October, 2023 - How would you know...

Evolution – Found Poetry 4

October 31, 2023October 31, 2023humanist55

Waters…

The sea rolled and roared
over rocks in Winter nights
lay still in bright Summer days
for children to bathe and play in

A spring- not as you see here
which soaks up out of white gravel
in the bog among red fly-catchers
pink bottle-heath and white-orchis

But a real North-country limestone
fountain where heathen fancied
nymphs sat cooling themselves
the hot Summer’s days – shepherds
peeped at them from behind the bushes…

This is a found poem with words derived from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. The title – Evolution, is because Kingsley was a naturalist around the exciting time when the work of Wallage and Darwin were revolutionising the worlds of science, geology and biology and there will be found poems that reference this aspect of the tale. But so far, the finding of poems has been more like the method for refining poems since Kingsley writes very lyrical passages anyway…
The image is derived in Midjourney.
This series was inspired by my friend Misky over at It’s Still Life who has been producing a series of Found Poems…

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 25 – The End…

October 30, 2023October 30, 2023humanist55

This is the very last card I sent, to Elise, and hers was the very first card I received which is as it should be – I have enjoyed the whole experience and I hope you all enjoyed my sharing the cards I sent to Group 15. Finally, I have taken a group photo of all the cards I received in order – until next year…

Dear Elise

You were my first
and you are my last
to write a poem
to a stranger, that is
I saved this pearly treasure
for you who talked of
the remnants of human history
and these shells on a Cretan beach
unposed I assure you
also tell of lives past
moist forms departed.
So much easier to write
to a stranger when you
have received their’s first
and it has been fun and
I regret I have reached the end.

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 24

October 29, 2023October 29, 2023humanist55

The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 23 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon…
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…
Before I post the last poem I sent but whose sender was the first I received – the next eight cards, two at a time, are ones on the list that I sent but didn’t receive from, – given what happened to the 23rd to arrive by way of Trinidad – I have not given up hope – so if you recognise a card you received and you know you sent one – please let me know in the comments and we shall presume it travelling still, the backwaters of the postal system…

Dear Julie

I see you live in the watery
maze that is Seattle
more water than land
but perhaps you have a beach
where flotsam and jetsam collect
like this one in Crete where
we lived in lockdown.
I thought of the things
that wash up on beaches
and added my thoughts
a refugee child from the small boats
a famous shipwreck in a Xanthos cove
a Russian tank destroyed in Ukraine
and a gas-masked Barbie
abandoned in Chernobyl
not all beaches
but flotsam nevertheless

Dear Emily

What gives a location
a sense of place that
makes it unique to it’s population?
I studied geography long ago
and still I love to read maps
and Gadsden is on a river
though that doesn’t guarantee
that your sense of place
is the one I imagine
or even that of your neighbours.
Perhaps the River Coosa
is everything to you
or is it a street or the climate
that makes, for you,
Gadsden’s sense of place?

Evolution – Found Poetry 3

October 27, 2023October 27, 2023humanist55

A poor Irishwoman
grey shawl over her head
crimson madder petticoat
be sure she came from Galway
limped along tired and footsore
a very tall, handsome woman

Walked beside Tom
asked where he lived
he never met such a
pleasant spoken woman
Asked whether he said his prayers
sad when told he knew no prayers to say

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 23

October 27, 2023October 27, 2023humanist55

Dear Jesse

Forgive me for sending
coals to Newcastle for
Seattle must have many
tiny moss gardens
nestled in the crook of branches
but though we are strangers
and I have only your address to go on
as one poet to another
I hope you too see
moss gardens growing in the trees
on rock
by streams
wherever you look
and I would like to share
this garden of mine…

Harrison sounds like a surname
Andina a forename
but must I trust the form
as you filled it in?
So little to go on
in reaching out with a poem
to a stranger who may
yet turn out to be a friend
stranger things have happened.
I read about Seattle in “Stay”
by Nicola Griffiths and I
try to picture you living
across the watery way
and unknowing you
I send this picture of Friendship
Bracelets given by my partner
It’d some kind of message…

Between the Bullets and the Bombs…

October 25, 2023October 25, 2023humanist55

A detective contemplates a corpse
stabbed so many times that
he concludes – this was personal
so I am called an evil terrorist
as if the zombies in a
first person shoot-’em up
were suddenly weighted to win
I don’t want to witness my crime
by seeing the enemy as people
so I remember my X-box
shooting down Nazis
whose Holocaust
ironically
helped justify
our Palestinian “displacement”
between the bullets and the bombs

I press the button
which drops the bomb
but I don’t see the blast blossom
the seven stories pancake down
all in my rearview mirror
I don’t even see the confirmation
back at base – nothing to learn
about smart bombs
and our TV does not show
the dead children
or traumatised living
amongst the rubble
an angel of death
my hands are clean
only the world seeing
the blood dripping from them
between the bullets and the bombs

I am an old woman
whose heart has just given out
on the refugee road to elsewhere
surrounded, shelled
we took the only road they left open
my children will go to Kuwait
via camps in Lebanon
where they will be displaced
again by Saddam Hussain
and die in England
they will call this The Disaster
but my great-grandchildren
will have a good life
far from the bullets and the bombs

I am an old woman from Poland
I escaped the Holocaust
of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals
and the less-than-perfect of mind or body
only to find myself taken
to another prison camp
where the Jews are outside the wire
my husband and I helped the inmates
driving them to hospital
and I learned their language
so they have scheduled me for early release
and I will not die
between the bullets and the bombs

I am a baby who died
as the grossest provocation
the loudest shout-out
to a world that has long since
stopped listening and covered its eyes
whilst I am a baby crushed
into my mother’s breast
my grave a concrete sandwich
but we two babies
separated by bullets and bombs
whose ancestors lived here
side by side in peace
for millennia
if tested genetically
cannot be told apart
brothers and sisters under the skin…

Written for Poetics: Why war? over at dVerse Poets Pub Posted by paeansunplugged

Evolution – Found Poetry 2

October 24, 2023October 24, 2023humanist55

Out of the court
up the street
the roofs all shining grey
in the grey dawn
plodding along the
black dusty road
the groaning of the pit-engine

Soon the road grew white
at the wall’s foot grew
long grass and gay flowers
drenched with dew
the skylark saying his matins
the pit-bird warbling in the sedges

This is a found poem with words derived from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley.
The image is derived in Midjourney.
This series was inspired by my friend Misky over at It’s Still Life who has been producing a series of Found Poems…

Evolution – Found Poetry 1

October 23, 2023October 23, 2023humanist55

That short name
you heard it before
heard of God, of Christ
in words which you
never have heard

He cried half his time
for the way of the world

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 22

October 23, 2023October 23, 2023humanist55

Dear Albert
I wish to report a crime!
On a recent visit to Blackheath,
London, I came across this
Jane Doe – provisionally
identified as Barbie.
The naked body dumped on a wall
evidence of torture with
a cigarette lighter
to the breasts – otherwise
no obvious sign of fatal injury
no witnesses, no motive.
Who would abandon
such a doll?
Who can fathom
the workings
of the human heart…

Dear Mario

In Washington State great trees abound
but Olive trees are not, I think there found
these are the flowers of the Cretan Olive
grown more for oil than eating
olives now are threatened by global warming.
Pray for the farmer’s harvest
when next year comes around
I am guessing from your
name that your family
is no stranger to olives…

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 21

October 22, 2023October 22, 2023humanist55

Dear Lisanne
Like so many places in America
I knew the name of Berkeley
but I had to look at the map
to know exactly where it was.
Can you see the Pacific
framed by the Golden Gate Bridge
do waves cross the bay
to wash up on a Berkeley beach?
I first saw Dianne Arbus’ work
in a Sunday supplement
and I had my own Dianne Arbus moment
on the beach at Clacton
this lady pushing not
a baby in a pram
but a poodle…

Dear Rodda

I will not say Wish You Were Here
since this moment in time
was frozen digitally
a good few years ago
pre-Covid, pre-Trump, pre-War
and if we could have stood there
then it was a wet and windy day
not like the sunshine
eternally associated in the
imagination as shining down
on Stearns Pier, your pier.
Of course I know the Pacific
is not always peaceful
any more than the North Sea
splashing Blackpool is always stormy…

How would you know…

Month: October 2023