Ubuntu

When our humanity falters

In so many places

And what really matters

Is trounced in so many ways

When dictators are not just

A “Third” World affliction

Which “First” encouraged, in moral dereliction

And now is itself spotted like rust

With rampant would-be elite Fascism

We can draw back from the abyss

For democracy is no mere -ism

If. “humanity” no longer resonates, then think on this

There are other words from other places you

Can use so why not try “Ubuntu”?

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Ubuntu is not just a philosophical concept but a way of life that influences social interactions, justice, and community building. It reminds us of our shared humanity and the importance of supporting one another.

Over at Reena’s Xploration Challenge, Reena Saxena invites us to write about the concept of Ubuntu.

Signature Dishes – a Lyric Essay

A signature dish usually has a story
Rooting its cook in the time and place
Where it was acquired and from whom…

Palaver Sauce was my first glorious excursion into cooking in a different way, and I brought it out at dinner parties for many years and told its story. The American professor of West African studies who taught my fellow student and I to stew the things which convention would say ought not to go together, red meat and white, and salt fish…

Goat—funkier than lamb, nearer to mutton
Chicken – chopped in chunks still on the bone
Salt Dried Cod – ancient African currency that once bought slaves
Spinach sauce rich with garlic and chilli
Turmeric, my own addition.

Palaver is the Portuguese word for quarrel but there is no argument once cooking’s worked its magic.

My old boss Tony, took me for a meal in Manchester, in a church converted to a hotel and restaurant with a swimming pool in the Lady Chapel and Venison Marinated in Strawberry and Stilton on the menu.
Tony gave me my first job as a cook—I will not honour it with the title chef.
Ratatouille
Chilli con Carne
Six Quiches, various
and six buckets of salad each morning
developed my skills and gave me staples so that years later when I opened my own restaurant, Frewin’s, The Carroll Hotel long gone, I sentimentally made that Venison dish my own signature, menu centrepiece…

Small things can make a signature dish
I nestle walnuts into Apple Crumble topping
For who thinks of roasting walnuts
Yet how delicious is this tiny touch
Browned at the crown but protected from burning
A rival to its cousin Pecan Pie.

But crumble never overtook Bread and Butter Pudding at Frewin’s – I made a rod for my own back with that one, so often was it ordered, but at least it could be made at a moment’s notice – the ingredients always to hand…

Buttered Brioche bread
Cream
Milk
Eggs
Veins of sugar and raisins interleaved

Ramekins into the microwave until the mix began to rise and then into the oven to swell and brown – the look on diners faces when the souffle impersonating dessert arrived hot foot…

Christmas Dinner for the whole family, though a favourite feast, is my least favourite meal to cook – all logistics and creativity giving way to tradition. Yet special meals are not always for the many, once, I spent a quiet Christmas with just my sister, Carol, in a town in Roscommon where a halal meat packing plant had populated the place with Pakistanis and the supermarket shelves with foodstuffs I could have found back home in “Bradistan*”.
I decided to treat Carol to a “desi**” breakfast such as we had both enjoyed in Bradford. Such fun making wholemeal, spinach pooris, flicking the wrist to spin the disks discs like frisbees, into the deep fat fryer – watching them inflate like little green footballs then eating the curry and lime pickle with pooris and fingers, not forks and spoons.

Also at Carol’s command
I recreated a Victorian favourite
Sussex Pond
Suet Raisin pastry
Crudely thrown together
Roughly rolled out
To line a plastic bowl
A chopped-up lemon
And equal weights of
Butter and muscovado
The filling in and
Pastry top crimped down –
Four minutes in the microwave
Is all it took and
When the pudding –
Turned out on a plate
Was cut into – out poured the
Pond water, rich and brown
Its sweetness offset by
The chunks of lemon.
This too graced my restaurant
Tables for special guests
With suitable appetites for
Suet pudding – I promised
To deliver in just twelve minutes
Start to finish and
I never lost my race…

Food is life, and love, and comfort
and is it any wonder that
it generates stories
rooted in people, places
traditions and relationships
flavours and feasts remembered…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

* So many Pakistanis came to work in the mills of Bradford, that it was sometimes referred to as Bradistan.

** from the Sanskrit word “Desh” meaning “country”. The word “Desi” refers to something “from the country” and so for Pakistanis in Bradford, it means things from the old country – desi food, desi calendars, and desi dress.

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, in Poetics: Satiating the Soul, Punam invites us to celebrate any or all of the things that go to make up the Hindu festival of Diwali – cleaning the house, preparing food, and celebrating the festival of Light with friends, family and everyone else…

I have been intrigued for some time, by the idea of the lyric essay and have bought books by Claudia Rankine and Kathleen Graber as examples, but the form is as slippery as a fish and impossible to pin down. Writers.com begin a very good attempt at definition by saying “Lyrical essays explore the elements of poetry and creative nonfiction in complex and experimental ways, combining the subject matter of autobiography with poetry’s figurative devices and musicality of language.” This is my first serious attempt at the form…

Seeking salvation in drink…

Many a young man
thinking himself
“on a promise”
with a young woman
has been doomed
to disappointment
having misread the signs
or having allowed his
thoughts to stray
into the realms
of wishful thinking
may seek to salve
his ego
in wanton drinking…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Image by Midjourney

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, lillian in Quadrille, invites us to write a Quadrille ( apoem in exactly 44 words not including the title) that should include the word, if not the concept of “promise”…

Does Magic Believe in Us?

If a man dies never having described
the magical experience he once had
does it mean the magic never happened

Magic is not the same as conjuring
which is a trick, usually sleight of hand
though a trick of the light may be magical…

“There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s where the light gets in”
sang Leonard Cohen with a voice so low it may count as magic

Counting off the things on your bucket list
you may miss the magic
you never thought to list

Thinking about magic you have experienced
you may be in danger of dissecting
it to death and why would you not just accept

Accepting the existence of magic
is a personal prerogative
one person’s magic is another’s commonplace

Magic can happen any place
any time
to anyone

I believe in magic
but not magicians
or ghosts

I defend the rights of others
to believe in ghosts, and
to share what magic means to them

Magic, like love – just is
it cannot be reasoned or conjured up
though you may set the scene for it to manifest

The manifestation of magic
cannot be forced
but only prepared for in receptivity

The reception of magic is easy for children
but what they achieve easily
we struggle to hold onto with age

A life may well be weighed
by the amount of magic
we have observed to be…

Perhaps the real question to be asked
is not whether you believe in magic
but whether magic believes in you…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

An image created using Midjourney, of a certain magician…

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1942511719&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, msjadeli in OpenLinkNight, invites us to submit a poem and since we are, in Lisa’s words “just a week away from the spookiness of All Hallow’s Eve”, I have chosen one that references magic and ghosts…

I wrote this in my writing group in the shadow of “Belief in Magic” by Dean Young.

Hell’s Bells…

Hell’s bells and buckets of bloody blood!
My mother used to say
and after Australia
she said it every day

It used to be
just Hell’s bells and buckets of blood
but bloody was a word oft heard
in the land of Oz you see

Hell’s bells—an apt description
for news now from everywhere
it would have given her conniptions
were she still here

Hell, I’d even use the cuss she bequeathed me
except I don’t accept religious geography
and know that Hell is here on Earth
and not some seven circled place beneath

Hell’s bells – the cuss abbreviated
hardly reflects the place we’ve come to
climate change, genocidal wars
from decency and democracy we’ve deviated

Hell’s bells and buckets of blood
for greater impact
our world is in the toilet
and that’s a fact

So still I hear my mother’s voice
raised in exasperation
uttering her curse of choice
Hell’s bells and buckets of bloody blood!

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, dorahak in Poetics inspires us with a very fulsome prompt, to write using repetition as a poetic tool…

Autumn Colours – not just for show…

Is there anyone who does not love the display of Autumn colours that nature puts on each year if you live in the latitudes where deciduous trees flourish? A love that is, tempered by the knowledge of the meaning which this colourful transformation signals – the end of Summer and the advent of Winter – only young children are blissfully unaware of the message and thoughtlessly kick their way through the ever-deepening piles of fallen leaves.
The change begins on the edge of some leaves on a certain side of some trees and gradually creeps across the entire tree, to be joined at differing rates and with subtly different palettes by other species until whole stands of woodland are ablaze save for the odd patch of evergreens. But this extravagant show, which has us humans travelling to see its most spectacular examples, is not some random quirk of nature, but a necessary part of the plant’s process – one without which the trees would not survive the coming cold of Winter. The green, chlorophyll-filled engine of energy conversion which is a leaf, exchanging liquid food from the tree and using sunlight to power the tree, now switches its production to producing a kind of anti-freeze which the tree reabsorbs into its twigs, branches and trunk to protect itself against frost damage. Once each leaf has done its job, sucked dry by its parent, it shrivels and falls to the ground where it will rot down and feed the tree through its roots and complete the cycle of its life but the byproduct of its transformation in Autumn is a breathtaking, spectacular, partial rainbow from yellow to rich reds…

Autumn colours show

as leaves transform their sap to

save the tree from frost

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Frank J. Tassone in Haibun Monday invites us to celebrate Autumn colours and the passage of the seasons…

Le Pho

Le Pho (1907 – 2001) Jeune fille au chat blanc, ink and gouache on silk

I see an artist on the cusp of a wave risen up as the artistic traditions of East and West meet headlong in the art of a young Vietnamese artist in the early part of the 20th Century. Painted on silk, an Oriental tradition if ever there was one, that composition of the “Jeune fille” (titled in the language of the French imperialists) displays a synthesis of two quite different traditions of representation, colouration and style. The young woman is represented as almost but not quite making it into three dimensions, the thinnest of outlines on the left-hand side of her face and the strong framing of her hair to the right, work to flatten her face almost in the manner of an icon from the much earlier period of Western art even though the shading of her cheeks lean towards a western three-dimensionality. The table too betrays an Eastern style of perspective, or rather lack of it – showing a near-round disk as if we are looking down on it instead of across it to the girl who leans upon its far side insouciantly smoking a cigarette in a long holder which places the picture squarely in the mid 20’s. The objects on the table are all thus displayed at equal size – a printed book of Chinese pictograms, a traditional ink block and rubbing dish and some artfully displayed blooms in a shallow bowl. The colours are stronger than in traditional Eastern art and yet the face of the young woman evokes both Chinese art and Western paintings of the period with a very direct and frank intimacy – only emphasised by the white cat casually enfolded in the crook of her arm its tail perhaps trapped beneath that arm. This portrait is of a modern young woman, who is at ease with the artist but is somehow caught on the cusp of change both for her and the artist…

a new age beckons
pulling the young artist out
of Eastern art traditions

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Poetics invites us to be inspired by the work of LePho – an early 20th-century Vietnamese artist and to write Ekphrastically to a theme from the following, women, flowers, landscapes or family. I have chosen to write a Haibun for this prompt.

Curved Air

https://open.spotify.com/album/7hfA825fDvgS0W95LV5kDy?si=6_nYV-_SS1GBEyWfHkcQxA

My taste in music is eclectic
but there is some music which
locates my roots as such
with fusion rock & classical electric
screaming guitar solos
and no small touch
of sexy female vocals
singing of “Back Street Luv”
to 60’s Pop it was emetic
Prog Rock group Curved Air
their singer fresh from being in “Hair”
pulls me back to teenage years
and this, though compilations
may be infra dig,this is the sound
and album cover that I love
not least because I’ve flown
in just such an one and
might have seen in heavens above
A Rainbow in Curved Air
from which this band
derived their name.

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Over at dVerse Poets Pub,  Mish in Poetics invites us to pick a favourite album cover and write an Ekphrastic poem…

This album by Curved Air was released during a twenty-year quiet period for the band and I love it because it is a great compilation that has blasted from my car speakers on many a drive but also because, in the 1970’s, I flew in a De Haviland Tiger Moth biplane as featured on the album cover – what’s not to like. If you are unlucky enough not to know the meaning of Prog Rock – you could do worse than jump into this album – volume as high as your speakers can immerse you…

2024 Poetry Postcard Cento

In the heat and lack of rain
crow voices around
in a pond of questions
transient geese
possessing nothing
“I’m nobody
Who are you?”
“Who’s watching who doing what?”
“Is there freedom
in losing a memory?”
– This is where I come from…

Signalling who
you would like to meet.
“Excuse me” he cries,
asks me “Why
I’ve not done more?”
Turned, looked, then moved on
– the dominance
of our arrogance
I escaped barely – always
wanting more from my life

Whispers in the twilight
“Choice is gone…”
I’m drowning
not at all what we expected
as if reminders
– somewhere along there,
our words got lost
“Innocent, unlike us!”
never had I read such crap!

Violent metaphor –
it will fade like memories
nobody keeps or cares much
– pour over the gutters
of my soul
on a river of air
I peek through the dark…
it’s a tall order, carrying
this payload of freedom.

Fall will not be far behind
– some say one day we’ll
understand…


The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. It is organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, which arranges the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my second year and I was on List 10 and to date, I have received 22 postcard poems plus 9 bonus poems due to being on the Non- US List.


This Cento poem is made up of line(s) from every postcard I received from Group 10 plus Bonus cards


Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 2024 #15

Dear Melody

I felt. I felt it unencumbent on me
to explore AI. so I could see
what all the fuss was about.
I duly sought some pointers on the Internet
then jumped right in to experiment
and have to say – took to it like a duck to water!
To get the image just as you want it
clear instructions, you must formulate
when writing your Midjourney prompt,
even the order of instructions – best
before AI. goes off. and does the rest
But then again, keeping it simple
a single word – an abstract image
may deliver for your waiting. page
as in this image. – The prompt was
– Poetry…

Much Love
Andrew.

This last year, both I and many poets I know (in the Internet sense as opposed to the real world or the biblical), have started illustrating their work using AI images whose results are sometimes so stunning as to distract from the poems being illustrated. So are we shooting ourselves in the foot, gilding the lily…

The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. It is organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, which arranges the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my second year and I was on List 10. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your poetic missives – to date I have received 21 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent.
Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…