A blog about anything and everything…
…turn up for the books
turn the country, no – the world upside down
turn the law. no,-the constitution on its head
turn pawns into knights to do your bidding
but turn tail and run when pictures
of you and him speak truly…
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, where the various customers are celebrating the 14th birthday of the pub, Lisa or Li challenges us to write a Quadrille, the pub’s own special poetry form – a poem in exactly 44 words…
Driving home along City Road
an ambulance dashes by
with” blues and twos”
screaming its way towards the hospital
– do we all wonder whether
its cargo is of death or life
another human being on the way out
or a baby on the brink of being born?
Does anybody learn indifference
to this question of “for whom the bell tolls?”
The blue lights illuminate the faces and bare arms
of the sex workers leaning against
the old warehouse building – soon to be apartments
and if they were looking for their veins
right now, they wouldn’t find them
but that will come later…
One girl lurches across the pavement
as a familiar car pulls up
and as she departs, another slips
into pole position, eyes peeled…
A few hours earlier, or come tomorrow
this street junction will belong
to office workers or shopgirls
some in the sanctity of hair concealing hijab
with no knowledge of their having
traversed the red light district
of another temporal place.
The patient in the ambulance
will hopefully be settled in a bed
recovering, or perhaps a bed
beside a cot with mother and baby
also recovering, and adjusting
to the new place, respectively.
At home I make two suppers
to meet our different needs
– one soft and forgiving on dentures
that no longer fit well and tastebuds
stripped of efficacy by smoking
secondly the most creative that
cooking for one can get
and I remember cooking for different
tastes in our early reconstructed family
– one diabetic, one vegetarian
two for meat and two veg, and the two of us
then just wanting something interesting to eat…
Now only Christmas dinner brings
the whole family together and still
there are different varied requirements
to further complicate that logistical nightmare
but catering to all is the measure of care…
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, lillian in Live, OpenLinkNight, invites us to post a poem of our choice and hopefully read it at the live session.
This poem references a time when I lived in the centre of Bradford, and unwittingly (since I viewed it in the daytime) lived in an apartment adjacent to the heart of the red light district, also a busy route to the Bradford Royal Infirmary and rarely, I still traverse this road on my way home, to my present address…
I
Olive skin
Dark brown honey trap eyes
Black hair wiry as desert weed
II
No beauty
Prickly as cactus
Dangerous as opioid poison
III
Sky blue eyes
Generous with loving
But with an invisible minefield
But yours was
The soil in which I grew
Patiently uncovering each mine
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to write a poem in the Parallelogram de Crystalline form which consists of –
• 12 lines in total (each Capitalised but without punctuation)
• 4 verses
• 3 lines per verse
• syllable count per verse 3,6,9
• unrhymed
And for the theme of the poem: the beauty of a (real or imaginary) lover as compared with and described in images of nature.
Our first bedroom
was a work of art
where I bought my
profession and my painting to bear
like a Bower Bird building a nest to
attract and cement
a relationship with a mate.
I always preferred to make
my own Valentine cards
Christmas and birthday offerings
and even the gifts if possible
and that room was my gift to you
– on the ceiling a giant Chinese
prawn painted paper parasol
which I surprised you with
on a date in London and as
we walked, giddy along Oxford Street
we gathered a crowd of people
seeking shelter from the torrential rain
the painted prawns in their element
stopped from swimming off only by varnish.
The wall at the head of the bed
swam with myriad shoals of
tiny fishes gleaming like Neon Tetras
where I over sprayed the stencil
with spatters of silver
and the other wall moved subtly
from undersea azure to
misty morning blue
where an undergrowth of
real plants pressed and stencilled
emerged from the mist
at the foot of the wall
a perpetual daybreak to
greet us each morning.
I will not say that
all our intimacies took
place in that love nest
for in those days, any room
would do for us before
the clouds settled down on us
dampening ardour except for
brilliant sunbeams occasionally
breaking through
that bedroom was always but
our happy place
beneath the prawns
amongst the fishes
and flowering weeds
of late summer.
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Dora in Poetics invetes us to “write a poem that conjures a view (whether from our travels or everyday life, whether from desire or experience) that is colored by the emotion of the moment“
Walking back along the ledges
from a fruitless fishing expedition
fruitless but for the pleasure
of sunshine on tons of lazy swelling
clear Atlantic water
shifting glassy at my feet
– I encountered an otter.
Seeing me first it fled
across my path and
slipped into the sea
I searched the swells for it
and when our eyes met – it dived again.
We played this game several times
until I turned the tables
– dropping to my knees I crawled
crouched low over the serpent stone
snake fashion for ten yards until
carefully lifting my head
I saw the otter now searching for me!
We could have played all day
but the knobbly fossils of solitary corral
were hard on my knees
and so we parted with
a final interspecies gamers salute!
© Andrew Wilson, 2024
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Lisa or Li in Poetics, invites us to write a poem about an intimate moment. This encounter with the “other”, a sea-otter, on the West coast of Ireland where I lived for ten years, took place on ledges of “serpent stone” fossil solitary corals, solitary corals that with horizontally across the plane of the rocks…
Bradford is this year’s City of Culture and as one of the events of the festival, this morning, in time to greet the sunset, except it dawned cloudy and cooler than of late, some 300 people assembled in the quarry next to the Cow and Calf above Ilkley and on the edge of Ilkley Moor for the start of The Bradford Progress. However, far from the popular song in the title of this piece, we were treated to Handel’s ‘Eternal Source of Light Divine performed by 27 members of Paraorchestra and a Counter-Tenor, the falsetto song commanding absolute hush. Mindful that one can’t fully appreciate or be present for live a performance whilst videoing it, I took only a short sample of the performance.
Then, the Commoners Choir took over. Based in Leeds and led by Boff Whalley, former guitarist in Chumbawumba, the Leeds punk/anarchist band catapulted to unexpected fame with their chart hit “Tubthumping“, which is not a song about drinking but the resilience of the Working Class (“He gets knocked down, but he gets up again…”). I was too taken with listening to the choir harmonies this morning to really take in the lyrics but I heard a reference to Noam Chomsky…
The choir were then going to walk across Ilkley Moor to continue with a series of performances across today and tomorrow culminating in Millenium Square, Bradford.
In other news, my friend and poetry collaborator, Melissa Lemay, who runs an online Journal called Collaborature, published an interview with me that we recorded a few weeks ago. As an experiment, she recorded our Zoom call and then had the AI integrated with Zoom, transcribe it. This worked in so far as it kept track of our separate voices, and was surprisingly accurate and yet there were many misheard words that made editing quite arduous for her and she had to refer a few passages back to me for clarification. You can read the interview here.
You told me your schoolfriends called you little frog
because of your slightly bulging eyes, amiga hermana
and like an amphibian, you emerged from the river
into a new land without meeting those who
would have called you “Wet back”
and sent you whence you came
which is why to me, querido, you are Amfibio
for you brought me the gift of insights
of one who has travelled between borders
you are Alebrije – your travel has given you wings
wings that brought you and your fantastic colours
into my life, querida.
What Divina Providencia brought you to my door querida?
What spirit guided your path, melded our destinies?
You asked for work as a live-in ama de casa
to support your family back in Mexico
and you fulfilled a need I didn’t even know I had
and our relationship became hardly that
of employer and employed
Then came the Orange Chupacabrón
the devil who demands all the attention
consumes all the oxygen and sucks all the blood
– this trickster wants to send your kind
back to Mexico and elsewhere as if you are
una cifra insignificante
he would make you an apachurrado
a hat run over by a truck
but he did not reckon with me
At first you shrugged “ Ni modo…”
but I was encabronada
well and trulypissed-off but also I had Susto – fear
down to my very soul
fear for me, for you,
for your family, for my country
I would not see you become
Un pobre infeliz and so
We sealed off the entrance to the cellar
concealed a new entrance behind the mirror
made a safe refuge for you and others
told the shop where you used to shop for us
not without irony, that you had been swept up
and disappeared by the orange one’s minions
and I arranged for a Mexican run shop
with simpática, to deliver discretely
enough food for whomsoever we hid…
Now we have an underground railway
– not to escape victims of the orange one
but to hold them until safe houses can be found
– we did not need the magic of shamans
to defeat the Chupacabrón
we did not need to pick poisonous Toloache
or summon the Cenzontle to do battle
on our behalf because, after all
we are hermanas bajo la piel
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Dora in Poetics, invites us to write a poem using one or more of the poetically interpreted Spanish words in a poem by Sandra Cisneros…
Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), in Chicago, the only daughter in a family of six brothers. In her stories and poems, she deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures, and the constant migration of her family between Mexico and the United States, “always straddling two countries but not belonging to either culture.”
In “I Have No Word in English For,” Cisneros lists twenty-five Spanish words dictionary-like but non-alphabetically, yet seemingly objectively. You soon discover that each definition appropriates a keenly personal shade of meaning.
I Have No Word in English For
By Sandra Cisneros (The New Yorker print edition, September 16, 2024)
Apachurrado. Hat run over by a truck. Heart run over by unrequited love.
Estrenar. To show off what’s new gloriously.
Engentada. People-overdose malaise.
A estas alturas. Superb vista with age.
Encabronada/o. A volatile, combustible rage.
Susto. Fear that spooks the soul away.
Ni modo. Wise acceptance of what fate doles.
Aguante. Miraculous Mexican power to endure conquest, tragedy, politicos.
Ánimo. A joyous zap of fire.
Divina Providencia. Destiny with choices and spiritual interventions.
Nagual. Animal twin assigned at birth.
Amfibio. Person with the gift of global perspective due to living between borders.
Alebrije. Amfibio with wings from geographical travel.
Ombligo. Buried umbilical. Center of the universe.
Toloache. Love concoction made with moonflower and menstrual blood.
Tocaya/o. Name double. Automatic friend.
Amiga hermana. Heart sister closer than kin.
Un pobre infeliz. The walking wounded maimed by land mines of life.
Un inocente. Mind askew since birth; blameless.
Chupacabrón/a. Energy vampire disguised in human form.
Cenzontle. Tranquillity transmitter in bird or human form.
Friolenta/o. Tropical blood. Vulnerable to chills.
Chípil. Melancholia due to an unborn sibling en route.
Desamor. Heart bleeding like xoconostle fruit.
Xoconostle. Must I explain everything for you?
I have used some of Cisneros’ words, sometimes with her poetic meaning and sometimes their literal meanings, given below.
Apachurrado – squashed, down
Encabronada – pissed off (slang) angry
Susto – fright
Ni modo – “that’s life”, “oh well”, or “what can you do”
Divina Providencia – divine providence
Amfibio – amphibian
Alebrije – a type of Mexican folk art sculpture, typically a brightly colored, fantastical creature made from paper-mâché or wood
Toloache – literally – the plant with nodding head – Datura, a highly poisonous flower
Amiga hermana – friend sister
Un pobre infeliz – a poor unfortunate
Chupacabrón – a legendary creature, or cryptid, in the folklore of parts of the Americas. The name comes from the animal’s purported vampirism.
Cenzontle – the mockingbird, a bird known for its ability to mimic the songs of other birds
I also used some other Spanish phrases
Querida – Dear (one)
hermanas bajo la piel – Sisters under the skin
ama de casa – housekeeper
una cifra insignificant – an insignificant person
simpática – sympathetichermanas bajo la piel – Sisters under the skin
simpática – sympathetic
I have no skills for flight, or wings to skim the waves effortlessly, like the wind itself unaided, but I have flown in man-made machines, looped the loop in a Tiger Moth, watched men practise dropping food-sacks from inside a low flying Hercules. I have circled and landed in a glider and watched kite-boarders risk life and limb lifting off from Elounda Bay where once Imperial Airways flying boats landed on their way to India. Recently I saw a replica of the Wright brothers first flyer, one which is occasionally towed up to fly, briefly, perilously and from that to the climate polluting jets that crisscross our skies with contrails, from which I have had my share of gazing with wonder at the Earth below whilst transported unimaginably far, I have most certainly flown even though I have no skills for flight…
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, merrildsmith in Prosery, invites us to write apiece of prose using no more than 144 words, including a quote from Ada Limón‘s “The Magnificent Frigatebird,”. The italicised lines at the beginning of the piece are the given quote…
This year my A to Z theme was to construct a memoir heading each post with a photograph of something significant from my life and tacling the memoir thematically rather than chronologically. You can find the complete list of links to the 26 posts at the end of the post.
Each time I have participated in the A to Z since my first outing in 2020, my posts have grown longer and more layered, for example, last year, I was tackling Commodities which I was afraid might be a little dry as a subject, so I decided to add a poem in an alphabetically matching poetry form. This year I was afraid that my Memoir, would not be sufficiently rivetting in itself and so I decided to lead each post with a photo of a significant object for the topic of the day. I included 10 pictures that were “Knolling” style and of course, nobody likes to be overfaced by swathes of text, and as there were several topics on some posts, that meant a lot of pictures to break it up – 169 in all! Since even my phone camera takes large pictures, each one had to be opened in Photoshop and tweaked and resized – a rod for my own back. At the time of the Theme Reveal, I only had five or six posts finished and on April 1st I had two weeks worth “in the can” but by the final weekend, I managed to complete the last 3 posts so technically, no “pantsing” it!
Since adding poetry had worked well last year, I added nine poems this year (C, E, J, L, M, O, P, T & V) too, as well as a few videos, one of me working in 1995 and a number of music videos. All of this seems to have worked and I attracted a number of regular readers to whom I am most grateful for their encouraging comments.
In no particular order:-
A shoutout to Csenge (Tarkabarka) The Multicolored Diary who was first to comment on day one and also an A to Z committee member and consummate, epic storyteller.
Anne M. Bray of Pattern Recognition an old A to Z friend – everything you ever wanted to know about Fluevog Shoes…
Tamara of Part-time Working Hockey Mom another old friend since 2020 who this year guides around the cities of Switzerland with her cutomary aplomb!
Ronel is another Comittee member and supplied the colourful graphics for the A to Z – you can find her at Ronel the Mythmaker…
Deborah A Logophile’s Ludic Musings continued her exploration of unusual and interesting words and hardly missed a post
Lisa of Tao Talk, is a friend from my other habitual haunt – dVerse Poets Pub…
Donna McNichol was another frequent flyer and her own offerings are at Just call me Froggi
Kristin Kleage has been sharing her family history with the A to Z since 2013 at Finding Eliza…
Anne E.G. Nydam is a fabulous printmaker at Black and White: Words and Pictures
Holly J. of A More Positive Perspective
Samantha of Balancing Act
Linda Curry of The Curry Apple Orchard
And so, how was the writing itself – what did I learn from doing this year’s A to Z?
Firstly, I quickly realised how much material my life contained so that for almost any given subject, I had to be very selective about which stories I included. After writing about why I didn’t become a fine-artist or an architect, and why I haven’t been very successful as a businessman, I covered my family, my late sister Carol, my Dad, my mother Elsie and shortly after, my sister Helen and particularly in these posts, there was so much more that could have been said. I was trying to stick to those points that had a bearing on me – it was my memoir after all and not theirs – still, there could be a book rather than 26 posts! But as far as it went, I feel like I have made a memoir of sorts and I am not sure I would want to go as far as a book, even if it retained and expanded on the thematic approach rather than the chronological.
Secondly, it would be disingenuous of me to think that I have had an “ordinary” life, I am well aware of the priveleges I was fortunate to be born into, by being born into a “First” World country, to middle-class parents, parents who were both extraodinary in their different ways and who did their very best to offer my sisters and I the best opportunities they could, not least of all a trip round the world and the chance to experience life in a different country at an early age. Were there any flies in the ointment, along the way, of course there were but a life without some adversity would be a life less lived and adversity makes us stronger. Would I do things differently, some I guess, but hindsight is a fine thing…
My daily routine during April, was to start the day by checking that the scheduled post was up, read it through one more time for mistakes before going over to the Official A to Z blog to answer their daily question(s) and leave a link. Because of geography and time zones, there was usually one or two posts ahead of me, with posts from the Americas coming in much later in the day and so I sometimes had the mistaken inmpression that hardly anyone else commented there so I was very touched, when after losing the run of myself and forgetting to follow my routine, I received a comment from Barbie of Crackerberries
Andrew, this is the first time I didn’t see your name above mine on the A-Z page… I had to come see if you were here because that was so odd that you were not there, even when I went back this afternoon. Thanks for sharing the X-Rays and it’s really comical to me that the new hip bone kinda looks like a serrated knife. (ahhh the imagination of writers). Anyways, I’m glad you are here and maybe just didn’t get over to the page yet. Funny how we take people for granted. See ya tomorrow and I bet you will be first with Z post.
Cheers,
Barbie
It does surprise me how few of the 172 bloggers who signed up, do comment both to respond to the day’s post as well as to see this as their firsl line of promotion. My comment made, I would post a link and a photograph from the post on my Facebook which would bring in a few friends and family. I will put this post on a button at the top of my blog in the hope that future readers will find their way to my story…
Which post did I like writing best, we are asked on the A to Z blog? Frewin, Fossils and Film covered some of my favourite things but it was also fun choosing photographs and poems to showcase for Photography and Poetry – so a toss-up there…
Lastly, it has been gratifying to find that not only was I wrong to wonder if other people would find my story interesting, but it has renewed, once again, my faith in my telling of the story, in my writing. As every one of my A to Zs has been from 2020 to 2025, it has been a marathon and I am glad to have reached the finish line, somewhat exhausted, but I am hoping that, as I am told about giving birth, the memory of the pain of labour disappears (else no woman would do it again) and that at some point in the next year, another idea for A to Z 2026, will pop into my mind, though goodness knows what…
Now that all the writing is done, I am off to catch up on some of my favourite blogs and hopefully find some new ones! You can peruse the whole A to Z list and find some for yourself here.
Elsie/Jill, Mum, Upward Mobility v. Imposter Syndrome…
Gadgets, Gardening, Geography and Geology…
Helen, the House, Health and Humanism
Ireland (They order these things differently in France!)
Music, Murals, Memories, oh, and Marmite!
Signwriting and Squidgy Things…
Travel, Tapestry and Tear-ing Up…
I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
Zoom…
How many are the ways we communicate apart from face to face that is… Phone calls, texts, WhatsApp, messages, Messenger DM’s, Skype and Zoom (not an exhaustive list lol). Zoom and its brothers and sisters from Microsoft et al, came to the front duringthe Covid Lockdown when you could use it to keep in contact with friends or work from home or even have a remote consultation with your doctor. Skype – a Microsoft product was the go-to product for a long time but it is now being pulled because Zoom and it’s compadres do much more – multiple participants, recording and transcribing those recordings etc. One of my favourite things done with Skpe, was a guy who corresponded with lots of people all over the world and then edited themed conversations for the BBC on topics like work or marriage or migration. So adios Skype and welcome Zoom on which I attend a Writing Group, read poetry for the dVerse Poets Pub open mike night, not to mention work meetings, and speaking to my sister in Nova Scotia…
Which is all I have to say about Zoom, which seems a whimper rather than a bang for the ending of what has been as in depth an A to Z as any of the five before it – but at least I have written a memoir of sorts, if I do no other! At the outset, I expressed the hope that you would “assemble an impression of my life and who I am” and I hope indeed, that you have – only you know…
Adios, Amigos – see you on the road…
I leave you with a few photos of myself over the years…
