A vilanelle?

Today I completed the second of three poems I'm required to submit as part of the assessed work for my creative writing course at the ANU. We're asked to submit a free-verse poem and two others with more traditional, formal structures such as a vilanelle or sonnet. I finished and submitted the first, my vilanelle, this morning.  It's called Custodians, and this is how it starts:

Tomorrow is not ours to lose but keep, 
To hold, protect, and save from foolish men
So no dark days may make our children weep.

We shall see what they think.

Dylan Thomas
Source: University of Buffalo

And here - because one can - is the most famous vilanelle ever written. Thank you Dylan Thomas. The rest of us know how high we need to aim.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Poem? Not a poem? No idea.

Restore after Fish

And today's word is ...

DUMPLING

As in, I am one.

Clootie Dumpling ... from Texas, apparently

I submitted two poems as entries to the Fish Publishing poetry competition 2015.  The poems are Come Take The King's Shilling and Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre.  I've been working on the former - which started its life as Blackstrap Molasses - for months.  Throughout that period I have pondered the title as much as anything.

So you can imagine how silly I felt when I received the automatically generated e.mail telling me that my poem Come Take The King's Silling had been received by the organisers.  Silling?  It's not even a word!  Of course, one can't edit an entry after it has been paid for and submitted.  

Precision of language?  I can't even type properly.

Fool.

Two paces forward or ten steps back?

It can do your brain in, this writing business.  I've been staring at - working with - these lines for hours.  They're a bridge in a poem that started out in life as Blackstrap Molasses.  It's something different now. 

Theirs was an alien landscape, force-fed

From that once-mighty river; no longer

The greatest nor, ever again, the nation’s

Life blood. Sucked dry. Like metaphor. 

First there were three lines.  Now there are four.  And the chances are that there aint much poetry in them whatever the number of lines. But you keep at it because the voices don't stop.

There's a Clydesale horse in it.  Makes sense to me.

Small birds will fly regardless

The day will come, believe me,
when the same old yellow sun
will rise from East as it has always done
to meet another dawn 

but one you will not greet,
old man, for there will no more be
the time remaining, time to wonder 
what it's for, what it is all about.

That sun will rise, the air skip gently 
through another lazy morning 
or blow a gale the likes of which 
you never saw in all your too short days.

So do not linger. Do not pause to speculate
on what might happen, one day, should you wait.

Peace - Burial at sea of Sir David Wilkie by J W Turner

I watched a short arts programme on the BBC iPlayer; Benjamin Zephania (who I saw perform in a small theatre on Mile End Road, Tower Hamlets - where I lived in 1982) was taking us through A Private View of an exhibition of Turner's late works at the Tate Museum.  The poet paused to reflect on Peace - Burial At Sea, painted in 1842 to mark the burial of Turner's friend Davd Wilkie.  Critics didn't take to it at the time.  Too dark.  Too gloomy.

Anyway.  Benjemin Zephaniah ruminated on the painting and the artist.  He drew our attention to the small bird gliding over the water, almost emerging from it.  I wrote my poem.

Camouflage For Beginners

Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Breathe in again.
Try not to think, not think too much.
Try hard to limit what you think or say or write
To careful, cautious words that favour what is right,
Seems right, reflects the way you’ve learned,
The way you taught yourself, to limit what gets out,
What can be said, expressed, exhaled, expelled
Like poison from a fevered body, fevered mind,
A spirit held in self-made, well-worn chains.
Self-made?  Self-mad more like.  A madness so perfected
Others take it for a measured state of mind,
Mistake it for some kind of equilibrium.  Normality, 
The wretched soul’s best hiding place. Out here.
In plain sight where all one needs is mediocrity.

Gnats

Is it true?
Do we only have the attention span of 

Sorry, what was that?
I wasn't really paying

No, I was just saying
there's this thing on 

YouTube.
YouTube?

Not another 
cat

dancing to whatsisname.
Whatsisname? 

Rick
Rick Astley? 

Never Gonna Give You 
Up.

Boy band from the Eighties
- without the band.

But all that other stuff.
What stuff?

Rickrolling.
How enthralling.

Just saying.
Saying what? 

Nothing really.

Old Habits Die Hard

There is science to explain that thunder
"is simply caused

by vibration of the air"
when lightening strikes at speed.

Some say
three thousand, seven hundred

miles per hour
or in a flash

too fast to count,
too quick to measure

but not so fast
we do not run for cover, cower

and watching angry clouds
thank ancient Gods 

we are not 
rent asunder.


Another thunderstorm, our second in two days, hit Canberra. I wrote a poem as the rain fell.


http://www.sciencemadesimple.co.uk/activities/thunder

Is the lunatic in the hall?

Is it an act of surrender or retreat (at best)
to put on The Dark Side Of The Moon,
to disappear into the comfort of Us and
Them and all the rest from decades ago?

It may be.
And even now it may be too late:
perhaps it always was
and the suggestion we might meet again
on the dark side of the moon was,
then and now,
just another adolescent fantasy;

an idea one could never escape,
not even in this dismal old age
when  the  answer is only too clear.

The Same Old Songs

In search of what it might still be
a man like me may yet believe
old songs fill the infinite spaces,
old men sing of inexhaustible fires
and unquenchable thirst; desires
they never understood or satisfied

and if we're lucky (maybe damned)
we sing along, not just because we know
the words to songs we started singing
forty years ago, when we still thought
we knew the purpose singing had
or what the songs were all about.

We sing because old music lives within.
We sing because old voices yearn to sing.

One hand clapping

Wheezing like a tired, old dog
spreadeagled on a threadbare, faded rug
in an empty room on the ground floor
of a shack, two-miles out of town
on a long-forgotten, seldom travelled track

a man, no longer sure of why
or even when he came to sit and stare,
turns his slightly heavy head a fraction,
maybe less than that - to listen -
to try to hear once more that sound

he thought he might have heard before;
not an echo, not a whisper,
not the distant drum of some lost drummer
marching down the road to might have been
but still, he thought, the sound of something.

Just write

William Wordsworth was 28 and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 26 when Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems was published in 1798.  It may be true that it is never too late to try but I'm already older than their years combined.

Ice on Ben Arthur, 1971

Bring back the way we might have been
with our half-remembered brightness
like those eager men the world had not yet seen

restless in pursuit, not of their greatness
but of truths that they or we or any mountaineer
might look for in the glint of winter's sun

skating on the frosted summit's skin
above us; out of reach and yet so near
we dare not cease until the climb is done.

And here's a hand my trusty friend

Slipping, almost silently, out the back door
another year vanishes
to be talked about (if at all) only in the past
tense: the things we did, those other things
we never quite got round to (which we'll need
to see to soon); places that we'd been,
people seen and some we'd missed
or lost and then again
those others who'd lost us
or left us far behind as sometimes happens.
And so, for auld lang syne may be
(for more than just the habit, surely?)
we'll take a cup, we'll maybe sing
and try to make our peace with this New Year.

Let fly this wounded bird

I pressed into the willing hands of one not there
the once-forgotten hopes of one who would not dare
to dream or live as dreamers might or could;
of one who sank too far into the depths of should,
misunderstood the differences between those three
and chose not wisely nor chose well the way to be,
perhaps from fear, maybe from doubt
that could would work its own way out,
so should must therefore be the only path to take
against the gnawing fear of making some mistake
which in the grander scheme of life's events
must matter less - far less - than all that fear prevents
from living, breathing, taking off, perhaps to soar
above the clouds that stop us, always, seeing more.

 

Oh Magnificent Seven

Is it true? Do we all want to be cowboys
riding as one of the magnificent?

Seven years old and surrounded by toys
we built improbable futures, spent
too much time, too little effort
and insufficient energy on hopeless
schemes of the make-believe sort
we never thought led up life's endless
path of dreams or sped away from
one lost chance to any interrupted
opportunity to add a little to the sum
of ill-conceived imaginings, disrupted

by the world in which our real lives lurk;
dad says: bed straight after homework.

Listening to Desert Island Discs again.  Alfie Boe's third selection was the theme tune from the Magnificent Seven.  I was at least ten when I saw the movie but I have to practise my craft (I can call it poetic licence).  Clearly, a man clutching at straws will find inspiration anywhere he can.
.

Last night's poem ... new toy

The Juke Box Cafe, Eversholt Street

One note, long and low; held

as the heart beat accelerates.

The chest muscles of a young man

begin to ache, yearning for the release

of tension during an age, if not

of discovery, at least of exploration;

experimentation, which some might call
youthful exuberance.

                                    Meanwhile

a saxophone player
with whom

                                   someone’s mother
almost ran away.when she was barely seventeen
...............(which was not yesterday)

looks up from a newspaper

where he’s been checking classified ads

and searching jobs vacant columns

that seem never to have changed

and in an act of recognition,

recollection maybe, he smiles fondly

but not entirely happily. 

Shine on you crazy diamond

He played the part once, on stage

in a student union bar somewhere,

north of Wolverhampton.

The band was rocking.  He was

on fire

but the moment had passed.

It was all downhill

from there.



I'd been listening to Roger Waters on BBC Radio Four's Desert Island Discs

.

The Skinny Possum

I watched a skinny possum dart
between parked cars, aligned imperfectly
outside the University of Sydney's
English Department, where hordes
of undergraduate students roam
backwards and forwards every hour,
like herds of migrating Wildebeast
taking the same path, following
the same tracks, each hour; all day.

That skinny possum could move,
which surprised me almost as much
as the possum must have been
surprised itself, to find itself,
in broad daylight, cutting across
the well-worn paths of lumbering
English Lit. Majors, Honours
candidates in Early Anglo-Saxon
or Accountancy and Tort Law
specialists making up their credit
count with an Easy-A in Arts.

I barely caught a glimpse of it, to tell
the truth; four furry legs going helter-
skelter underneath a half-parked Ford
and a grey-black bushy tail vanishing
before my disbelieving gaze, unused
to possums, which I'd always thought
were fat, slow-moving and reddish
brown.  All of which just goes to show
that a prize-winning undergraduate
like me knows diddley-squat about
Australian marsupials; not how fast
they move or where they might appear
or disappear before uncertain eyes.
.

Quantification

If this is what it boils down to,
the residue of hopes no longer
triumphant over expectation
how might one measure that?
Does one weigh it in a balance
between all that seemed unlikely
and every thought that never flew
or pour it out into the glass to say
half full, or maybe not; half empty?
We dare not say or have no view
for knowing this, that fools rush
in where angels fear to tread,
the more or less we think we know
such thoughts hang by bare thread.
.

Now Voyager?

Barely floating, like an ancient, leaky boat
from some lost age, with creaking joints
placed under too much constant pressure
but resistant yet; still together - just -
beneath the cracked and flaking skin,
once bright, once clear but fading now;
half-submerged in water on which once
it sat upright and maybe even perky,
defiant in those former days, those days
of bygone glory when (once upon a time)
no farthest shore seemed yet too distant,
no feint horizon failed to stir the impulse
to head out, to set out on a journey
over seas with neither map nor compass.
.