchorite peers, breath held for the strong circle-sound of hymns Verses turn for seventy seconds The door held open, a coincidence, like visions, by a bookmark of candle light Voices ushered in by the great acoustic dome She takes a chance in assuming that it’s round like His voice The music lures its own end, unlike it began Then, flustered, glancing at the cross, returning to the scripture.

Eyes down and steady, feeling in her mind the view from the pious height: An unlikely breeze stirs the pages.

Alexander Bridge

41

Autumn

Autumn This week’s theme is inspired by Keats’ ‘Ode to Autumn’ - the challenge is either to, like Keats, write an ode, a poem celebrating and praising what is great about autumn, or an “anti-ode” (for want of a better term!) attacking/criticising the less great parts about autumn, which Keats fails to mention! You could write in the style of Keats, parody him, or subvert his poem to create something less full of the joys of autumn!

Tabitha Hayward

Autumn haiku I Sun and wind among the apple-trees, and the small fruit already fall.

Washing flaps and twists on the line. Our cat chases a white butterfly.

The window rattles in its frame. A climbing rose trails against the pane.

II Michaelmas daisies tall as trees; and around them on the unmown lawn fat pigeons soodle among the layered leaves and windfalls, loosely strewn.

Sun all day. The cat still cares for nothing and for no-one; not at all.

III Rain drizzles among the yellowing hostas, now nibbled to lace by slugs.

The cat sits indoors eyeing squirrels on the lawn: not worth the bother.

An immense pear, bruised by falling, disintegrates, feasted on by flies.

Lucy Newlyn 43

Autumn

An apologia for escapism “I hope you are better employed than in gaping after weather.”

(John Keats to John Hamilton Reynolds, 21 September 1819) This is the autumn equinox, when a new moon brings fine weather; and near Twyford Down on a Sunday afternoon Keats walks the water meadows, soaking up the sun. He notes how fine the air is, with a “temperate sharpness”; how those stubble fields are warm; and how he loves them better than the chilly green of spring.

Five weeks have passed since, under a cloudless sky, the cavalry charged at Peterloo, hacking the crowds with sabres: fifteen were killed, more than six hundred injured. Indignation spreads like forest fire; Hunt is tried at York Assizes, and (with four others) jailed for sedition. As the days shorten, Parliament cracks down with its “Six Acts” and the nation hunkers down for winter: the maimed in Oldham, Royton, Crompton, Saddleworth and Lees; the poor in Mossley, Middleton and Rochdale; the downtrodden in shocked and bloodied Manchester.

Keats, relaxed after his long walk, returns to Winchester and pens a poem about the weather. It’s been four long years since he’s known a September day like this: a day when he could fill his addled lungs with air.

(As Tambora erupted, spreading darkness over the world like disease, the first signs of his sickness came ... since then, neither he nor anyone has known a normal summer.)

Today, with the harvest safely gathered in, can he be allowed a thanksgiving? Eighteen months from now, coughing himself to death in Rome, far from the rosy stubble plains, he’ll not be hearing the hedge-crickets sing.

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Autumn

45

Social Media

Social Media The theme of this next challenge is going to be ‘Social Media’. We’re leaving the theme open again for you to interpret as you will, and I’m sure there will be some wonderfully inventive takes on this. For example, you could try and write a piece in 140 characters or less, in the format of a ‘tweet’, or tell a short story as though through a Facebook conversation, or using hashtags or emojis … or just take the impact of social media as the theme for a more conventional piece of writing, of course!

Tabitha Hayward Free Speech Armoury of the mouth, dental crenellations, prattlements, bartering ram forever in service of fending off, ending, offending >> In original post “we boast our light >> but if we look not wisely on The Sun >> it self it smites us into darknes” >> >> *Starkness. Typical narrow mind misses >> >> the marrow, mortifying fortifying experience >> >> that shallow nest of imperfect perception >> >> >> we brits don’t need your expert-tease >> >> >> aggro-saxon let status inflate us yeh facts >> >> >> are distraction spoken smoke and mirrors >> >> >> >> Lol. The press’s minions puffed on winged >> >> >> >> winds of o-pinions, it’s “preju-dis and preju-dat” >> >> >> >> at once too much and not enough discrimination, >> >> >> >> igno-rants, dumb-ocracy, free speech has failed >> >> >> >> >> Then all hail silence, scrolling this thoughterfall >> >> >> >> >> chevrons cascading, masquerading, conversing >> >> >> >> >> conversely, cross-purpose while trolls usurp us >> >> >> >> >> and reason is treason forever and ever amen.

Tom Clucas

47

Unconventional Sonnets

Unconventional Sonnets The fern garden at the Golden Temple “... the golden rule for sonnet proportions, as rigorously upheld by Jared Campbell.” - L. Newlyn The fern grove is as nice as planned.

The path is smooth and perfect and in places crumbling. Forest pushes through the cracks.

The sky was blue, the clouds were white, the ferns were brilliant green that night, when nobody was there and everything was black.

The forest was so still it seemed a world apart. The lovely stream that drains the valley is polluted and it reeks.

I wasn’t there to see the oldgrowth trees asleep. A pheasant told me all about it in a tongue that no one speaks.

He said the forest’s bright and clear, as friendly as it is austere, and no one’s ever pierced the darkness at its heart.

He might be right, I wouldn’t know.

Anyone can point and show that ferns are products of self-referential art, which means you have to start at goal.

Those who can’t comprehend the whole will also have no hope of reading any part.

Jared Campbell

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Unconventional Sonnets

unconventional sonnet - or is it?

Sonja Benskin Mesher

49

Elegy or Obituary

Elegy or Obituary This week the challenge is to write an elegy or obituary - this could be for a real person, perhaps a famous or historical figure, or for a fictional character, and could be comical or serious, in poetry or in prose, it’s up to you…”

Alexander Bridge Letter from Tomis “laeta fere laetus cecini, cano tristia tristis” This sense of exile’s very hard to bear.

I left, it’s true; but now they’ve all left me.

Nothing remains the same. I wonder where My Country’s gone? I can no longer share Their selfish values and mendacity.

This sense of exile’s very hard to bear.

The Image and Emotions rule. Don’t dare To check the facts or argue rationally.

Is anything the same? I wonder where.

Blame it on others when things don’t seem fair.

“Don’t give them any! Just keep all for me”.

This sense of exile’s very hard to bear.

All’s changed. All’s relative. One mustn’t care.

Beauty’s not Truth and Truth’s not beauty Ful. What remains the same? I wonder where Old certainties have gone? What’s left to share?

The Canon’s dead: - there’s no stability.

This sense of exile’s very hard to bear.

Somewhere must stay the same. Do you know where?

Brian Smith

51

Purple

Purple Wisteria When through carelessness I sawed across my thumb and not the wisteria branch, the blood flowed freely from the channel that I’d cut through flesh and nail.

Wrapped in cloth, it seeped a little more as I worked on, restoring order to the wall.

They were whippy shoots when first I tied them in, reaching from the same ladder almost twenty years ago.

Now gnarled and stiff, some are thick as arms, my snap decisions held in arcs and loops forever: a sort of writing on the wall, to warn how youth’s ad hoc becomes in time unbending.

Close up, I see my twists of wire have cinched like a garrote, or as a wedding ring holds in the plumping finger fat of ageing bride or groom.

But in May, when breaking waves of bloom on bloom repay my years of careful pruning, then it’s a smugger story: “The well-tended vine” - good show, you harvest what you sow.

My thumb? Completely healed and tapping on this keyboard now to space the words, this record without which you’d never know.

Tony Hufton

53

Sorry

Sorry Psalm 51:3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

Sorry I No word for “sorry” in German – “Entschuldigung” is just a round-lipped version of “mea culpa”.

Do I need to be at fault to feel your pain and say “I’m sorry”? Your “Oh, don’t worry,” is such a useless reply.

Sorry II Once, I told a beggar I was sorry (I had no change – he made me sad) he piled on me a thousand tonnes of guilt with one long stare and gob of phlegm.

Sorry III Don’t pity me, compassion!

Don’t divert me, kindness!

Don’t console me, mercy!

Don’t condole me, solace!

Don’t say “sorry”, saviour!

Feel for me, be tender, close and rationally distant, too.

Ache for me in silence.

Natasha Walker

55

No Word

No Word Describe or demonstrate a feeling for which there is no existing wor Alexander Bridge Cuttings i.

Rummage for words to describe this numbness but language too is numb heat-treated meanings shrink- wrapped and sterile. Where were you when the populace outlawed reason?

Latte Larkins and panini Plaths typing the next great Americano novel backed up on despotic circuits. ii.

Arise arm- chair economist housebound again sandbag the senses showering twice a luxuriant novitiate.

Take time to perform this debtrestructuring of feeling.

The news cycle like laundry rinsed in blood vermillion weight in your pocket. Rebarbative ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ from an associate at Goldman’s brings home serious wedge but I couldn’t possibly. iii.

Days trickle down. Sleep on sorrow like toothache.

CommonSense tells me my argument is dirigible but at least it floats. Backspace and keep back- spacing through the day. November landscape retrograde as drizzle digests the commuter belt clouds like enzymes still this fantasy of a plagueless past returned.

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No Word

iv.

Scandinavian metal is most apt the fall of hearts an airborne murder pollster of ravens hunger an imported pain antipodean driving the humanist traipse through the mulch.

Later, the night Bahnhof is overfamiliar and otherworldly platformed with ice and migrants.

Tom Clucas

57

60s

60s The Sixties - A Bermuda Triangle of Idealism “About a thousand years ago there was a very brief period of time that is now referred to as the 60’s, lasting eleven or twelve minutes before the hustlers and hoaxers poured in. And it has become a kind of “black hole” in the national Cosmos into which you know all the noblest and fiercest aspirations of a generation sunk and disappeared in a kind of Bermuda Triangle of Idealism. And this is the song that I wrote many many years ago when I refused that seductive invitation to join in a general celebration of another silly idea.” (Leonard Cohen) That was Cohen in 1993, commenting on his song “There is a war” (1970/71). In this challenge, you are invited to submit your own impressions of the Sixties, in poetry, drama, prose or song. Accompanying illustrations/photos/recordings are encouraged. You are welcome to approach this theme from any angle that you like - journalistic or historical, personal or political, anecdotal or philosophical, poetic or musical. Please stick to a limit of 750 words.

Lucy Newlyn Dec. 24, 1962 It’s the night before Christmas. The kids are in bed.

The house is abundantly trimmed green and red, though darkness has fallen and I am alone aware of the ornaments cluttering our home.

The children, I’m sure, are enjoying a vision recycled from magazines and television of Slinkys and Hershey’s and robots and toys, the interests that turn little boys into boys.

But back in the thirties there weren’t any gifts.

All dad would bring back when he got off his shift was himself, if you’re lucky. And anything more’s unexpected. It’s grace if you’ve learned to be poor.

The season was magical then. Where’d it go, the moonlight that lived in the new-fallen snow, the warmth that arose from our sharing of need, not tinsel and chestnuts and lists of our greed.

What will they think of, five decades from now, my little ones, snug in their ignorance? How will they learn what we all know who weathered the storm?

My children, so soft and so comfortably warm?

My memories are mine, and theirs will be theirs.

I close all the curtains and climb up the stairs.

The wife has gone tranquil. Her breathing is deep.

I silence my thoughts in the damper of sleep.

Jared Campbell

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60s

Busy Being Born A paperback account of nineteen-sixty-five is issued in my fiftieth year; as it concludes, I hear a crackly Churchill in the author’s voice: “It was the year that gave us a new tomorrow the tomorrow that is our today.” True enough, for me; and I’m tempted to allow the glow of history to illuminate my own birth date, take credit for the Race Relations Act, death penalty abolished and flogging too, imagine that without me Dylan wouldn’t turn electric, or Moog find synthesis, that Edward Bond refrained from stoning, and Tynan never swore.

Milestones of an era, printed in monochrome.

I remember nothing of them, but just as all their impacts colourwashed the backdrop of my life, I could hand-tint the photographs, deckle-edged and black-and-white, my parents took in sixty-five: the writing desk, which hid the Easter eggs, in teak, the tartan garden rug in burgundy and green, the white-and-silver artificial Christmas tree, vivid with hindsight; and further back, the ink which marked indelibly a plastic bracelet, around my newborn wrist, identifying me, bound by a string of digits to that lifelong date.

Fiona Larkin

59

Advent

Advent This week’s theme, now the countdown to Christmas has begun, is ADVENT! Interpret this however you choose to (it doesn’t have to just be Christmassy, but could also look at the meaning of advent as the arrival/coming into being of something more generally - although of course Christmas entries would be very welcome!)

Tabitha Hayward .10.12. i do not have an advent calendar. it is a season of dark.religion waiting. it may be time to regrade christmas.

Sonja Benskin Mesher

61

Advent

Hi Herod Hi Herod, I thought I’d touch base with you on rolling out this Judæa taxation program. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that it promises to be beneficially impactful on your revenue stream going forward; and slapping import duties on gold, frankincense and myrrh is a no-brainer, even if it did make those star-gazing camel-drivers throw their toys out of the pram! Just what were they on?

With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, your decision to downsize the client base by slaughtering all those so-called wholly innocent children went down like a lead balloon - but the spin-off is that you won’t have to provide quite so many free school meals or child care facilities.

Can I stir-fry this idea in your think-wok? Before this Jesus guy cuts the mustard with his blue-sky thinking, you’ll need to incentivise the scribes and Pharisees - give them a sunshine enema! I suggest you run this up the flagpole with Pontius Pilate, just to make sure we’re all singing from the same hymn-sheet. Let’s eat a reality sandwich here: this Christianity cult isn’t bringing anything new to the table and won’t gain traction, I promise you.

At the end of the day it’s all down to crisis management - so chin up, walk tall, and hold your head up high (as Salome might have said).

Ave atque vale, Cæsar Augustus PS Have a look at http://www.messiahdirect.com - simply divine!

PPS What are you doing for Christmas next year?

Darrell Barnes

62

The Fine Line between Comedy and Tragedy

The Fine Line between Comedy and Tragedy Might seem a bit obvious, but this week’s challenge is to write something about “The fine line between comedy and tragedy”.

Interpret as you wish. There’s been plenty of it this year, but it’s also a perennial theme in both genres. Might be worth considering the act of revenge and revenge tragedy is so often (outside of Hamlet, at least) funny at the same time as disturbing and troubling.

Alexander Bridge The Fine Line A seam of meaning running through each day: isn’t that what makers dream of? Filament of notes, words, hues, spun from experience, thread for beads of a lifelong melody, a seam of meaning running through turbulent years of grief, sickness, poverty, their shadow cut away to leave beauty immiscible, pearl of tragedy, moonlit rain, a seam of meaning running through rare moments of grateful insight.

We deify those who plucked out life’s golden nerve and left us songs to sing: their lives seem prismatic, a seam of meaning running through.

Tom Clucas

63

Modern technology

Modern technology The idea here is that sonnets use old language and are often very antique, so your task is to bring them up to date.

Alexander Bridge techno It will again in time from me to you, this science within but unknown to me, these laws of physics slowly shown as true, this darkly working bodily chemistry, the liver’s factory, the heart’s desires, the electronic wobbling of the brain, the atomic gangs of soft and hard wires, their secrets squeezed and teased out to explain themselves to themselves. And from nothing’s night, no in, no out, self-consciousness arose, brought space and time and particles in flight, the very cutting edge, caught as it goes and now equipped a thousand ways to see how to speed truth and lies to you and me.

David Braund

64

Protest

Protest Three times you cried (for Jelena) 1.

Only now it’s coming back to me how we trudged up to the Parthenon: dust and crowds; sequins of sweat on your lip; then the building - blam! broken, naked, but gloriously clad in history; and my surprise and love as you simply cried, not knowing why, as if some purer joy had been set free at the birthplace of democracy.

2.

It was seven in the morning and raining.

Laughing, in his immigrant’s accent you reminded me of your dad’s old quip: vote early and, ha ha ha, vote often.

Then, after we’d run back to the car, on your cheek was that a raindrop or a tear? “I’ve always cried,” you said, “as I make my cross, because for us voting somehow mattered more”.

3.

We marched there, chanting weedily to proclaim our solidarity. Weeping, you pinned your thin red paper heart to the Eastern European shop that was set alight two nights before.

I write to save the words you wrote: “My parents too were refugees, and they were welcomed here.

Everyone is welcome here.”

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Protest

Tony Hufton

66

Ciphers

Ciphers A cipher is a thing which poses a sort of interpretation on something else, a key for a lock to reveal a meaning, a hermeneutic object that commits semantic violence.

See if you can put all these ideas into a poem, or even write two poems, one as the cipher for the other!

Alexander Bridge Mesopotamia Only brambles invade this long thin slip of land, tunnelling between tributaries.

Low leafless hedges border the path, and on either side runs a cold stream.

Behind, the trees are wintry and bare, emphasising edges, distances. We tend to gravitate to this place in the new year, looking for somewhere to walk companionably.

Partnership is effortless here; the options are mapped out openly. The path is even and well defined; the parallels are clear.

Walking side by side we feel in our element, but free - surveying bands of water and land that alternate, as far as the eye can see.

In this quiet place of silvery green, where all is stilled to strange attentiveness by the winter sun, the underside of things cannot be known. There’s not a breath of wind to stir the grass, or break each soundless glassy surface - only a sharp bright crispness in the air, and the mute calligraphy of branches.

What is there behind the waiting silence that cannot be settled with a single wordless look or a touch of the hand?

If the question could be answered, every secret element would become part of a speaking allegory. The two of us walking together here would be no more than matchstick figurines in a flattened landscape: symbols of something or other, dreamt up by the ingenious reader. But so in-between a place is not claimable, like territory.

It is not yours, nor ours. We are here inside it, and it is neither this, nor that, nor the other.

The key is to interpret, not decipher.

Lucy Newlyn

67

Ciphers

68

Signs of Spring

Signs of Spring This week, the theme is ‘Signs of Spring’. This could include both traditional signs of Spring, such as longer days, more sunshine, Spring flowers appearing, etc, or could be more personal or particular things which not everyone might think of, but which just remind you of Spring, or which you associate with a particular Spring (either this one, or a remembered one) - or any other interpretation you can think of!

Tabitha Hayward IKEA and the Chesterfield A Chesterfield - you know the sort of thing: a comfy seat that’s very hard to move, lots of little buttons tied with string, on which your parents probably made love was rarely sat on once its springs went “boing”.

The vicar’s wife had once exclaimed “by Jove!

Is that the time? I really must be going!” and, getting up, she realised with a shock a spring had snagged her dress and was undoing the dainty knitted fabric of her frock.

She left the house half naked, close to tears.

“That sofa’s got to go! Let’s see the stock in trendy, modern outlets. It seems IKEA’s lots of styles with names we can’t pronounce”.

But comfort was appalling, it appears.

In the end it’s craftsmanship that counts: the Chesterfield resprung regained its bounce.

Darrell Barnes

69

Signs of Spring

Snowdrops I hadn’t got a lot on, to understate it, so I went to look at the snowdrops.

It was that day the computers froze and they were working on a fix?

If you went to private browsing you could do a work-around, they said, but for me that was largely theoretical.

It was quite a show. As white as whitened teeth and a good deal of nodding.

Alice Oswald likens them to maids holding in an urn the ashes of their hearts.

Does that seem a little fanciful to you?

A little gothic? Me too, I’m all for gaiety, even in a churchyard, even one ‘twixt Cash Converters and Reds Convenience Store.

Anyway, you couldn’t ask for more, though strictly between you and me, I could have done without the beer cans and, come to mention it, the syringe.

We who have lived so long and seen so much, these days it’s hard to have a virgin thought.

Be pre-warned: everything comes ready cooked in its own unique and authentic sauce, or else buried under quite a heap of crap.

Still, you plant a bulb and after a year oftentimes it comes back, only more so.

Without wishing to point the finger, if only everything in life were as reliable.

You know to what I’m referring to.

Tony Hufton

70

Anniversary

Anniversary The theme for our ANNIVERSARY CHALLENGE is “Roadtrip through our favourite places in the world (this could include what we see, hear, smell, taste and remember in those places)”. This is Natasha Walker’s suggestion, and it has strong support. It can be in any verbal medium, with accompanying images and/or music as an additional option.

Forum Facilitator Four Postcards from the Low Countries Tom, from the Netherlands God bless this dream of days unbroken, this fairy tale in which I’ve woken, each sunrise in adagio, with waters still and rooftops low; one glimpse of Rijn and I’m beholden! your thinly-beaten light so golden, your windmill blades forever turning to vivify this seat of learning; the very walls inscribed with poems, then bring me wine in jeroboams, oh lovely Leiden, I am smitten they’ll never drag me home to Britain!

All week I drift beneath the garrets, the roof-tiles in their reds and clarets, unchanged, it seems, in my remembrance, the side-streets of Vermeers and Rembrandts, and if the heart from here can go towards the birthplace of Van Gogh, behold! the beauty vision yields: he saw the world in tulip fields!

To live within the peaceful palace, with still life, banquet scene, and chalice although I’m but a lowly for’gner, I’m home from home in this Dutch genre.

Jared, from the Netherlands Linda - for lunch we ate a bland and very yellow cheese with bland and airy bread and bland and yellow beer.

They seem to like it here.

On every corner, glowing signs Heineken, Grolsch and Amstel - shine and promise light and golden, thinly hopped and alcoholicked, primly fizzied water. First I take a sip of Heineken to make the stubborn bite of sandwich fall, but then (unfairness of it all!)

I have to take another bite 71

Anniversary

to make the weak-beer taste take flight.

For lunch I had Catch-22.

I left the restaurant missing you.

To kill some time, Tom suggested a museum. It was congested, but fine. The paintings were dark. Frame, face, face, lace, face, lace, face, lace, face, lace.

We went to dinner. Cabbage and potatoes. Sausage. It was bland.

Jared, from Belgium Linda We went a little outside town to a restaurant of some renown and had a lentil-scallop salad whose sauce was hip and strange, but valid, puff-pastry with gray snails inside, and lamb filet with gravy, dried pear chutney and a vegetable I didn’t recognize at all, and every course brought different beer one sweet and plummy, one austere, and one as light as sunshine on a wheat field when the autumn starts to yawn.

Returning to the city, we stopped in for just an hour or three at Delirium Cafe, granddad of all the Belgian bars. I had some Orvals there - they really are as wonderful as they’re bizarre it tastes like leather. Or like soap.

I’ll make you try it soon. I hope you’ll like it too. In any case, I think that Tom enjoyed that place (in Holland he was quiet. Dour.)

He’s loosened up and hour by hour is starting to enjoy himself.

We talked about the town of Delft, I think, or how a place’s mood can shape one’s sense of all that’s viewed?

I think we thought Trump’s a buffoon.

I’ve got to go. It’s dinner soon.

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Anniversary

Tom, from Belgium I am not one who gladly bustles through busy Metro stops in Brussels, and with all due respect, UNESCO, I could not stop to dine al fresco: Grand Place was far too full of hubbub, so I retreated to a suburb and sadly found the buildings modern, the highways jammed, the pavements sodden.

It’s hard to weigh the old-style gothic against the busy shops and traffic; I’d quickly had my fill of waffles and tourist japes about the brothels.

It’s funny how a change of mood can change a place’s attitude; confess, it happens (far from seldom), I might have judged you harshly, Belgium: perhaps I am too much a Scrooge to feel myself at ease in Bruges, or else I like my Danish hygge too much to be at home in Brugge; I found the streets not quite disarming (although the river-ways were charming) and though it’s quaintly medieval we tourists caused too much upheaval.

Jared Campbell and Tom Clucas

73

Misunderstanding

Misunderstanding This week’s challenge is to write a monologue or piece of dialogue, in either poetry or prose, on the theme of Misunderstanding. You could write it as a scene from a play, with stage directions etc, or in the form of a poem or short story, and it could be a piece that is complete in itself or part of something longer - up to you!

Tabitha Hayward Asymptote

Tom Clucas

75

Cold War

Cold War Spring being a type of war on the cold, and with international tension mounting (isn’t it always mounting though?) this seems a highly appropriate challenge this week.

Or you could take it personally, so to speak, and write about a relation or relationship which has become something of a stand-off.

Alexander Bridge The Coldest War 1% who own just over 50% somehow have persuaded over 50% of the remaining 99% who own just under 50% to vote for policies that will continue to move more from the 99% to the 1%. 8 individual men control as much wealth between them as 50% of the world’s population, the poorest half, inequality beyond grotesque, social polarisation seeking catastrophe. In China and India old figures underestimated the amount of poverty and the half of the world’s wealth previously allotted to 62 multi-billionaires is now shared by only eight, a golf buggy’s worth

David Braund

77

Wilderness

Wilderness The theme for this week’s challenge is ‘Wilderness’. All interpretations welcome - you could bring in ideas about Lent and Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, describe an actual place which is a wilderness, or interpret more metaphorically, as somewhere or something which is inhospitable, wild, abandoned or easy to get lost in.

Tabitha Hayward

bad night dreaming dreamed of devastation, flew miles low over concrete . skeletons, bones of the thing.

all is dust, as dust we have become. slow.

grey. nothing moves here no more. no sighs.

they have forgotten us. we have forgotten them.

are we now the bones of what we were?

bad night dreaming.

Sonja Benskin Mesher

79

Up with the lark

Up with the lark I think I should set a challenge as I haven’t been around for a while. I’d like to ask for poems about a time of day. It could be any time of day. But I would ask you to dig into that time of day and find something special, something intrinsic to that particular hour. Middle of the night. Late afternoon. I don’t mind what time.

People find they have different moods at particular times of day. I’d like to know more about yours. Make it personal.

Jude Cowan Montague Dusk in Borrowdale Stand in the moist grass at dusk sniffing the cool air, and listen.

Beyond Stonethwaite an owl hoots and on the fell a single sheep is bleating.

Watch for a long time as the pale moon in her last quarter slowly climbs.

She is a lonely companion to three mountains, their contours and craggy fissures softened by shadow, soothed by the movement of a quiet brush.

The sky is pearly pink; mist rises from the silver water. No clock ticks.

This is the evening hush.

Lucy Newlyn

81

Scum

Scum I was down at Port Meadow yesterday and was surprised at how dirty the water and swans and rocks could be.

With that in mind, the challenge this week is “Scum”. Write about the things that have risen to the top, or the gradual accumulation of dirt, the worst of the worst, or the feeling of cleansing. Or anything else you can come up with!

Alexander Bridge Clammy These faded swans are more like puppies, with their grey bills and filthy feathers Three of them dip their necks deep, become half-swans and return with wet weeds that twist and stick I roll up my jeans and foot By foot take into the river, pricked by rain-steps, skin stinging faintly at the ankle deep, veins turning red in the clearing lens spotting Two shells with muck and green hair Swaying to be picked They’re ringed with driftwood marks, and for a moment I am surprised they don’t float In scraping scum my nails underline green, murk turns to milky muck that I shake off in the water for the brightening I wonder about teasing them apart by the folio, or squeezing all their bubbles out, or cracking them completely for the wonder but chuck them back and sit instead Two flies mate and crash into my neck and fall, turning onto the grass beside my wrist A pregnant swan said ‘This is good weather for tapping two dead clams together’ ‘I am sick of words’ Into a surprisingly wide field A white runner stretches.

Alexander Bridge

83

Summer

Summer As we are a couple of days away from June and (in Oxford at least) the weather has been seriously good lately, I think it’s time to ring in the summer challenge!

I think there are fewer poems generally on summer than on autumn, spring, or winter, so without that weight of influence on you see what you can come up with.

Alexander Bridge Sunflower Van Gogh painted really unbeatable sunflowers of huge violent petals creamy and alive stemming out of a core rusty shaving brush.

Annoyingly, no matter how hard I stare at a real sunflower, it will never be as good as Van Gogh’s; his sunflowers make you want to be them as if they were celebrities, but a real one makes you want to look more like yourself.

A real one isn’t bad to look at, the way the back of its head has a white fuzz over its green scalp like an unshaven alien, or its huge drooping hands with holes chewed through them or the bumble-bee torso that lies at its center like a microphone of dark fur.

Only my eyes can kill Van Gogh; Oh well, I lie down outside with the sunflower, and look at it against an enormous tree with billions of leaves that trail and push in the wind like long green capillaries; 85

Summer

waying in huge muscular pushes and rotations like a wheat field thrown across the sky.

My sunflower will never be the same as the tree behind it, will never be Van Gogh’s sunflower or the sunflower of Blake or Allen Ginsberg, but it is my sunflower, long and syrup-coloured, its huge shadow like a scarecrow falling into the distance, a ragged main of mad quivering yellow fingers, ghastly fibers aggressive and brilliant, burning as it smiles, the queer sunflower that it is.

Sunflower, intense and made out of my bones, painted gold - sunflower full of death and Symbols; my eyes crack open as if a brick was thrown through a black window, and your jagged green limbs climb through the hole - your Christ-thorned head beams through, as if my darkness were giving birth to you; you even cry; I cut your mossy umbilical chord and drop you into a glass of water; you’re still a child, but an old one.

I eat your petals and they cure my headaches; I stare as you stand solemn in the wind and grass, and I feel naked simply looking at you.

Alex Matraxia

86

Sub-culture

Sub-culture Write something you’d like to write about a subculture you know of.

For example, Goths, or South-American wrestling, or Dutch academia, or Oxford rowers, or Anti-Stratfordians, or competitive whistling, or witch-hunters, or communists, or salsa, or whatever you want!

Alexander Bridge Commuters They are sick of it all. The metal ribs in which their heels catch, on the descending and rising funnel tubes through which bureaucracy pours them in the name of safety and health.

They are already mentally and physically exhausted, from sighing, straining their eyes, from picking their time through the crowds, taking any small advantage to rush through, push into that opening.

The office has taken a heavy toll. They gave it for money.

Since daybreak they have smiled, frowned, clicked, argued, agreed and sighed quietly, laughed at the unfunny perhaps crying on the toilet, and have been speaking languages which did not come naturally from their parents.

They have been conscientiously applying the correct stages of reams of complex documents.

And now the body is a dry husk, empty of tears, military efficient. Drones.

So many take refuge in the stories they pin in their ears or the ones they glean from their phones.

Suits. Are you one, or casual, whichever you are, do not shrug off your plastic armour until you open your front door.

You travel, still trapped in a false persona.

The quest for peace, of a kind of peace is your grail In between stand adverts for capitalist norms.

The guardians of the trail are barriers, the LED displays, the platforms, the standing and looking and hating the broken trains the engineering.

Consider the strategies of waiting.

Observe. You cannot help hearing

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Sub-culture

a girl is talking increasingly louder, her voice down the wire as if to block out the grey and the proximity of strangers with the sound of her own inner struggles and desires.

The office couple keep up their dialogue, for perhaps there is still danger as they unfortunately live too near each other to slip quickly into their home selves, and relax their clothing.

An man who no one wants to sit by is muttering into his jeans and twitches up at nothing.

The healthy, sweaty jogger with her crop top and her banana, with a strain in her look, is trying so hard to make matter every second, even these wasted ones spent in this miserable manner.

Here comes the moment.

Your carriage arrives. Time to choose wisely.

Which door? How crowded is the carriage?

Who is getting in, and is there is there space for me?

Will they move up? You tell yourself this is a journey, not marriage, do not rage you can make the next hour better, it’s all about your skills honed, pragmatic. Commuters, execute your collective free wills.

Jude Cowan Montague

88

Sub-culture

The Silents Charlie wink your eye Charlie pick up your hat that’s right we love your Charlie feet popular - why? - moustaches, everywhere not many venues can work with REAL FILM the boat going to the Picture House in Nottingham the beat a dog wagging his tail on a drum wearing the T-shirt of the living dead Nosferatu’s fingers down my neck what a gang, what a group of Clara Bows with our red hair we are IT flapping our programmes, colds from the old guys, sniff the shadows study the ephemera Julian in sandals swanking through the screen digitally it’s swashbuckley time, come on Douglas, boots and smile wider than cheese wider than the moon infected by a runaway train hitting the moon, going through the moon, out of the moon into Flick Janet from Edinburgh looking for the kilted soldiers sound-on-film hovers in the background, waiting for its starring moment in the production but for now the piano players have got it all abolitionists dancing on the black keys the klu klux klan pointing their hats at us, remember who’s making these movies Flick the Somme, the blood, the bombs, the drums the German Spy Peril the mark of Zorro Baghdad may always have thieves the faith of its fathers and the action of melodrama my poster is Mary in boy’s clothes rescuing the kids from the baby farm at the Princess Theatre smile you’re on 16fps FFS Flick 89

Sub-culture

sentimental is celluloid baptised in by Methodist immigrantsI just saw a man with no clothes on!

I just saw a man with kohl on his eyes staring right into my soul laughing (Ivor I can see why they loved you so much) Mark manages his betting shop but tonight he is a naked man on his top half in a changing room getting ready for a rugby match and it was just like someone might have seen it once in audience studies in1917 I fell asleep just then did I miss anything? war capped in the storyline the intertitles the nitrate decomposition eating your face THE END burning up if it stops still THE END a hand grenade in a tin, trapped by the metal in a case of death what was that?

D major chord crash and clap we still clap animated pictures here.

Jude Cowan Montague

90

Sub-culture

Neo Victorians BLUE BLEU BLINK BLINKING at the sun rising over a piano Cum on the troubadour of the city cummerbund fright-puzzles are on the table on the landing temple slippers on the pedals play play the infant saviour pay him five pounds the beast is in the gas pipe chasing the trembling butterflies children! child! holy woly ON FIRE! Get off first at the foundry Me the second on fire.

Get your FIRE hat on!

All hands to the fountain temple. rub my hands in gentleman butter if you’re going to make tea on the landing five o’clock, where are the fizzlers? the donna lights are low on the landing beards hiding my chin in the stained glass I’m calling you my dear old granny x granny can you hear where’s that old bloke who dressed like a red indian he was from grizzly middleland i can’t see him but i FAT and the FEEDERS and the FEARFUL WILDS FREE FLEUR FLOW FLOW OH A skirt of filly and foal, oh you, it’s a bit like dust but it’s more like a pain in your ear that keeps itching but you can’t scratch it A flag of distress - that’s it!

RESCUE ME RESCUE cue pick up veil through the back garden Maud will open gate for u U Jude Cowan Montague 91

Tempo

Tempo Tempo is a very hard word and concept to work into a poem effectively, so it is this week’s challenge.

Try to write about beats, or speed, or try to rhyme with “tempo” without making any of it seem too obvious.

Or do your own thing!

Alexander Bridge The fiddle lesson for Gill Because he’s a novice, he will hold it like it’s just a hollow piece of wood, whereas she fondles it like a living thing, moulding it to the angle of her neck, its hardness yielding to the light grip of her chin.

She must warm it for him before he arrives so that when she hands it over to him he can feel her touch still lingering in its curves, her rhythm still vibrating in its strings.

‘There you go’ she’ll say, as she passes it to him, and the lesson will begin.

It will be like lighting a match and carrying it across darkness, hands cupped to protect a wavering flame. Or like holding a small bird gently, so as not to stop its heart-beat or crush the feathers on its folded wings.

Lucy Newlyn

93

Childhood

Childhood This week is “Childhood”. I think this is a pretty rich one, there have been lots of poems on childhood. Try Clare’s “Childhood” or D.H. Lawrence’s “Discord in Childhood” for ideas.

Alexander Bridge Nigel Nigel, I’ve been fishing in murky waters like we used to with our nets in Meanwood Park, dabbling for sticklebacks, dreaming big of bullheads, and black crayfish we couldn’t even hope to catch.

Here I am again, bare knees on the bank, trawling this time for memories, scrabbling through the tangled weeds for special things to keep.

Here’s one! We used to make dams across the beck that fed the pond - your idea - using rocks and turves, plugging the holes with mud so that a huge lake spread out behind, until, on your command, at your whim when you suddenly got bored, or angry, we’d tear it all apart, thrilled with what we’d made: pent-up energy that could sweep everything away. The destroying that was the highlight of our day.

Nigel, today I googled your name - not to get in touch but just to know a bit how life’s turned out for you.

There’s just a dead-end trail or two: a company you might have formed, a learned letter you wrote long ago about a distant place. Once I met a boy who said at school you were wild - even expelled?

95

Childhood

When we took our catches home in jam jars, they always died.

They were cannibals of course you told me that amazing fact but most just floated to the top, grey, in a growing cloud of gunk.

Then all I had left was stinking water going green, and the aimless tracks of water snails on glass.

Tony Hufton

96

Childhood

Childhood: a Trilogy Childhood I When I was a child, everyone was there.

They’ve left me now, caught unaware.

I trusted more when I was small.

I couldn’t see their lies at all.

And oh, to ride on shoulders, high above the rest, (I shall not cry).

I’ll swallow tears and challenge age to leave untouched that sacred stage.

Childhood II Sore bloody knees and dirt-scratched hands have dragged the little body up the tree: there she climbs, escaping thought, she bobs above the branches, slips a bit, then holds on tight, and finds her easy balance, flips her legs around and marvels at it all.

She hurls her head back: “Kickeriki!” she calls.

Triumph laughs delight and glee: she waves and yells: “Mum, look at me!”

Childhood III I’m picking on you again, four-eyes.

For God’s sake, why don’t you stop me?

Tell me to take a flying jump or just fuck off.

Stop giving me money, stop being scared.

It’s called bullying - we both know.

And it’s not nice, but somehow natural.

You see, they all laugh and feel safe when I trip you up or call you spaz.

And it’s not just about us, is it?

Please, stop pissing yourself - there’s no way out for you and me unless you change: you’re in charge of this game’s rules.

Natasha Walker

97

Things My Soul Is

Things My Soul Is Coming up this week is a slightly leftfield one: “Things my Soul is”. Interpret how you like, but you might want to write a poem with the title “My Soul is a(n) xyz”, or write from the point of view of a speaker who isn’t you.

Or do something completely different!

Alexander Bridge My Soul is a String My soul is a string that runs down my middle From the base of my throat to the plane of my coccyx And widens itself into an infinite regression And is tightened by my love It does not meet my neck, and it does not reach my bowels, And it loosens when I relax my legs in bed When I think that I can only sleep in the dark and not the light I feel my soul in my navel and roll over And think that I love my girl so much- she is very small, and she is okay, And I travel to her a hallway and staircase away Then I eat on the things that she lays in her bed And end all her poems with anger and death, and with my thrashing and my striking I kill my girl with words I know to use My girl has me pick her up sometimes and stretch my soul out over my own back And she feels her back crack by her shoulder blades and loves me And my soul is a string like a blade of glass that will never itself snap Then I must love my girl, I love her and screw myself up into a ball And pinch the strings beneath my throat and smile and swallow all by myself And bend my eyes up and stretch out my back like an animal on tarmac I feel my soul when I sigh and become lines on a rack Or a depth of black water I am out of words sometimes, But I find them again from nowhere when my skin becomes one thing Stretched round and round me into my armpits, it flashes beneath my neck into the shooting pains of life Then my limbs become limbs away from my soul, inside but outside and thickened My girl lives in her bed only these days She sleeps but a hallway and staircase away I eat chips and popcorn and cooked fish in her bed And all our bad writing is ending in death.

Alexander Bridge

99

Things My Soul Is

.things my soul is. i think my work, my soul is in my chest.

Sonja Benskin Mesher

100

Work

Work

Peter King

101

Three Pigeons

Three Pigeons ..three pigeons.. how do they know to come back, how to come back? . i asked steaming at central station.

they were sending eggs by post those days, and dad sent primroses, i am told.

in boxes.

remember the day we bought the cat, placed in a special one for carrying, marked pigeon.

became his name.

they sent them away by train, later

we imagined we saw them fly back.

103

Three Pigeons

Sonja Benskin Mesher

104

First Aid Kits

First Aid Kits You’re not allowed to write about an actual first aid kit, or medical supplies, or anything that’s too obviously related to a first aid kit in its literal sense.

The idea is to encourage a conceptual response- so the feeling after you get a cut, or the idea of a bunch of supplies being tucked neatly into a package, or how we own things which we hope we never have to use.

Alexander Bridge Lion and Stallion, Rousham Ancient, pocked with lichen, two mighty beasts writhe and thrash.

Hungry the lion’s teeth, tearing the stallion’s hide, leaving its marks in stony flesh; yet how regal its head, with crisp mane curling.

Noble savagery triumphs over use, and the beast of the hunt can only submit to a deadly purpose: forelegs buckled, long neck arched in anguish, head contorted, jaw gaping, testicles exposed and ready to be gashed.

Vast and sedate, the landscaped garden leads from every perspective back to this.

What end is served by so stark a spectacle of struggle and dumb distress?

The statue’s silence grips, here on the calm hill side: an emblem of legitimised violence, drawing all lines of vision into single-minded focus.

Dignified, aloof, the house stands well back from the mess, its windows boarded-up, as if oblivious Lucy Newlyn

105

Re-hash

Re-hash You’re invited take a very famous poem and re-hash it in a different form. The idea is to offer a digest of the original, as Wendy Cope did in her limerick version of The Waste Land. But you don’t have to use limerick, and there’s no need to be irreverent if you don’t want to be; how about summarising whole of Paradise Lost n a single sonnet?

Lucy Newlyn Paradise Lost recast as a sonnet He made a pretty garden in the east, And put two puny little creatures there.

I went and offered one of them a feast Of apples, and I said ‘They’re good to share’, And so it trotted off and looked around And saw the other peeping round a tree And said ‘Just come and see what I have found’ I’m going to let you share it all with me’.

He saw what they were doing in his garden And said ‘I am afraid you’ll have to go, This is a sin I find it hard to pardon: Go wander round the earth an age or so.

At least I spoiled his fun and made him cross; But now he’s trying to shown me who is boss.

Justin Gosling

107

Ghostly Villanelles

Ghostly Villanelles The Governess I saw him there through window thin and other times on towers high, I saw her where the reeds draw in, black her clothes and white her skin stood stark against the dappled sky.

I saw him there through window thin, he stood without and I within that melancholy house at Bly. I saw her where the reeds draw in, reflected there my want to sin my need for love, my want to lie.

I saw him there through window thin, his face against the glass, his chin, his forehead, mouth, his nose, each eye.

I saw her where the reeds draw in, the screw begins to turn, to spin I mustn’t let the children die.

He saw me there through window thin, she saw from where the reeds draw in.

Amelia Gabaldoni

109

Villanelles

Villanelles Lot’s Wife So dark the con of man, the human ken, but no one stops you if you think you’ve got to justify the ways of God to men.

Lot’s wife looked back a bit - just once - and then her fate was not to bear a little Lot. So dark the con of man, the human ken...

No talk of quantum states, black swans or Zen! One has to be quite full of “Thou Shalt Not” to justify the ways of God to men.

A type of villanelle called ‘Kantienne’ might put the picture straight and stop the rot.

So dark the con of man, the human ken.

I think of Lady Lot most often when I see a woman priest who’s really hot to justify the ways of God to men.

The oddest things have sprung from human pen to complicate life’s vast and tangled plot.

Too dark the con of man, the human ken, to justify the ways of God to men.

Gerard Lally

111

Haikus

Haikus Urban Haiku Apple-blossom from your garden fondant-coats the rusty car in mine Daffodils planted in perfect rows; a small child runs through them laughing Rain on the puddle-pond: an empty crisp bag drifts serenely across Formal flowerbeds giddy with bees; butterflies bright as sweet-wrappers Summer park: a spotless new carpet of daisies and sunbathing girls August sun melts asphalt and ice-lollies; sticky children yawn and smile Overgrown gardens bear fruit: old orange sofas ripen in long grass A fluffy slipper peeks from next-door’s bin: one stray exotic flower Edible dawn: shiny black liquorice spiders spin candyfloss webs Small ripples crease the freshly-laundered snow; a city dreams of summer Rose Anderson 113

Pantoum

Pantoum A Yorkshire Pantoum (for t’ Tour de France) We called it t’ Tour de France, a race for lads on two wheels.

We led them a right merry dance as it took them over the hills, this race for lads on two wheels.

We’ve home-grown talent in Froome, who looked at our dales and our hills: “they’re nobbut but slopes, eeh bah gum!” said last year’s winner, Chris Froome, as t’ race departed from Leeds (some way from the slopes, eeh bah gum).

Yorkshire pudding’s all a chap needs: he packed ‘em for t’ tea back in Leeds (they’re nothing as fancy as Betty’s).

Any road, that’s what he needs, washed down by a good pint of Tetley’s which you don’t drink wi’ tea when at Betty’s, that Harrogate tea-room all posh.

Puts lead in tha’ pencil, does Tetleys, and lines your gut for French nosh.

We’re glad his top’s got a poche to squirrel away Yorkshire food (can’t stand the sight of French nosh those frogs’ legs can do you no good).

Nay, lad! The best Yorkshire food leads the rest a right merry dance: Chris Froome just needs Yorkshire pud to win this year’s Tour. Vive la France!

Darrell Barnes

115

Ottava Rima

Ottava Rima Conflict ‘His warfare is within.’

(William Cowper, The Task, Book Six) The drones have one thing right: their point-of view, how different from the people in control: they’re trained to know their chemicals, push through the pounding heart, the rush of cortisol, but still the human engine steers askew, dense clouds of passion make it yaw and roll, trapped in the valleys of its own perspective, long mazes cut by glaciers of invective.

If only minds could reach such altitudes and see the land-locked lie of the terrain, that justice points in all directions, feuds jostling like rocks raise mountains out of pain, that passions stick and slip past attitudes whose heights they neither scale nor can explain, and hence the past is an Ouroboros of righteousness, and suffering, and loss.

My dreams are under siege with news reports, with images of body bags and blood.

I form opinions as a child builds forts with shrapnel of accounts misunderstood.

These are the dead-end days of last resorts, where noble speeches bode more ill than good, where victim after victim seeks redress, each victim in their turn more merciless.

By day, I walk along the patchwork streets, with new blocks in the footprints of each blast, a record of man’s self-destructive feats, the visions which his rage has overcast.

All see that hatred’s pattern still repeats, the future goes on mirroring the past, then let’s add this: the bombs will never rest while each bear’s no-man’s land within his breast.

One day, when humans are a paragraph in books and dust, new men will learn of those who built and later bombed the Cenotaph, who felt compelled, although they really chose.

‘All against all’ will be the epitaph that brings the human chapter to a close, unless we try to emulate the drones and fight the inner wars that no one owns.

117

Ottava Rima

Easy to write, impossible to act, no mind can see its craters from above, no pairs of eyes that saw their homes attacked, no hearts that mourn the deaths of those they love.

Too true, and yet it cannot change the fact: all wars are internecine, still the dove must fly from caverns where the spirit delves, as humans lay down arms within themselves.

Tom Clucas

118

Rictameter

Rictameter Bodleian Complete freedom: all routes possible out of this lettered maze, or stay within it forever. The walls are made of knowledge, centuries of thought lie patient with dust, waiting for thumbs, but once opened they’re as fresh as the day they were printed. Thoughts immaculate, the words still playful and limber, divulging your human wants and needs, never asking anything more than your attention to make you complete.

Tom Clucas

119

Blake’s Tyger for the 21st Century

Blake’s Tyger for the 21st Century 21st Century Tiger ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’

I’m afraid of the tiger that protects me. the tiger seems to live beyond my law and in my blood, waiting, crouching, never sleeping a word of yours could make him strike your lips would bleed, and my exhilaration tear your hopes apart it holds knives, my tiger, it holds lives don’t mess with my tiger or me in the middle of the open night it runs riot like a bus on fire through my home town burning bright punching through a thousand windows and one of them is you, who left me like a shoe tiger tiger rescue me i’ll never win with you in me. o tiger tiger, tiger tiger

Rod Tweedy

121

Religions

Religions Reformation 2.0

Tom Clucas

123

Nonsense

Nonsense The blisty grane There was a glube with frentrails flothed That flid bethrew the catamane And when its gludrops flupped on slote It wound its nuster round the sain.

And soon the gludrops clost their drist And now the glube was crucked with brane The nuster drazzled and the jist Was flabbernocked with blisty grane.

Oh glisty glube! Oh gludrops blitched!

Where droth and loth are slicht amain There carst is all the drumin critch And crutched the olve with sloty scrain.

Lucy Newlyn

125

Scripture

Scripture The word of God The word of God is rich like frankincense, it smokes with meaning, sensuous and dense, it clings to lips and coats the tongue with awe, marooning minds on sands of metaphor and winding hearts in mazes of the sense.

Bejewelled with figures, decked beyond expense with tropes whose tinted light disorients, no wonder people’s dazzled minds adore the word of God. It bottles human passions’ heady scents, leaves readers giddy with omnipotence, a perfume of unreason spreading war; men mutilate the texts they murder for as each benighted conscience reinvents the word of God. Tom Clucas

126

Scripture

River Border I stop to admire the garden where the cows sing of grace and each is given strength.

There were gates but they have blown open.

There’s birds everywhere.

In haste, I chased a brave man here, a fighter, who was angry with me, and he hid, gladdening the fat air.

Possessing nothing firm I wander the grass, looking for the swift-footed.

A spring.

I drink the precious juice mingled with milk.

I have heard of West and East and still wonder at the meaning of each.

Battle-makers invoke the hero’s name but my gaze is distracted by the unsteady tails settling on his shoulders, giving his game away.

His brightness shines out of the bush, shaking with laughter in the presence of heaven and earth.

Jude Cowan Montague

127

Greed

Greed Greed The stranger who walks among us, unusual now no longer but accepted fully integrated; his differences, which might once have raised our wrath, we have ceased to see; we have ceased to notice her at all.

The flags and symbols he has raised aloft tower over us, unassailed, unquestioned, fully taken to our hearts, thoughtlessly adhered to, ground into political thought, mediated and spewed up again and again until we do not even know she is the star we follow, the guide to all our choices. Until, one day, tragedy, too stark to disavow, wrings our hearts as well as our hands, recalls the ancient stuff we’re made of, roughens the water of our private pools, rippling unlearnt lessons in our face, demanding enquiries into a past of pleas unheeded and warnings just ignored and we are given yet another chance to see the stranger for what it is, alien, terrible and unforgiving.

David Braund

128

Ancestry

Ancestry Family I watch the paint dry in the recently furnished living room. Dead objects lie carefully in their place, a black and white family photograph like a Hollywood kiss in the dark, cushions stuffed with sleeping pills, a TV that has become a portrait of James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.

I ask mum and dad why we painted the walls; apparently the walls have ears so we were clogging them up, making sure nobody could hear a thing.

I can’t watch black and white anymore, its mythology that just seems so televised with its series of bad actors waking me up from a bad dream where a family tree turns into a weeping willow, long heavy tendrils writhing down like a giant squid; sometimes I don’t even know if I’m there on the tree; maybe I am, like some rotten fruit, ready to fall and hit a genius on the head and crack his skull to inspire gravity.

Otherwise I’ll just be eaten up, picked by a tentacle; glossy and white, running down my back in my sleep, down my throat as I yawn or cry, and plants itself at the bottom of my gut, and branches out so that vines grow out of me; 129

Ancestry

all of a sudden the horrors of Daphne’s transition becomes apparent, branches out of my eyes, out of my ass, ever-growing and fingerless arms curling in my cochlear, flooding me with branches taking my bones, feeding them to the sea, painting the walls with them like the start of ‘Eraserhead’ I’m hoping The Man in the Planet pulls a lever and lets me go, to fall from the tree and the emptiness of paradise.

130

Daily Bread

Daily Bread Our Daily Bread She struggles up the high-rise stair; the food she needs is far below.

A refugee thrust high in air, some little warmth still far to go.

Her baby’s breath against her breast, her own breath steaming in the cold, from time to time she stops to rest, adjust her grip, renew her hold.

Her mind fills then with noise and fear the whine of jet planes overhead, and drowning faces bobbing near and terror, anguish, mortal dread.

A liftless journey down and up makes scarce a ripple in her cup.

David Braund

131

Interim Challenge

Interim Challenge A Blessing on Tories May the new dawn of equality come soon and inevitably, rendering your old ways redundant.

May you suffer as you go through the necessary changes, like a growing child.

May your souls, dry and parched as arid fields in the baking sun, be quickened into painful life by breezes of love and forgiveness. May your stony hearts, softened as at the touch of gentle September rain, feel the agonising pangs of guilt and remorse.

May your new-found tolerance (matured in the hidden valleys of your compassion, and watered by fresh rivers of reason) remind you perpetually of your former crimes.

When plump blackberries of kindness ripen in your hedgerows, and apples of fairness drop from trees of justice, to be harvested by all, may you belatedly comprehend what it is to share the means of production.

When you are tired after unprecedented labour may you sleep soundly with a clear conscience but wake to memories of greed and idleness that will haunt you at all hours.

May the revolution come suddenly, as in the passing of a single season, leaving you blinking, un-prepared for the transformation which will follow.

May the life you once knew wither utterly away, giving you torment as you watch it go.

May the new dispensation be an autumnal blessing that comes too late for you, and may wintry regret cast its shadow over your lives like a lengthening curse.

Lucy Newlyn

132

Interim Challenge

Brexit Though some might be inclined to curse in strident language, often terse, perhaps in prose, perhaps in verse, I’ll understand. But nothing’s worse than harbouring a poisoned vial full of spiteful malice, bile such behaviour’s simply vile.

Abandon hate, and with a smile think of everything that’s good.

Just to put you in the mood, bless the candidate who stood for Maidenhead (well, someone should): providing government that’s strong; distinguishing what’s right from wrong; quitting Europe won’t take long.

So let’s join voices in this song: “Britons, bless the happy day when we’ll leave the ECJ; friendless, shunned, we all can say: bless you, St Theresa May!” Darrell Barnes

133

Breaking News

Breaking News Breaking News I munched my breakfast through the flood while others barricaded mud to save their homes.

Their crops were blighted in the bud; I watched the cars and busses scud on roiling foams.

Before too long, the roofs and domes were flattened by the water’s combs; I watched them dropping.

I’ve seen a thousand burning Romes, seen desperate crowds in velodromes, but this wants topping.

It rained and rained, no sign of stopping, the villagers whose land was sopping they sank or swam.

I lived my day, no thought of swapping, and posted photos of my shopping on Instagram.

As all they owned became a dam I tutted at the diagram the news displayed.

The usual story: tried to cram too many houses in - a scam, huge profits made.

While others knelt and wept and prayed I sent some emails, long delayed, and left the flood.

No doubt they’d fund it all with aid; I washed my hands, with tax I’d paid, of distant blood.

Tom Clucas

134

Shame

Shame Shame Some stains just won’t wash out no matter what ads say, try bio, bleach, pumice, wire wool, they may fade in time but not entirely away.

Aged four I peed my pants at school, At eight I almost saw a young girl drown down she went into the green, weedembracing river, down, down, before a boy, smaller than me, dived in, which is what I knew, and know, I could not do…. and brought her spluttering up, her life accusing me of cowardice, fourteen, I stole a book I didn’t even read and in my twenties was a treacherous friend, and there’ve been more since then.

You can see their lines like ketchup splashed on a new silk tie, never quite new again.

These things I air, these things I can’t bear to see in the mirror, hoping they’ll be cleaned by light, be washed away by summer rain.

I hold my young self close and kiss his hair, murmur, it doesn’t matter, it’s all all right these shames show what we were but forgiveness is what we are: living with shame’s a curse, being shameless, far, far worse.

Tony Brignull

135

Flash Fiction: Migration

Flash Fiction: Migration Net Migration I don’t remember much about our escape. I was very young. My little sister died. My parents never spoke about her again. I don’t remember her now.

We had to keep very, very quiet as the boat stole in. I looked over the side to see the flash of a shoal of fishes in the morning light. They were the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. Then they vanished.

And overhead, a flock of brightly feathered, chirping birds flew past. They sounded so free and happy and looked so pretty.

We were pulled ashore and placed in a compound. It was surrounded by wire. There were searchlights shining on us all night.

Not far away I could see a fishing boat landing its trawl of fishes; and in a rocky field I saw so many little birds caught in a net.

Darrell Barnes

136

Drama: Recriminations

Drama: Recriminations “We said in March. And now I’m here, and this is when you tell me?” “Oh! And I had thought that this would be a visit. But if that’s the reason you came all this way,” “Of course I came to visit, but you couldn’t have thought I wouldn’t pick it up when I came. We said in March. We never changed the date. And now - ” “We can repay it at the end of July.”

“July. This is the third time we’ve extended it, and every time you ask me when the loan’s already due. I told you. I’m buying a house. You said you’d pay me back in March, and then - ” “Look, business has - ” “You said the business would be closed by now!

You said as soon as Tim was getting his social security he’d close it up!

What are you even doing with it now?”

“You don’t even trust us to manage it, do you? You never have. You always think - ” “It’s just I can’t plan my own life without you giving me some idea of when I’ll get my money back.” “July! Good Lord, we’ll pay you in July!” “I said I needed it in March! You think - ” “And here it is again.

Big Sister, so responsible! You think I’m still eleven and I haven’t done my homework. Just because you’ve got your Lexus - ” “You think that I enjoy this? Do you think I want to have this same humiliating conversation every couple months - ” “I think you do.”

The thrush sang inside its cage as they considered who could best reopen the proceedings. Like a song they had sung a hundred times, they knew their notes and could resume at any point.

They sometimes skipped a verse or even left the chorus out, and breathed, and picked it up again right in the middle of a bar without confusion. “Why, when Tim had no one else to go to, when - ” She paused. “But why, when you’re the one who’s always late, when you’re, and I have always, why are you always angry at me?” “And why are you and Chad, who, by the way, has no right to tell me how Tim and I should handle our affairs,” But now we’ve reached dal segno. If you’d like to overhear some more, then maybe we can visit in July.

Jared Campbell 137

Definitions of Poetry

Definitions of Poetry What is Poetry?

Ogun is the deity of war and warriors, Ogun is the deity of hunters and their chants, and poetry like ogun is in seven parts.

There is the poetry of the physical The poetry of the metaphysical The poetry of Kings and chiefs The poetry of rascals so brief The poetry of the commoners The poetry of “come on now�

The poetry that covers lovers with words when hearts are lowered into pits of emotion.

That poetry that pours its self like juice from trees and flows like milk So what is poetry in lines so sweet, what is poetry which tastes like the tongues of gods when poets have drowned gourds of wine on windless nights I know a poem when I read one I feel a poem when I hear one There are times, the rhythm like my heart beat at other times it mirrors the glint in my eyes Ogun, you who with water at home still desires blood Ogun of several parts Lead me into the forest of words where ideas move across pages like swords drawn for peace...

Kole Odutola

138

Valentine’s Day Ballad

Valentine’s Day Ballad in honour of Shirley Collins and dedicated to the memory of Pete Seeger It was a lover and his lad, With a hey-ho, and a hey-nonny-no, That o’er the brown field site did pad, In the winter, the icicles like splinters When roads do flood, hey rub a dub dub; Street sweepers rule the waves.

A dark grim ballad they sang that night, With a hey-ho, and a hey-nonny-no In the back of a derelict building site In winter gloom, damp February gloom With no one about to turf them out When grey mud glistened in the cold moonlight.

They took a burger each and coke With a hey-ho, and some fries to go And a packet of cheap fags to smoke.

They climbed the wall, burgers and all, Onto the damaged land, hand in hand, And the fog of their breath like a cloak.

They’d found a squat on the edge of town With a hey-ho, nowhere else to go Where pipes leaked wet, and wet oozed down.

Away from the stars and the stares they’d hid Till notices came, and the risk was too great Then they’d fled to this site, so bleak and brown.

The burgers cooled, the lovers lay spent With a hey-ho, they’d nowhere to go Not a card, not a cake, not a token, well-meant, Not a ring, nor a single red rose They whispered their vows where they lay so low, On the dark, rain-spattered cement: “I found the cell-phone you wanted”, he said With a hey-ho - he’d some way to go “And I set the ring-tone, our only pretty ring-tone”, But sirens were loud in his head, For he’d stolen the phone and forgotten the card And now he wished he was dead.

They huddled together till daylight came With a hey-ho, it was sweet and slow On the brown field site that bears nobody’s name But care-takers came to drive them away In grey first light at the break of day With a ‘haven’t you two any shame?’

139

Valentine’s Day Ballad

They spoke for the owners of the site, With a no, no, no, and off you go “This land is prime and, yes, it’s our right To evict you, benefit cheats! - and so Move your spliffs and your lager larks, We’re building flats for oligarchs.”

And the flats were up, and the site was down, With a hey-ho, and an oh god no, With a fine design, at a minimal cost, And insulation to keep out the frost, But the lovers and the burgers were lost, And the rain rained rain like the tears of a clown.

It was a lover and his lad With a way to go, through hail and snow Not a tree to be seen, not a home to be had In worsening winters, icicles like splinters When roads do flood (hey, mud and more mud) Rich oligarchs make the waves.

In Qatar, an oligarch’s sleep is postponed With a ring and a ding and a ring-a-ding-ding.

He’s not kept awake by debts or loans But by a wail in the night from a far-off site; With a an ‘oo’ and an ‘aar’, waves carry it far The green, green call of a mobile phone.

Collaborative challenge

140

Despotism

Despotism

Goya and Jovellanos - a sketch Scene: The office of the Spanish Minister of Justice, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, late one evening in the autumn of 1797.

Francisco Goya, who has been commissioned to paint a portrait of the Minister, has set up his easel and is arranging his materials.

Jovellanos: How shall I pose for this portrait, Francisco?

Goya: I think I’d get the best image of you if you sat in a relaxed position. As you explained when I arrived this evening, you’ve had another very busy day, and trying to keep your back straight for an hour would be tiring – and false. Why not indicate how wearying your work is, by resting your left elbow on the table, and leaning your head against your hand?

J: Like this? Or like this, fast asleep, dead to the world? (Puts his head down on the table) G: Then I wouldn’t be able to see your face.

J: (Collecting himself, with a wry smile) You could call it ‘The Minister of Justice Sleeps’, or maybe even ‘The Sleep of Justice’.

G: The Minister might sleep, but surely Justice itself never sleeps?

J: I’d like to think so, but Justice is a human construct. It needs human agency to make it work. Look at all these documents waiting for my personal attention. The judicial system of this country ultimately depends entirely on me. When I sleep, Justice itself is to some extent in abeyance. The truth is, I’d have to be awake 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to cover all that needs doing, and even that wouldn’t be enough. I hope you don’t imagine that this imposing statue would carry on my work for me if I wasn’t here? You might just as well depict it as a huge, monstrous bat!

G: (Laughs) No, I mustn’t do anything like that, because the portrait should contain a symbol of your position.

On the other hand, you might like to put your head down and take a little nap while I incorporate your ideas 141

Despotism

into the ornamentation of the table. I could make these fittings look like the skulls of sheep, for instance, as if to suggest... Did I just hear a cat outside?

J: My beloved pet, Cicero. He usually does my sleeping for me. I’ve banished him for present purposes, as he can also be a bit unruly on occasion. I’m sure you wouldn’t want him upsetting your easel... (Sleepily) I’ll just take that nap now... (Puts his head down on the table and before long begins to snore gently) G: Wouldn’t you like Cicero to be with you in the portrait, sitting just there at your feet? (Pause) Minister?

Never mind, take your rest for the time being. I’ll wake you up when I’ve finished playing these tricks with the table.

Gerard Lally

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Evil Eye

Evil Eye

An Oriental Tale in 300 Words “I’m sure the Pasha is a reasonable man,” I remarked to my young companion as we were led towards the palace by unsmiling guards. “And after all, we’re British subjects.”

“His eye... evil,” muttered another prisoner.

While the rest were thrown into a gloomy cell in the outer walls, the guards escorted us down long labyrinthine corridors and through large ornate doors, until we found ourselves facing the Pasha, reclining on his divan in luxurious robes and an extraordinarily large turban. His left eye was, indeed, much larger than the right, and glittered with a disturbingly cold blue light. At the sight of us, the eye bulged larger. The guards barked out a short description of the circumstances in which we had been apprehended, and the Pasha gestured to signal that we should explain ourselves.

“Your Excellency,” I began, hoping my voice would not falter. The cold blue eye had now grown to a prodigious size, and held me with a hostile stare.

“It is simply that, being new to your country, we were unaware...”

My voice trailed off as the eye acquired the dimensions of a fist. I sensed that Deirdre was attempting to speak, but we were both silenced by the Pasha’s fearsome blue eye, which continued to swell to the size of a football.

Why even try to talk rationally when faced with an unnatural phenomenon of this kind? As the eye grew ever larger, I could only gape at it, frozen by its malevolent glare.

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Eventually, the eye became so enormous that it obscured even the Pasha himself, and floated in the air before us like a huge balloon, wobbling slightly as it stared forward relentlessly. Then, suddenly, with a noise between a tremendous bang and a splash, it exploded, drenching us in vile, slimy foam.

Gerard Lally

144

Animal

Animal Pigeon Ballade Supreme That lurid streak of petrol round the neck and city filth embedded in the breast: robotic birds that hobble, swarm, and peck through every square our human feet infest.

They eke out crumbs, scraps, shelter for a nest, bedraggled, two toes missing, one leg lame, poor victors in survival’s ugly game.

The pigeon’s drifted far from nature’s plan, learnt human wiles, pretended to be tame: a fallen dove, evolving fast as man.

They’re beautiful when new, but soon a wreck, each feather out of place in every crest.

They flap on fractured wings, or grimly trek between the shoes that kick them as a pest, the ever-present uninvited guest.

In every city, pigeons look the same: eyes lurid, red like LEDs not flame, a sullen-looking but determined clan that guard the rubbish bins and fight to maim, a fallen dove, evolving fast as man.

When seeds are scattering they hit the deck, approach obtusely sly until they test their luck too far, still focussed on a speck of bread or dust. At dawn, they look their best, a sheen about them, though they barely rest.

Columbidae: adventurers, fit name for birds that struggle on without an aim, five years or so of life, a brutal span spent digging in the dirt from which they came: a fallen dove, evolving fast as man.

Their pampered cousins race to great acclaim, each puffing pristine feathers like a dame, but these ones, guttered where their lives began, must bear the city’s marks upon their frame: a fallen dove, evolving fast as man.

Tom Clucas

145

Sonnet Sequence

Sonnet Sequence Three Interpretations I’ve chosen to write three different interpretations of one famous man, the essayist William Hazlitt. I’ve invented very little. Most of the details come from biographies or memoirs of people who actually knew him.

In the last sonnet, the repeating phrase ‘So what?’ refers both to the girl’s defiant attitude (she was his landlady’s 19 year old daughter with whom Hazlitt became besotted) and to the biographer’s dilemma - what credence to give to the interpretations of others? I’ve taken a relaxed view of the Shakespearian sonnet, sticking to the rhyming scheme but departing from iambic pentameter, but then so did Shakespeare.

William Hazlitt I never gave the lie to my own soul 1. By John Hamilton Reynolds When I think of William Hazlitt I see Ilissós, The river god, carving with negligent Power through mountains of clinker and dross An azure path, clear, frank, dissident, Or like the sure-footed chamois his leap From point to point, balanced, extempore, With grander rhythms than poets keep, He loved the sweat of brawling, public furore, Gusto, liberty, motion in all things, And when he spoke of them his eyes shone, His melancholy brow lifted, the wings Of his great mind spread as if he’d flown Into the eye of the storm, into the rage: He was the very spirit of the age.

2. By Thomas De Quincey ‘Brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange’ At odds with everything and everyone, Sensitive to any slight, he sought to estrange Opponents, preferred bone-breaking collision To the give and take of government; a mean Man, shadowy, he turned his back on the sun, A jacobin who closed his eyes to the guillotine, He praised the ‘people’ but lived alone.

And then there was his thing with girls Saints (he worshipped) or tarts (he spanked) We had to smuggle him away from churls In Cumberland, and were scarcely thanked.

Of shop girls and harlots a serial shagger, When he reached in his waistcoat you feared for a dagger.

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3. By Miss Sarah Walker So what?

Each day for an hour I’d sit on his knee.

So what?

We touched and fondled each other.

And yes, I kissed him - often - and he kissed me.

This is only what Mrs Walker, my mother, Instructed, to make our gentlemen feel at home We needed the rent - you’d think he’d know It was one of the amenities to let his hands roam, You’d think he’d know I wasn’t made of snow, That though a maiden - well, more or less I’d have lain in bed with him but no, no fear, I was his Pygmalion, he gave me a cap, a dress, A bust of Napoleon, recited Milton, Shakespeare, Called me a goddess, sweet muse, a statue: But I’d Mr C next door to do.

So what?

Tony Brignull

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Shakespeare

Shakespeare Based on a sequence in As You Like It when Jaques, offstage, cries about a stag he finds killed by a hunter near a stream, written from Rosalind’s perspective: Jaques A man in the forest of Arden I met Who told me the nature of truth was a bet Placed by fools on a clock which will turn them away And melt all their poems by breaking of day In the dewing of dawn on the lancing tree branches The knaves in the clearing have wasted their chances On a life spoken through the divisible power of poetry, He did speak me: “ ‘These men are not like you, they are unfit for love’ Upon the sunny air rude bleats and bellows Carried, and to their source anon a dying stag Besides a stream I found I sought, and wept ‘They are not like you, they are not like you, They yell from the dark’ That bleeding breast beneath the knotted fur From forth did brightly flow hot blood, And on the steaming air those few and Roughly taken breaths expelled: I did proclaim through tears that autumn stream And once-proud running life comingled *.

My brother, my wayward hunter, whose Fatal arrow is fell within yon clearing, pity not: Thine mistakes are only infinite in seasons Alas, my thoughts do stray in streams along, I am full broken by these weighty showers ‘You are not the same as them, thou art the serpent In the light who is a serpent in the dark, pull away And away again, for they will not let you speak!’ ” And, heeding the wise man whose role I see now swapped With the fat fool who melancholy muses on the court’s rawness, I found the next man and I poisoned his wit, And now I must cope with him in all his sullen fits. * “The earliest use of the term recognised in the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1602 by William Shakespeare in Hamlet, with what Mr Terrell highlights as a “variant and now obsolete spelling” of ‘co-mingled’. Mr Terrell drew attention to the first recorded use of the modern term ‘commingled’ in 1626 by Sir Francis Bacon.”

Alexander Bridge

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Election 2015

Election 2015 In February 2015 Brian Smith invited members of the Hall Writers’ Forum to collaborate with him in producing a Canto of Stanzas “in Ottavo Rima after Byron”, on the subject of the forth- coming General Election. 11 writers contributed, some writing several stanzas; then there was a collaborative process of revision and re-shaping, led by Brian Smith and James Whelan.

The Parliament of Fouls, or The Foulest of Parliaments.

Being an indictment of the Politickal Classes &c.

The Prologue: A writer looking at the coming Poll Might feel despair. But we (Byronically Inspired) associates of St Edmund Hall Have made a Canto, a bionically Collaborative affair, sick in our soul, Expressing our disgust laconically.

With candidates becoming so moronic No wonder that our comments are sardonic.

The Chorus: Again it’s nigh - the cycle draws around, And tricksters’ faces flicker in the half-light.

Again the fairground’s rolling into town All starry eyed with promises and foresight; And whitewashed cheeks adorn a leering clown And palms and silver cross by shade of midnight.

And later in the empty light of morning A samey view across the landscape’s dawning.

The sick and disabled: The UK needs a leader: that is clear.

Last time it was Condemned to take a Blue one, But that mistake has cost the country dear; And now the time has come to find a new one Who can heal the Tories’ savage cuts, and steer A juster course. Another way, a true one Quickly found, for it would be a Pity To leave the people governed by the City.

The working man: We don’t still want leaders, that’s evident, Like the ones we have now, who smarm and lie, And we don’t want false smiles dipped in Steradent.

What we do want is sensible policy: From sharing our riches (hoarded, unspent) To accountable actions, transparency; And time in jail for the powerful, the rich When they do things that make the rest of us retch.

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The disillusioned student: The Liberals are a goner; that’s a fact Clegg’s treachery was just for personal gain.

‘Sic transit gloria mundi’ when he’s sacked Will be the students’ jubilant refrain As betrayal and the cruelties he backed Come home to haunt, along with all the pain.

Instead of being moderate and mellow He was content to stay himself: just yellow.

Swift: He once set fire to cacti for a laugh A young man’s misdemeanour, if you like Destroying life at twenty? Reading Plath Was more my thing. Death to plants, nice big hike In taxes, Clegg! The students: shroud their path From here to there in ashes, burn the tyke No trust fund can support. Cremate the meek, The poor, disabled, disenfranchised, weak.

The shop steward: Labour have no Balls; they’ve lost their way.

Afraid to rock the City they have missed it Despite the hopes that it would be their Day. If there were any Justice they’d have pissed it Against the likes of Cameron’s foul play and IDS and Gove. As Gideon hissed it: “Milliband’s too terrified to make a stir Castrated by the ghost of Tory Blur”.

Keir Hardie: Two centuries of socialism down the drain, Forgot in the blare of city excess; And Tories, like tyrants entrenched in their reign, Still with us, still touting the joys of success For the favoured few on their gravy train But not for the ones left to clear up their mess.

And the axis of evil of Blair and of Brown Replaced with a ‘malgam of malice and clown.

Byron returned to ‘Albion’s isle’: Where are the voices now that once would boom With moral strength - Foot, Benn, or Glenda Jackson, Their eyes ablaze, their tongues like crack of doom?

Justice is gone: a light we turned our backs on.

The days are dark with inspissated gloom.

Hell opes her gates, and shrill Time whines her claxon.

Don’t trust a weasel-word the leaders say: It’s venal trash and soundbites, all the way.

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The working woman: Last night we met The Ukips on TV, And now I’m tired. I shouted myself hoarse, Despairing at the ignorance, and glee With which the ignorance is flaunted. Worse, The thought this shower could be our destiny, A plague, a slow and painful death, our curse.

There’s smiling faces on their battle bus; We can’t keep quiet, or else they’ll come for us.

The gay serviceman: The conference has started with a cock And bull farrago; BRITAIN FIRST are here, Intelligence discarded, CAPS ON LOCK And knackered “ARMORED LAND ROVER’S” which steer Towards the queers, or anyone of stock THATS NOT FROM BRITIAN (sic) SHOULD NOT BE HEAR. While Nigel sits and sups his pint, the scamp, His militia kill an Eastern-looking tramp.

The social historian: This pamphlet’s full of madness of the type Not seen since dark old Bedlam closed for good.

“The gays recruit young blood” - what hateful tripe, But Ukips lap it up. For them it’s food For - what, for thought? - my arse I’ll gladly wipe On this. Of course, they’d say I’ve misconstrued.

This is no time for “I’ll not vote” and “fuck it” Unless you want your own head in a bucket.

The armchair hippy: I relish all things green: Chartreuse, an English field, My mistress’ eyes, and once I even ate a salad.

The Greens too are what? Nice. Middle class-appealing, almost holy well, holier than thou, my lad.

Their promise: elect us and our planet’s healed.

But, dammit, is it costed? Sadly not, Milud: This manifesto’s mere wishful thinking - bin it, Crying out not Natalie but Gordon Bennett!

The incumbent politician: The citizens deserve a living wage, Our energy should be renewable.

But in interviews we’re not exactly sage Our words a mess, entirely skewable.

We’re green with envy; in this media age The unpolished can’t win it’s not doable!

(If housing prices have an upward creep, We’ll build them out of plywood on the cheap.)

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The Spin Doctor: Now we’ve Nationalists from half creation Standing. (Yes! They too want a finger in The pie). Voters, struck with some vague notion, Drawn to their cant and “old bag” lingering Ideals. They talk “Democracy and Nation” Poor fools like that. A little tinkering Will quickly fixit. A simple thing to do To’ensure there is no triumph of the New. The political commentator: The candidates line up for the election: Weirdos; nonentities; no rarity Of takers or demanders for selection.

For some the thrill of power’s (oh spare it me) A turn-on tantamount to an erection.

Others, thinking only of posterity Stand nobly “to rid Politics of Vice,”, And in expenses hide their avarice.

The moral philosopher: They offer scandal, war, and cash-for-honours, They conjure prejudice and debtor laws, Building up Babylon to crash upon us While smoothly talking of a better cause They sell this mad, careerist dash for goners That drains our pens of spleen and metaphors, And when we vote we’re aiding and abetting, Voting for years spent bitterly regretting.

The party leader: Do vote for us; we’ll promise you the earth!

The heavens too just vote for us! We’ll steer You safely through these choppy seas; your berth Awaits both safe and sound; the channel’s clear Our pilot’s steady/ready/able, worth Your trust. Ignore the siren calls don’t hear The Jeremiahs! The past? - Best not to dwell.

The slate is clean – our hands of course as well.

The MP with something to hide: O halt th’enquiry! But halt th’enquiry! We are feculent In fact, but details must be hid away ‘Till jobs are safe for five more years. Repent Our sins we will, the sins of Savile’s day And our day too; the miscreants will be sent Away, but not just yet. Oh, nay, twice nay, Betray the children? Never. No retreats From justice. But we’d like to keep our seats.

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Election 2015

The aristocratic parliamentarian: “Voting doesn’t matter, it’s dispensable But counting does; the system’s skewed awry.

What if the Greens (Quite indefensible!)

Start taking seats; even worse the Reds!! Why What if people hope for something sensible And end th’ entitlement of those on High?

Change and decay in all around I see.

So what! - as long as votes still count for me.”

The conspiracy theorist: Now’s the time for flap and filibuster, And polished manifestos; it’s all play To make us sick and tired of all their bluster, So we’ll retire and let them have their way.

It’s just as well the police force doesn’t trust her Or else a coup’d be staged by Witchy May. The nasty party could get nastier still, Vampiric Duncan Smith is out to kill.

Edgar Allan Poe: He rises from his crypt at evening-fall, Coughing as he dons his silken cape That trails among the wiggly things that crawl Around him, and the boots of steel that scrape The ground and grind the poor to dust withal.

The bedroom tax was such a jolly jape: “O leeches, come! we’ve blood to let! You hounds, Come, rip apart their sofas! Find their pounds!”

The Private Eye journalist: Christ! Boris! Barrel of lard and weird albino, Liar, champ of the art of bloviation (Bullshitting) and of shagging el supremo, They tell me now your plan’s to fuck the nation.

God give me strength (and, boy, another pinot!).

Reader, forgive the “fuck” - it’s sheer frustration When politics becomes pure egomania The time has come to migrate - to Australia.

His colleague: And who’s our voice of protest? Russell Brand!

That booky-wooky, womanizing lout, Who hopes the dumbocratic fuss’ll land Plumb in his corner (or his bank account) If he can loose his moron-muzzle, stand Posturing in front of RBS and shout.

Is he the best who steps forward as a leader, That fake-ass-cockney clueless bottom-feeder?

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Election 2015

Anon: It’s time, now, for an epic simile Something witty, long-drawn out, digressive, Arch and self-knowing, neither crass nor silly In which we liken this drab, unimpressive Lineup of wankers to a useless filly Or some other rhyme-word, more aggressive: “We’re nought but flotsam, tossed on a rambling thread By sightless captains, steered by the un-dead...”

Milton: Measureless and toxic as the oil that seeps Darkly, wastefully, and out of sight From a cracked vessel, and then creeps From shore to shore, a devastating blight On all that stirs within the bounteous deeps Still onward, still hushed up, all through the night Spills the insidious abuse of power By smooth careerists till the final hour.

The cynical voter: Opinion polls give comfort to the dim Their names a joke upon the ballot paper.

Polls designed by cunning stunts upon a whim Of friendly sponsors. What a jolly caper!

And yet their chances really are as slim, As that of crap left on a carpet scraper Or should be if the voters knew the truth Before they set foot in the polling booth.

Everyman: I couldn’t care less. I don’t give a fuck Who wins, so long as Lucre drives our cars From bank to wank, from lottery to luck.

The ballot paper’s boxes are a farce.

With such a choice, between such shit and muck, I dare not grace their parchment with my arse.

Go mark your man! Go pick your petty faction!

For me, this turd Election’s just distraction.

The abstentionist: Voters desert the polls. They know their luck’s Right out. Whichever party wins, it’s clear The country will be ruled by selfish fucks And crass commercialism. We will pay dear Their lack of vision. So moral eunuchs Triumph. Is it surprising that when mere Clowns and crooks demand to be elected The population is so disaffected?

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The first-time voters: The older generations press their views, But first-time voters don’t know who to trust.

They’re told each day by pundits on the news That vote they really should, and vote they must.

‘Twixt bad and worse, how are they meant to choose?

The system needs an overall adjust.

On polling day the youths will be befuddled Seeking ideals, not policies all muddled.

Forum poet: I set out to write in Ottava Rima, But realised I was only a dreamer.

My mistake: that blue, red, orange, or green Could ever deliver strawberries and cream.

Someone once said “pick the one who will win Remember the government always gets in”.

Nothing will change, we’re all at a loss.

(I wake up recalling I don’t give a toss.)

The voice of reason: The time draws near to make your final call.

We’d not presume to tell you what to do.

Whoever wins the writing’s on the wall!

At least be heard! - so other folk like you will use their common sense. Ignore Whitehall, whose bromides pall, like every other hue.

Consider well, lest later you repent a rash decision made with good intent.

The Chorus: Again it’s nigh - the cycle draws around And tricksters’ faces flicker in the half-light.

Again the fairground’s rolling into town All starry eyed with promises and foresight; And whitewashed cheeks adorn a leering clown And palms and silver cross by shade of midnight.

And later in the empty light of morning A samey view across the landscape’s dawning.

155

An Awkward Meeting

An Awkward meeting Scene: Forum entrance, Teddy Hall, mid-afternoon. Three students crouch against the wall, rolling cigarettes.

They huddle away from the rain. Yasmin squeezes through the turnstile.

Jack: Yo Yasmin (opening pack of Gold Flake and lighting one): Hey, you okay?

Pause. Nods of the head. Students re-shuffle, breathe in smoke and nicotine.

Prolonged silence. [Loud traffic noise offstage] Enter stage left: bespectacled stranger with beard, wearing sodden socks inside sandals and carrying in his left hand three battered plastic carrier bags, one inside the other - the outermost one about 18 months old, the innermost one filled with books and papers; in his right hand an enormous bunch of keys and a banana. He stops by the turnstile.

Yasmin (eyeing him suspiciously, shrinking slightly): Sorry, I don’t have any change.

Stranger looks through or past her absently; shuffles for an abnormal length of time finding appropriate key.

Moves through turnstile.

Jack (doubled up with laughter): Do you know who that was?

Yasmin: No. What have I done?

Jack: That’s Stephen Blamey, the Dean.

Lucy Newlyn

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An Awkward Meeting

A Lot of Bottle - If you’d come this way Mr Lowenstein … I think your party will be very impressed by the comfort levels offered by our new rooms … The panorama from the balconies of these ones on the top floor is quite breathtaking - the roofs of Oxford are laid out before you.

- Ah, Mr Lavender … do you mind I show Mr Lowenstein your room. He’s bringing a party to stay here next Easter?

- Well Dean, I …

- Come in Mr Lowenstein …as you can see … Mr Lavender is … one of our talented installation artists - he specialises in taking everyday objects - in his case milk bottles - actually surprisingly large numbers of them as you can see - and creating intriguing shapes and forms. How would you describe these twenty … no thirty empty ones on the two shelves of the wall bookcase, Mr Lavender?

- Well Dean … you should see them as two rows of empty vessels - the top row obviously superior ones in level, but in essence no different from the ones beneath and therefore intrinsically equal, both series are empty vessels after all.

- I see Mr Lavender … and how would you categorize those … twenty installed above the window - they are very colourful, I think you would have to agree Mr Lowenstein - those wonderful purples, reds and greens randomly suffusing the off-cream, almost Adam white, wouldn’t you say Mr Lavender … foundation. The mottled effect is very striking. How did you create that?

- Well Dean, it wasn’t as difficult as it looks … I suppose I really just let nature take its course, you might say …

- If we could just step out onto the balcony - perhaps you wouldn’t mind moving those bottles there - yes that’s it - so that Mr Lowenstein can enjoy the view? I apologise if it disturbs the pattern you were striving to achieve Mr Lavender but I trust it won’t take you too long to re-create the effect … by the way, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind dropping in to see me on Monday morning - 9 o’clock suit you?

Postscript: this is something of a riff on an actual happening - the protagonists were my best mate Tim Lavender and the greatly missed Graham Midgley.

James Whelan

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An Awkward Meeting

“Sorry.”

“Are you?”

“No. I mean. Well, sorry, yes. I mean my backpack must have banged your arm just then.”

“No.” “Oh good.”

“So you’re not sorry any more.”

“But I didn’t hurt you.”

“Are you sure?”

“You just said - ” “ - that your backpack didn’t brush against my burning heart. Yes.” “What?”

“I love you. Doesn’t that even matter?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You are? Well that’s good. A broken heart is more valuable than a bruised arm.”

“But - ” “ - I accept your apology.”

Natasha Walker

158

Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka Cantica Animalia Introit Sacred be the energy That shattered into light, Sacred be the universe Still bursting into sight.

Sacred be a speck of life Spinning through the dark, Sa cred be the thread s of genes Unfolding on its ark.

Sacred be this planet earth Running out of air, Sacred be a clear blue sky, And sacred be its care.

Sacred be the sun and rain On each uplifted face, Sacred be the messages, The mystery of grace.

Aardvark

i Hallo there human being, What’s an aardvark to you?

Maybe just a video on the world wide web Of a creature with a strange looking head Pacing round and round the cage of the city zoo. ii Hallo there human being, What’s an aardvark to you?

Maybe just a phantom in the lights of your car You saw when you were speeding down the tar Across a dim and dusty plain of the great Karoo. iii Hang on there human being, Look again at that plain.

Tell me do the aardvark go to war, Do they make each other poor, Do they bruise each others hearts And deal in crack cocaine?

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Wole Soyinka

iv Hang on there human being, Look again at that plain.

Do the aardvark chop down the trees, Do they mess the rivers and seas, Do they manufacture nuclear weapons And acid rain? v So give thanks for the farmers Who keep their farmlands green, Give thanks for the factories That scrub their chimneys clean, Give thanks for the game rangers Who guard the aardvark’s worth, For who but the meek shall inherit A green and growing earth?

Who but the meek shall inherit A green and growing earth..

Finches Intro with guitar Hayi - bo, hayi - bo, ag no! i To think that we slaughtered Finch after soft - bodied finch Without a shrug of remorse.

Two barefoot boys on holiday, Pellet - guns, khaki shorts A gum plantation on a farm.

Hayi - bo, hayi - bo, ag no! ii I can still re member the warmth And the scrabbling of the claws Of one I wounded in my hands.

Twisting its head off I sensed The skull rrrik from the spine, I felt sickened then confused.

Hayi - bo, hayi - bo, ag no!

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Wole Soyinka

iii Come on ! said the other boy.

To him the son of the farmer, Birds were predators in a war.

We went on killing till dusk, Killing, killing, killing, Killing, killing till dusk.

Hayi - bo, hayi - bo, ag no!

Outro Sickened, and then confused.

Sickened, sickened, confused.

That feeling I now hug close, That feeling’s still part of me, A growing pain, a blessing, A growing pain, a blessing.

Bees Sometimes you make me nervous, Sometimes you make me scared, I’d hate to find you in my motorcar, I’d hate to find you in my beard.

You’re a swarm cloud by my highway, A buzz below my floor, You’re a sudden smell of honey That drifts inside my door.

Smell of honey, smell of honey.

I guess there wouldn’t be many animals, I guess there wouldn’t be many plants, If you weren’t out there spreading pollen And coming home to dance.

You never work for money, Or hang out in a dive, But you’ve been toiling for millions of years To keep the earth alive.

Smell of honey, smell of honey.

Sweet, sweet smell of a honey-packed hive, Sweet, sweet smell of the earth alive,

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Wole Soyinka

Sweet, sweet smell of a spring-time day, Sweet, sweet smell like good times, Spring-times are here to stay, Smell of honey, smell of honey.

Apple blossom turns to apples, Thanks to you in spring, You make me think of angels, Angels with a sting.

You’re the bravest of home defenders, You’d die before you flee, If you weren’t out there working, working, Working, working, working, I guess there’d be no me.

Smell of honey, smell of honey.

Sweet, sweet smell of a honey-packed hive, Sweet, sweet smell of the earth alive, Sweet, sweet smell of a spring-time day, Sweet, sweet smell like good times, Spring-times are here to stay, Sweet, sweet smell of honey.

Maggots Intro with guitar Hey, hey Mr Maggot, how, how do you do it?

How do you guzzle and gulp Death’s grime and slime, And never ever spew it?

Recitativo I just want to say, I appreciate the way You and your friends chew night and day To save the people-poisoned planet From odious putrefaction and death by decay. i How do you shed the gunge you grow up in, And morph your mindset from within?

How do you pop out wings and sail the sky, And wave your woes and past goodbye?

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Wole Soyinka

Oh you make, make me think uplifting things, Hey, hey Mister Maggot, how, how do you grow your wings?

Wings, wings, wish you could show me how to grow wings. ii You make me want to clean my house and car, And wipe the dust off my guitar.

You make me want to put on shining strings And turn my blues into a song that swings.

Oh you make, make me think uplifting things, Hey, hey Mister Maggot, how, how do you grow your wings?

Wings, wings, wish you could show me how to grow wings. iii I’m going to moult my gripes and grouchy mood, Detox my thoughts and attitude.

I’m going to grow new eyes and nimble feet, Quit grovellin’ round in Grumble Street.

Oh you make, make me think uplifting things, Hey, hey Mister Maggot, how, how do you grow your wings?

Wings, wings, wish you could show me how to grow wings. v When my music’s lost its rock and roll Please clean my grave but leave my soul.

Help me flit above my graveyard’s stones Before my song’s a heap of bones.

Oh you make, make me think uplifting things, Hey, hey Mister Maggot, how, how do you grow your wings?

Wings, wings, wish you could show me how to grow wings.

As I’m not in line for angel things Or a big jazz heavenly band that swings, And as I plunge back into the gunge of the blues Each time I see a shooting on the news, Recitativo I’d be mega-happy Mister Maggot, To metamorphosize my melancholy habit iv By sing, sing, singing … a song with wings, Wings, wings, oh! a song with wings.

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Wole Soyinka

Wings, wings, a song with wings.

Wings, wings, a song with wings.

Ancestral Crocodile When Africa, America, And all the continents were one, You lived and died beside a swamp, A Mama Croc in the sun.

I see you now as you lash your tail And lunge at a dinosaur’s legs, I know you’d die right then and there To save your nest of eggs.

Ye le le ma, le le ma, le le ma!

I see you glide across the swamp, A hungry mama on the prowl, I see you crunch a shrew with tusks, A hippo-big pig with a growl.

I guess you crocs are country folk, Your table manners are sort of raw, You don’t conceal from city folk You’re red in tooth and claw.

Mayi ba bo, mayi ba bo, mayi ba bo!

Hey Mama Croc, were you being cruel, When you devoured that shrew?

Don’t shrews eat worms, and when you died, Didn’t the worms eat you?

Don’t pigs eat plants, don’t plants eat soil, All round the biosphere?

Don’t flies eat dung, don’t leaves eat light, Don’t lungs devour the air?

Ye le le ma, le le ma, le le ma!

Hey Mama Croc, I’ve learnt to love Your rough-house honesty, You make me see that death feeds life In swamp and soil and sea.

You feed my faith that life on earth’s A miracle in the void of space, You feed my faith that red turns green On planet earth by grace.

Ye le le ma, le le ma, le le ma!

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Outro Hey Ancestral Mama Don’t be a fossil any more, Pull your skeleton out of that stone, Put back the muscle on your bone, And plod-plod-plod, Plod-plod-plod, Your presence through my door.

Seahorse I love the way the seahorse twirls And dances with his wife, Every single morning, Every single dawning Right through their seahorse life Right through their seahorse life.

Is this love, mmm, mmm, Is this love, mmm, mmm, Well he don’t say and she don’t say, They just keep dancing every day, Twirling, whirling eye to eye, Until the day they die.

I love the way the seahorse twirls And rises with his wife, Every single morning, Every single dawning, Up through the watery light, Up through the watery light.

Is this love, mmm, mmm, Is this love, mmm, mmm, Well I don’t know and you don’t know, All we know Is it could be so, It could be love, mmm, mmm, It could be love, mmm, mmm.

Cicada

i Sing, cicada, sing, sing the summer in, Sing in the dune bush by the sea, Sing in the milk-wood’s spreading tree, Sing in a time for living slow, Sing in a time for letting go, Sing cicada sing.

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Recitativo You sing your heart out, From a milk-wood dune Swooning with berries In the hot quivering air Of a mid-summer’s day.

I hear the same song In the sighs of lovers, A child at the breast, The beggar by an alley, The priest at the grave.

You sing on and on, Of the life-long desire To love and be loved, Of a wisp of star-dust, A twist of genes. ii Sing, cicada, sing, sing the summer in, Sing in the bush around my track, Sing in the sun hot on my back, Sing in a time for letting go, Sing in a time for loving slow, Sing, cicada, sing.

The Murmuring of the Holy Spirit Far, far across the sea I hear you murmuring to me, You keep murmuring like a dove A dove in the hazy hills of Galilee, A dove in the hazy hills of Galilee.

Your murmuring murmurs on From year to year, Though people get too busy, Too stressed to hear.

Your murmuring murmurs on From age to age, Though people turn from peace to war In homicidal rage.

Yo-yo-yo-yo, yo-yo-yo-yo‌

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Far, far across the sea I hear you murmuring to me, You keep murmuring like a dove A dove in the hazy hills of Galilee, A dove in the hazy hills of Galilee.

Dragonfly Time is like a dragonfly That skims a long a stream, A flicker in eternity, A shimmer through a dream.

Every minute of every day Time keeps speeding away, You might as well try To catch a dragonfly As catch those seconds Speedin’ by, speedin’ by.

The best you can do Is say with a sigh I love, love, love the way Time shimmers by.

Time is like a dragonfly That skims along a stream, A flicker in eternity, A shimmer through a dream.

Night Song: Ariel to Prospero Doze on, dream on, the mind’s an ocean deep.

Visions, decisions are shaping while you sleep.

I’m an Ariel ethereal as moonlight on the sea.

A minstrel environmental as chirping in a tree.

I’ve brought a little something To help you get along, The earth-pulse of a poem, The earth-throb of a song.

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Doze on, dream on, the mind’s an ocean deep.

Visions, decisions, are shaping while you sleep.

I’m a song-smith, a word-smith, still searching for a smile.

Compassion’s my passion, it’s been growing the while.

I’m a sound-wave, a thought-wave glimmering in your brain.

Glimmering, shimmering, until you wake again.

I’ve brought a little something To help you get along, The earth-pulse of a poem, The earth-throb of a song.

Reprise Sacred be this Planet Earth Spinning through the dark, Sacred be each thread of genes Unfolding on its ark.

Sacred be the dragonfly Skimming down a stream, Sacred be the aardvark Twitching in a dream.

Sacred be the seahorse Swimming a lagoon, Sacred be the bush dove Murmuring at noon.

Sacred be the urge to live In fish and bird and tree, Sacred be the urge to love Alive in you and me.

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Sacred be the sun and rain On each uplifted face, Sacred be the messages, The mystery of grace.

Sacred be the energy That shattered into light, Sacred be the universe, And sacred be - sight.

Chris Mann

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Reclamation Something serious has gone amiss: don’t ask me what it is.

The usual ‘lost’ is sought and found.

My loss so elusive: it’s ground that comes, then leaves my mind.

I stand on it, but cannot find.

You shower affection please tell me our connection; you bring back my past, but I hardly know you.

Your tales of times bring no clue.

I sweat with shame guessing your name.

Don’t quiz me please, something’s gone wrong: your name, my name, and where we belong.

I lost our relationship somewhere, somewhere I can’t repair.

Your face is so familiar, so dear, but who are you?

Too shy to admit if I ever knew you.

When you come in, I ask, ‘Who brought you here?’

But where is ‘here’?

What used to be one is now so many.

The name leaves the face in its usual place; their threads lose common company.

To call them as one is like calling none; too many threads to be one, and the time they take to become someone.

My memory goes off and on; a stranger seems a friend, but the known’s unknown: so the ‘stranger’ I saw was my son-in-law, but I called a walker on the street my brother.

The words I have known, the ties that have grown are now lost in memory’s haze.

I need your help to search the maze.

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You may be known, or unknown.

Just hold my hand until I stand to find what went amiss.

As others’ ‘losts’ are also found, I shall regain some firmer ground.

Mohammad Talib

171

Impressions

Impressions So this is partially a challenge for all the keen new beans out there who just joined, hence the “first”, so you can write about the first time you met a person or thing and how that went, and how your opinion changed later on.

But it’s also more generally about things that make impressions, perhaps physical ones, like when you push your hand into a pillow and the pillow retains that shape for a second after you take it away, or even “impressionism” or “impressionist” paintings and art.

So write about that, and try and leave a lasting impression!

Alexander Bridge Advice to Candidates Don’t work too hard to make a first impression; Your charm will work its miracles. Don’t stress, But cultivate a sense of calm discretion.

An easy manner and a pretty dress Will do the trick. It’s just a small concession.

The man you’ll see’s the Principal, no less.

A smiling face, a hint of scent, nice hair, A slight disorder in the dress. You’re there!

When he speaks, fake a riveted expression And fix his eyes with fascinated gaze.

To be a scholar is a sad profession.

Flatter his ego. He’s spent hours and days On boring and quite meaningless digression Now you’ve arrived. Feign interest in his ways.

He’s prolix, pompous, very hard to bear.

To get a place you must pretend to care.

Then, just a hint of feminine aggression To play the woman interviewer’s game And talk of centuries of male oppression.

“It’s not a lack of talent that’s to blame”.

Of course Equality’s her main obsession.

You know these feminists are all the same.

She won’t be interested in what you wear, So just convince her that it’s only fair To take someone like you; a real concession Since those before were male, thick, rich, and white.

Imply that if you fail you’ll fall into depression.

For all her years of study she’s not bright.

She’ll love a touch of sisterly confession So flattering to her sense of doing right.

Remember: if you want to grab your share Good Fortune only comes to those who dare.

Brian Smith

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Compass

Compass Encompassing, to Compass, the Compass as a tool of guidance: I feel like the words which make for good challenges are the ones which double as nouns and verbs in that satisfyingly Renaissance way.

Think about a moral compass, or about something which orients you, which helps you show the way, or even about something which does all those things but which still depends on something else (magnetism).

Or explore Donne’s image of the word’s other meaning, the geometric instrument used to draw circles and plan on maps: “If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two;” And how strange it is that a word derived from “step” in Latin came to mean an instrument whereby people stepped across the world, such that the word’s new meaning came to mean covering something entirely, ‘compassing’ it.

Or do your own thing entirely Alexander Bridge All-Encompassing I wear the smell of sickness like a scent; a perfume that reminds me of lost days and endless nights.

Once a week I wash it off.

The water shimmers with star dust from my skin.

The water pales in the moonlight through the window, the hall light through the key hole, the dream light through my soul.

My hopes are reflected in a bubble of soap; distorted and hidden by rainbows.

It bursts before I can see them.

Not that I could see them, anyway.

It’s dark in here.

When I get out, the touch of the towels beneath me is the only thing that ties me down.

Sleeping on spikes, drifting on clouds.

Sophie Thomas

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Witness

Witness The challenge this week is the best A Gallery title which we ended up not choosing: WITNESS! Now “Bounds” is our title, and like witness, and like most choices for poetry competitions or anthology titles what is looked for first is multiple meanings. Bounds is so good because it’s the boundaries of something, but also as in “leaps and bounds”, so jumping over those boundaries even as it mentions them.

Witness is exemplary on this too: the verb seeing something, the person who has witnessed something, the imperative to witness. Maybe “witiness” is even in there.

The challenge here is really seeing if you can even go OFF topic as so much of poetry depends on being observational or at least invoking some sort of “seeing” at some stage.

Alexander Bridge England is Ruined They changed me into a child.

Her name was something like Feather.

After a flash of gun metal that caught in my eye I only dream the order of letters, now I’ve been shrunk.

Bags in the cellar, a man trap.

We’re going to catch each other out.

Life is resurrected as a game.

Violence on the lawn and another bird is gone, another child who was a man, dead.

The plastic, the thin plastic rustles as I kick to see what’s inside.

Jake put him there, the old boy who I met when a marine orphan.

They swopped us around.

Maybe mixed us up. Even.

The sea was moody.

We only had our caps and a great hurrah for the King.

Our wee suits were navy and we ate the best pudding this side of the Humber.

Feather her name was or was it Crow? It may have been two names. All the past turns mixed up when you get to the age when England is ruined and deliveries come in all sizes of bombs.

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Do you want to go into the cellar?

There’s spirits, not only piles and piles of rubbish.

There’s bodies, never taken.

We will die in our own filth fighting over the last bin liner.

Jude Cowan Montague

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Migration

Migration The challenge this week is…MIGRATION!!!

As inspired by a recently visiting poet to Teddy Hall (Kathleen Jamie) I want you to write about migration. This can absolutely be to do with birds (are birds the most popular subject for modern poetry?) but you can make it about any sort of migration you want. Avian, Personal, Global. Maybe about a migration towards your own spiritual home.

Sadly, these days, it’s a highly politically charged term too - I think migration poetry in this sense is becoming a sort of genre unto itself.

The forum itself “migrated” not too long ago - Choughs themselves are non-migratory, but Wikipedia says they don’t mind “wandering into neighbouring countries!”

Alexander Bridge On Leaving Arun Kolatkar Ever since mama changed my bedsheets I’ve been looking for a new spiritual home They recently built a mall that I make it to Every lunchtime, you can see all the way To the red logos at the end, I say that I Feel then that it is somewhere I can go, At least since my options became limited After the year two thousand fifteen In Prague and Vienna and Budapest I had Always to restore my soul in swimming pools with entry charges, to submerge myself in chlorine water, rare salt combination water, pink tea saunas, strong massage taps, cold wave pools (that picked me up and moved me back and put me down again on concrete I could feel between my feet), 40 degree scalding mineral springs, unbearable 60 degree steam rooms, huge wooden bucketshower deluges, baths wherein wizened older men play clay chess on pillars of salt and are unbothered by people, cloth cubicles inside Which unctuous oils are spread by pressured elbows Onto long invisible skin in a room of polished wooden Slats you entered then forgot: My skin turned red and raw or soft and Cold and clammy and when the people saw Me jump into the ice bath and fall between the clear they knew I was there: Or was at least desensitized now, now my hair was patterned down And I felt no difference between water And between air before I returned into The sun and felt it sting my eyes at That time of year: but this was still like home 176

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Sometimes, full body mirrors are also like Home sometimes, mural wall maps in hostels Are like home sometimes but really just make A whole continent scope like a piece of paper Arun Kolatkar, who was home sometimes but who Was sometimes at the inn to write On mongrel Dogs said there was a difference Between pirate maps and those of Cartographers and the difference, (involving The prevalence of spiritual monsters) was To me obvious and relevant, but Kolatkar Sat for days on end (but did not sleep) in The Wayside Inn at the end of a side of a polygon of traffic, interested in how The art gallery looked like an awning mouth and the Triangle like an Island with rounded edges From a crows-eye view as ‘any place where a dog gives birth must be at least a bit holy’ - you don’t really think This water is pink for a geological or semiSpiritual healing reason, do you, you don’t really Think these hills are demons, do you, Chaitanya, my friend, my monument who Stands by me on the left when I choose To turn my head: we were on a boat Heading for somewhere spiritual like A home and I turned to Nishant on my Left and said: The man holding two beers in the Tight black shirt, this man will bring His hands down too hard on the rasping guitar, this man is the killer of the demon named honey, I wait with Nishant to pounce on words of great moment as they arrive in my reading-mind, but this is only highly stratified, and I stand moving in front of the imaginary temple pillars or the Cathedral of old Buda at night when It is either lit birds or bats that circle it None of this will tune my strings to the Mood that the thing itself is in, this is No spiritual home or woodland grove, This is two beers, Nishant: iron blocks The sunrise: I find this boat we are on Will bring us nowhere but back to the Hotel, and eventually more trains, And the first sort of crushing independence You will live to know, and owe to open 177

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Supermarket-style weeks of waning hours And watched clocks and sweat without family And birds which you can follow home from Bombay over the black statue of the horse You showed: they call this Kala Ghoda Where we have been all along The family in your life in this overnight Compartment which goes through some Mountains over which D.H. Lawrence Walked will not adopt you, she is not an Ogress but the mother of two kids who Are not awakened for the passport Checks, I check the window like Arun Kolatkar until the sun, all across, all Oh all across this continent goes dark For the provincial loves to sleep: I Skip vineyards with my feet when I Pay attention to the bulging purple Grapes like small plums, unreal and pale In the awning sun and extremely fast In passing by, a dog or a baby starts to cry In the alley between my frosted glass Compartment and the next, this is no time: The yellow stumps the horizon that sits just Above the time line, I can’t see these lines Or zones of time in reality, I can’t walk the distance, I can’t Stomach to take notes or to edit Circadia, I can’t walk that distance backwards or again, but If I jump high enough, if one was to jump high enough then nothing, Nishant, But low enough and the subway will catch You and throw you to the grafitti’s edge, Ready and alone To land back on my bare and soaking toes In the land of Woe, French gardens, Neutral Milk Hotel, And an eye-widening, open, circular lack Of a spiritual home, with nothing to show for myself but love: If you get to see your poet Then you always risk forgetting my poet is dead now but I met people who met him.

Alexander Bridge

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System

System System If you really want to meet him you won’t find him at the bar in the theatre or the playground, at a movie, in a car…

System has no time for leisure when not working, he’s at war.

System tuts and wags his finger, splitting the whole world in two subject/object, slave and master male and female, me and you.

He is tall and very tight-lipped, white, and knows a thing or two.

When first born, he wasn’t naked wore a suit, had socks and shoes.

(His mother fled, she couldn’t bear to see the way that she’d been used.)

Now he carries rule and compass instruments he mustn’t lose.

System loves to make decisions on what’s good and what is bad.

Nothing thwarts his use of logic nothing makes him lost or sad.

There’s no sea that he can’t measure Newton should have been his dad.

Mathematics, Law and Physics these are fields he understands.

He knows rules and regulations like the back of his right hand.

(Don’t expect imagination, that’s a flame that can’t be fanned.)

System has a blindfold on him cannot see outside his head thinks of all things in compartments black and white or blue and red.

He loves walls and tall skyscrapers keeps a gun inside his bed.

If there were a way to build it System would devise a wall strong enough to keep out strangers no, we don’t want them at all.

In our nations as our houses, let’s be mean, and let’s be small.

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System’s always been much better than competitors at Trade.

And you’ll find he’s always Tory that’s the way the world is made.

If that scares you, then you’d better ask what makes you so afraid.

Invariably good at money, he backs the winner, funds the wars, underwrites fraud and oppression, evades the taxes, writes the laws.

Nothing shocks him, nothing moves him, gives him pleasure, gives him pause.

If you want to beat the System you won’t find him at the bar in the theatre or the playground but inside all things that are.

He is Male, and he is Always whether working, or at war.

History is always with us Patriarchy has shaped Man ever since the story started.

(That’s when gender wars began.)

Language is a gendered system.

System is a gendered plan.

Adam delved, Eve did the spinning, bore the children, cooked the food.

In this System, who is winning?

Is this fair, and is this good?

What has changed since the beginning if we’re all still spilling blood?

Empire, Rule and Colonisation, disequity of every kind all are Manifestations of the drive that makes Man blind.

Change is very slow in coming: see it, blowing in the wind.

First you must perceive the System.

If you can’t, then others can.

Take your blindfold off and face it: Mrs Thatcher was a Man. See the world and see it clearly when you’re ready, form your plan.

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Lucy Newlyn

182

Radio Drama

Radio Drama Radio drama is as distinctive an art form as film or TV. It requires more from its audience than the visual media, for radio drama is formed and lives in the mind of each individual listener. Through a combination of aural elements - dialogue, sound effects, music, technical devices - radio drama builds a unique picture in the mind of each separate member of its audience. Because the drama is created in the mind, it is individual and different for each person listening. How I envisage the heroine will certainly not be as you envisage her. Where I place and picture characters in a confrontation will be my vision. Yours will be different. This is its fascination, and Shakespeare might have been foretelling the art of radio drama when he put these words into the mouth of the Chorus in Henry V: Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts…

Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hooves in the receiving earth…

Neville Teller [Note: How I turned secret police files on my family into poetry.

In 1989, the five members of the Bugan family were allowed to leave Ceausescu’s Romania with one suitcase each and death threats in their wake. In 2010, the poet Carmen Bugan took possession of 1,500 pages of Securitate files on her father and in 2013 a further 3,000 pages of secret files on her mother, sister, brother and herself.

The result is her new book of poetry Releasing the Porcelain Birds - see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03wtmlk] Releasing the porcelain birds: Poems after surveillance SCENE 1.

The speakers are an east European woman poet in her early 40s and a middle-aged male secret police transcriber.

The poet addresses both the audience and the transcriber in the language of poetry, while he speaks the flat words of the transcripts. Two versions of history emerge, complicated by a distance of nearly 30 years between the events that caused the surveillance and reading the transcripts, making memory both enemy and ally.

The accent of the poet is light east European, the transcriber’s is a heavy east European accent spoken in a voice damaged by smoking.

The sound effects are the clacking of a typewriter in an empty room when the transcriber speaks and the sound of east European music (enescu) when the poet speaks.

(Typewriter in an empty room) TRANSCRIBER: (clears his throat) Ion Bugan was condemned for crimes against the socialist order from1962 until 1969. He became influenced by the calumnious programmes transmitted by Radio Free Europe, and in the autumn of 1980 decided to return to his antisocialist activities by creating and distributing pamphlets by which he aimed to instigate the population to actions of disorder in the country. On March the 10th, 1983, following his plan, Ion Bugan drove to 183

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Bucuresti in his personal car. After he had fixed three placards with hostile words against the government on his car, he drove from Piata Unirii into Boulevard 1848 to the intersection with Coltea Street, while he threw manifestos of a hostile character against the regime. He was apprehended by the state organs.

Music and shuffling of pages to indicate coming into the present POET:

There are records of us eating sour soup and polenta, drinking linden tea, Mother knitting sweaters at two in the morning to exchange for bread and flour. You will find her sitting on the bed alone by herself, talking to no one for many hours. Framed forever in the state archives.

PAGES TURNED In his prison cell my father’s jubilation was recorded: ‘If I come out at the same time as any of you, I’ll buy a bottle of wine and some ham, that’ll last us till home!’

The jailer warned him not to talk about what had happened there.

TRAIN, THEN STREET, THEN FRONT DOOR OPENS AND CLOSES TO SIGNAL GOING INTO A MEMORY They walked in the door holding hands, his wrists raw from chains.

He caressed my brother, wanted to know what I have learned at school, Then went around the house visiting each room; he asked for his shaver And his radio, the night wore on. The antennae at the top of our house Transmitted our feelings, the microphones must have blushed At our words after long silence, the informer outside the window stood At his post recording ‘the atmosphere of joy on the part of children’, Witnessing those first slow moments.

MUSIC MIXED WITH SOUND OF SHUFFLING PAGES TO SIGNAL COMING INTO PRESENT Twenty-five years have passed. This morning snow arrives like butterflies.

I see us in our small kitchen that first night, standing around each other Not knowing what to say. The image disappears into thousands of pages.

I no longer remember the pain in my father’s heart. It was long ago.

SCENE 2.

TYPEWRITER IN AN EMPTY ROOM. SHIFTING IN A CHAIR AND COUGHING FROM SMOKING. THE VOICE OF A MAN. FADE TRANSCRIBER: (smoker’s cough) A black table with intertwined vine design Three porcelain figurines (birds) A wall library with two drawers and display case 2 (two) hats made of light fabric and one leather hat 3 (three) man suits, a thick short coat 4 (four) woman summer dresses, a violin and a guitar.

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POET:

I found her porcelain birds today: three in one room Eight in the other, and those brought back to my mind The one with the broken wing my sister and I once fixed With Mother’s nail polish and a matchstick.

Mother loved porcelain birds; They must have made her think of flying When such thoughts were banished.

TRANSCRIBER: He represents a danger to our state Use all methods to monitor her, including special methods A radio Selena, a radio Gloria Display case with books for reading.

POET:

How far you have travelled my still swans, my white sparrows, Archived for thirty years all over the country, shelved and cleared I see you now, when I am too old to take you in my hands and mend you.

MUSIC. DOWN FOR PROTEST ON THE STREETS FADE BENEATH: My father went to change the world With wood, words, flags and portrait.

‘Down with the dictator,’ he said on 10 March 1983.

‘Give us hot water, electricity, freedom to assemble’.

Thousands saw him between armed soldiers None of his countrymen said a word.

SOUND OF PROTEST FADING INTO CHAINS IN PRISON On 4 May 1985 my father thought about his birthday.

TYPEWRITER

TRANSCRIBER: … make a cake with fifty candles and take a picture Come to see me with my children Do you remember me coming home with snow on my brow?

Children I so much miss you It’s disgraceful that you have nothing to eat A year has passed with no news from you Something awful is happening to you No one looks after us anymore, even Grandmother has left Mother is ill and short tempered.

POET:

Letters we sent were not received Until now, thirty years on: We Marsyas the Satyr tied to our tree.

The censor scraped at capillaries of our words.

TRANSCRIBER: ‘Butnaru’, at the visit with his daughter.

POET:

This is a memory I no longer have: Aged seventeen, gone to prison to see my father All on my own. Mother was ill.

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The slash of glass on glass at the window as The guard prepared the microphone between us, When my breath went from my room to his; another time.

A quarter of a century without memory of this visit?

Now the handwriting of the officer on duty calls me To the transcript with my name on it: daughter Of a convict with a code-name.

Now the struggle is between me and a piece of paper That talks about a girl.

MUSIC. DOWN FOR FOLLOWING AND OUT TRANSCRIBER: Post: 13 JDER Strict secret Date: 26.10.1988 Hour 5:50 objective and wife leave for work. At hour 18:10 wife returns to domicile. The objective arrives after 25 mins.

Wife: where did you go?

Obj.: Everywhere I went I was asked which routes I take when I return home. What am I to make of it?

Wife: You don’t say. Only that they want to plan something for you?

Obj.: If they want to plan something, why should they spread rumours around?

Wife: from today onwards we go together to the railway station.

POET:

They don’t know I read this record a quarter century on.

I am the link between their hearts, taking Love home The way of words rescued from the state archives.

TRANSCRIBER: At hour 1:32 we could hear someone trying the door equipped with the listening devices.

The door did not open, after which we could hear the footsteps of someone going away and the insistent barking of the dog, as to a person who is a stranger to the house.

POET:

After they left, we collapsed in leaden sleep Heads pounding, hearts racing through the night; In the mornings we drank our linden tea in silence.

Who can tell a quarter of a century on if my father Was so terrified to sleep in his own house He arranged with relatives to receive phone calls Announcing overnight guests who never came?

TYPEWRITER. FADE BENEATH.

TRANSCRIBER: Post 13 JDER Strict secret Date: 23.02.1988 At hour 22 the obj. listens to Radio Free Europe. His wife is busy knitting. At hour 22:25 the obj. attempts to put his son to bed by telling him a story with something imaginary, the action taking place in the West, with a life of plenty and no worries, and a country with lemon and orange trees…

Wife: It’s good also here with apples, and pears, and prunes…

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POET:

He went imagining the blooms of orange groves, Endless summer trips we were to take If not for real, then in his stories Taking place in the West, itself A forbidden word those days When we secretly cherished his dream.

TRANSCRIBER: Post 13 JDER Strictly secret Date: 24.10.1988 Report urgently to direction to include these aspects: POET:

There are arrows that mark my words: I said to my father that I would have saved him From going to prison if I could have been his lawyer.

He warned me about being tracked by them.

To find such record shining from the litany of blame Which then seemed just and also safe as self-defence.

SCENE 3.

MUSIC (ENESCU) AND THE SOUND OF BIRDS. DOWN FOR FOLLOWING. KEEP BENEATH

TRANSCRIBER: February 12, 1988: ‘In attention’- note written on the left top corner of the text Hour 6:00, in the room the ‘objective’ listens to the news from the Radio Free Europe.

The children sleep, he is listening by himself.

At 7:35 Carmen leaves the house…

The ‘objective’ is reciting the following verses to his son: ‘Let us not by the will of the Holy God Crave blood, instead of land.

When we will reach the end of patience, Everything, by turn, will end.’

Son: Is this all?

Father: Eh! I no longer know this poem…. I like to live alone, not with people, because I don’t trust them.

Son: Is this what you call loneliness?

Father: Yes SOUND OF PAGES BEING TURNED, MUSIC, PAGES BEING TURNED POET:

I make out capillaries under the flaying instrument, I reconstruct parts of the skin from the words That were copied out. We now know What has been taken from us and how Words alone saved us then And bring joy now, the joy of finding them, For in their frail syllables I recognize the old self.

Apollo has cleaned his instrument and left.

SOUND OF THE SEA 187

Radio Drama

Not all turning against your language is self-betrayal Behind each word is what tries to get inside it, Whether I speak it in my own language Or in the tongue of others. The thought With which you send love out, or forgiveness, Outlive the words and languages.

Today is allowed to exist and then vanish Like the seagulls and their shadows On the still-seeming water in the Bay, Where I walk unnoticed, unrecorded, Making memories of compass jelly fish swimming Up with the tide, after the storm.

My own shadow over rocks and sand Simply means that I exist And there is light.

--END-Carmen Bugan

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Romance

Romance This week we are doing…ROMANCE!. I like this one because it’s a both a topic, a genre and potentially a form too. A lot of Arthurian Romances were written in a particular form e.g. alliterative verse, stanzas or Bob and Wheel, so you can potentially mimic one of those in your poem.

Alternatively you can write a straight-up love poem, as permitted by being “romantic”, or you can take it as “Romantic”, and write either an old-style Romance or even open up the whole “Romantic poetry” can of worms. What makes something romantic/Romantic to you? Is it a tone, a style, a form, a genre? Write a poem and find out.

Alexander Bridge The Romantic’s Holiday The rift is where a dragon sleeps over which the wanderer leaps and roams beneath the gathering black that casts cold shadows down the track.

A man has seen his own eyes there glint through sheaves of tangled hair, and flashing through the rocky wild he hopes to glimpse the holy child.

In the thunder of the mist he gains the regal precipice, to steal the awe and passion he needs to recharge philosophy.

The recess carved by water’s hand sinks deep into this floating land.

He thinks he’s found a mystic throne, this ridge, on which he stands alone and gazes down into his mind.

To make an offering to this shrine, he throws a stone into the gap then listens to its joyous tap.

Can he harness nature’s sense, to fire his pallid eloquence, use this stony imagery when he relies on memory?

For there are cruel empires to change, kingdoms to move, not entertain while enemies plan their attack.

He picks a rock and takes it back.

Jude Cowan Montague 189

“I Hate Christmas”

“I Hate Christmas” Not a normal Christmas challenge. I was wondering how I could mix it up and decided this would be a fun way to do so.

Interpret how you choose. Maybe you hate the cold. Maybe you hate family gatherings. Maybe you have a unique spin on things. Maybe you just don't like capitalism all that much.

Alexander Bridge New Year’s dragging on: Lady Methadone wore bright purple at “Her Upstairs” last night under the ignited ceiling rippling in white breath an expectancy for some shiny carnage and to receive the dramatic event of time being knocked back & forward by the huge city fists (and its queens, faces like Expressionism and orchids) until the hour dropped and one queen exhaled a deep red cloud which stripped the walls and everyone stopped crying all of a sudden.

The streets are dirty but they feel clean in my lungs, walking through Borough the morning after, tip-toing past broken bottles and lost stilettos and condoms like white peppers, decorating the streets in human confetti an enthusiastic musician walks past with a red guitar-case and a woman in a long green dress and turban, 4 children play-fighting and a sun that lay in too long and only now is beginning to reveal its bright shyness.

It woke up with everyone 190

“I Hate Christmas”

else’s hangover and tried to clean up the air waving a long crisp hand.

Everyone is as fresh as the prediction for some forthcoming history.

My eyes are still red from not washing out eye-shadow properly, as sore as we expect the calendars in a new wake up.

I wasn’t as guilty as I thought I would be.

I only danced. And the Sun promised it would forgive me this year.

Alex Matraxia

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