~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (the poetry) WORM ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 24

 

Guests

Migration

My house is full of feathers
he took a long time flapping his wings
my last chick to leave the nest
Once I thought to give him a push
then thought the cat might get him
In the end he went
Flew away of his own accord
Migrated to another land
where there is more ice than sun
more snow than rain
where the sun shines at midnight
and lights dance on icicles
It wasn't the going away that bothered me
it was the gaps in the day
the one dinner plate on the table

© Sally James

( Migration : Editor's Choice of Clive Simpson,''This made me sit up and take notice of it and that is about all I ask of a poem these days.' )

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© Susan Smith Lesser

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Akeldama

(An Alphabetic Acrostic)

Ah! how the task weighed heavy on my mind.
Before he blessed the bread and final wine,
Christ whispered: "Go, do what you will." He knew!
Do treachery! He knew! And yet I flew,
enchanted by the alms of Perfidy -
full thirty silver coins - to oversee
God's Son delivered up to Calvary.
How sweet the tinkling music of the coins
inside my girdle pressed against my loins:
just recompense for every dusty mile,
kind deed and noble act of self-denial
Lord Jesus had impressed upon his squad;
mean stipend in the service of his God.
Now, as I try the rope around the bough
outstretched along the precipice's brow,
perplexed and overburdened by my guilt,
quick expiation beckons. Though I wilt,
remorse can never compensate a deed
so foully wicked that the heavens heaved.
The thirty silver pieces are returned,
unwanted; even by their donors, spurned.
Venality's reward is meetly earned.
Where I swing above the rocks, the sweet
xylobalsamum beneath my feet
yields its faint perfume. The gibbet shakes.
Zion nods approval as it breaks.

© Peter Moltoni

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Becky Lovejoy and the Malone School Orchestra

Learning to play clarinet, I favored low notes.
With puffed cheeks, I bellowed deep C's, B's,
notes that would slink from my flared end
like a stalking panther, black and blacker,
belly down against the music room's red rug.
My grave anthem prowled through herds
of tapping toes keeping time with tribal thumps
of snare and base drum smote by four-eyed percussionists,
mighty fifth grade warriors.

Trombones and trumpets spilled melancholy pachyderms,
sickly beasts, spit wet and whiney, pecked by bug hungry wrens
that fluttered from the hollow tips of silver piccolos played
by a trio of chubby brunettes sitting cross ankled
in our orchestra's front row.

Saxophones snapped like angry crocs and Becky Lovejoy,
the sixth grade's first bra babe, fingered flute airy songs
that leapt through the jungle's muddled strain like perfumed impalas,
bouncing up again up again up as my panther crouched quiet
beneath a leafy spread of cymbal clashes,
waiting to pounce, waiting for Becky to stray and bounce
closer, closer, close.

Sand Lines

On a desert island, not a poet yet, you long to read
some poetry. All you have is a stick and sandy beach.
You decide to write your own. Not on your life
can you remember a single sonnet from school
or that favourite plum poem by Williams.

The shipwreck struck all poems from your head.
How would you start, knowing only how poems never
seem to fill a page entirely?

You pick up your stick.
On sand, you must compose for your audience.
Apart from you, the tide,
devouring your every word. Not for your lover --
not for publication, not for posthumous discovery.

But truly writing
just for yourself (the tide will read anything
once and delete) --
what would be your poem?

You have your stick
and all that sand.

© Shisa Poet

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Genesis

i)
Reading-Good; Writing-Good; Arithmetic-Very Good.
A good General Knowledge and contributes to class discussions.
Arthur rushes his work and can be careless sometimes.
Attendance possible: 196 Attendance actual: 192

Extract: School Report for Arthur Seeley,
July 1940,
Eastwood Board School,
Keighley Board of Education

ii)
Haworth Carnival 2003
Fun All Day Every Day
August 27th-28th
Craft Stalls Fun Fair Straw Race
Music Entertainment Procession
All Welcome
***All Day Family Fun Every Day****

Street Poster, Keighley, 2003

iii)
In Memory of
8 children, Sons and Daughters of
Richard and Mary Ann N------
of HAWORTH
who died in their infancy.
Also Mark William N-----
who died December 1st 1843 in his 2nd year
And also of an infant daughter of theirs
June 15th 1846
And also of an infant 1850
And also of an infant 1852

Gravestone in St Michael and All Angel's Church, Haworth

iv)
Oh for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity
And never care how rain may steep
Or snow may cover me!

Extract from ' The Philosopher' by Emily Bronte (1818-1848)

v)
It is estimated that 40,000 people are buried in Haworth village churchyard.
The graveyard being so overcrowded and badly drained is affecting the
already poor sanitation in Haworth. The sanitation is poor to the public
health, with inadequate fresh water facility.

41.6% of children in Haworth die before the age of 6, average life
expectancy is 24. Diaries from the school history are testament to the poor
health of the children; smallpox, measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever are
mentioned frequently and the deaths of children logged on a daily basis.

There are 69 privies in the whole village, one to every 4½ houses. Some
people drink from water contaminated from open drains. Many of the houses
are damp due to backing on to higher ground that is continually seeping
water from higher up. There are many cases of typhus, dysentery, smallpox
and consumption.

It is requested that gravestones are not to be laid flat on the ground in
the churchyard as they are limiting the growth of shrubs which would help
with decomposition.

Abstract: Report to the General Board of Health
Benjamin Herschel Babbage. 1850

vi)

Those gloomy ways
were never ways for children.
Steep rains

swept the elms,
drenched the graveyard
till it bellied and seeped

the putrefaction
of faltered siblings
down the cobbled Main.

Row on row
stones tell
of other children born

to dank rooms,
darkness and the choke
that cluttered lungs;

rack of cough in the night,
the hot kiss of fever,
the rustle of breath at dawn;

then silence sudden in the crib.
Late boots
trudge up the hill;

-'And also of an infant'-
to be cut -
later.

Their lives
a brief procession
through bewilderment.

Despite all,
on unpapered walls
the first faint sketches bloomed,

in tiny script
a city grew,
prospered;

sisterhood
kindled a flame
that lit the years

and never again a time
to sleep, as others sleep,
without identity.

© Arthur Seeley

( Genesis : Editor's Choice of John Carley, 'This poem is a pointer to the untapped potential of haibun in English."Genesis" blurs the boundaries of reportage and found poetry, text and context, comment and autobiography. I could read a lot more of this.' )

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Morning Pages


...write down the first thing that comes into your head:
that dream of a pawnbroker's shop with green violins.
Arriving in London from Grasmere with fresh daffodils.
The way that rain on glass is shaped like nibs.

Suspend views. Don't look up or dot your eyes.
Get it down. Anything. Shopping lists if you like:
cat food, bananas, book token, biro, cheeses-
they could be Cheshire, Brie - no-one will read

your morning pages, they're the writer's sweatshop,
jerked into air in the mental gym, machine miles
that end where they began. Shoe polish-
nobody uses that, except perhaps colonels

watching demos for subversives, yet pretending
not to be there, in tweed suits- biscuits-
or eager salesmen peddling blank impressions.
Notepaper. Words that leave on parallel lines.

Use dashes for impact- Rain- clearing later- Sun-
thoughts loose in your head, lines stretching to run.
It's harder than dreaming, all pensive like Shelley
in his big girl's blouse. It's like reporting

for daily papers, or other commercial writing
with fast words, gasped sentences, spilt palette colour-
show business, rap music, politics, famine.
All those things people read about once.

© Martyn Halsall

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The Dead Writer's Stories

Birthday suicide, your letters landing
gingerly like tiny probes from the far
system of being dead, were these your
finest stories, taut, crafted, demanding

and receiving awed attention, and sending
all who read them shocked and reeling through
the dumb if-onlys and what-ifs that you
bequeathed to them with such a killer ending?

They say a Sunday Magazine might run
a story on the story you've become;
they say a film director wants to see

if there's potential in your life's abyss;
they say that hacks you hardly knew - like me -
will use you for material - like this.

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The Marion Militia

In 1861 they came.
Claib Jackson blew the clarion.
d'Un called us rangers, coined the name
"The Merry Men of Marion".

Missouri suffered under siege.
St. Louis hardly fought, and fell.
To Hannibal we lay our liege.
Two hours later, "War was Hell".

Our guns grew heavy when we found
five Union soldiers standing guard.
Decisively we marched around
the house, laid low, and swallowed hard.

We hit the woods and, safe at last,
we hailed our movements a success
then followed up our brief repast
sojourning farms to convalesce.

We strategized or sang a song
or spun a yarn or cooked a meal.
Our watch horse listened all night long
for boys in blue who'd try to steal

inside our camp. We often slept
on corn, in cribs, from farm to farm,
consistently fell back and kept
one oath, and that, "to do no harm".

They called me Samuel Clemens then;
Ulysses Grant led in pursuit.
His wife was a Missourian;
I'd hoped he'd hesitate to shoot.

They hounded us for weeks on end
or fourteen days, to be exact.
We failed, at all points, to defend
but beat it home, all twelve, intact.

© Les Wolf

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Hora Sfakion

And as today, did dove-white islands float -
like puffs of smoke smudging the horizon;
at anchor, rows of blue stemmed fishing boats
knock and nudge in harbour? By dawn they'd gone -
the grey destroyers - their fickle saviours;
some soldiers wept, laid down their arms and sat
awaiting death amongst the bougainvilleas.
Instead, they found an eerie peace: a cat
curled-up beneath a shady veranda;
a myriad of lemon butterflies,
shimmering amongst the oleander.
Oblivious to our forefather's demise
we eat our lunch. What violence was done
so we might feast beneath the Cretan Sun?

( Hora Sfakion : Editor's Choice of M.A.Griffiths,'I admit to being a sucker for a good sonnet, and I love the sense of place and time conjured up by this beautiful example of the form' )

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Nids

Man for sure is a hominid,
perhaps the camel a llamanid.
But I’ll not venture to guess the relative
that provided abominid’s appellative.

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© Christina Fletcher

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Dear Albert


Your average size means naught
your genius wrought with stiff precision,

swift as atoms, matter
of fact twice as fast, as light.

I never knew my neurons thrived,
not even while with Newton.

Our brainstems pressed together, hemispheres
in full eclipse.

Encephala encharged, enlarged, your heart
beats speed and distance --

an instance limbically
unfree of love.

© K.R. Copeland

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Demon Lover

I sensed you were a follower of Set -
the way you grumbled at the dawn each day,
kept pipistrelles in pockets, and a pet
with three fierce heads to snarl and bark and bay.
I knew you were a demon when your eyes
went black and something vipered into view.
Of course I felt a soupcon of surprise
but Honey, what the hell, I still loved you.

I scarcely scent the brimstone now, it blends
with lavender and violet so well.
Did human sex transmute your horny glands
or have I lost my dogged sense of smell ?
Ah well, no man is perfect and, at least,
I'm topped and tailed by beauty and the beast.

© M.A.Griffiths

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