Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, challenges us – for Laura’s prompts usually offer a challenge in form, if not in subject – to write about “moments in time that stand out from time; they are the momentous days we recall and revisit, year in and year out as holidays, as anniversaries. Formal or informal, they are replayed in memory…” and as to Form – to use Emily Romano’s Memento poetry style:
Poetry Rules: rhyme scheme abc, abc 2 stanzas 6 lines per stanza 2 tercets (2*3 lines) per stanza syllable count per tercet: 8,6,2; 8,6,2
would you like to play with me says one grubby clothed sticky fingered toddler to another – no question of race or status entertained a playmate is a playmate to be shunned only if they won’t share and play fair
playmates with fluffy tails stride statuesquely on stilettos around the Playboy Mansion of one who either likes to play the field or has commitment issues or perhaps just has a thing for bunnies
my mother gave us no pets to play with – carriers of disease she reckoned – except once she did allow a tortoise but you can’t play fetch with a tortoise nor even give them a squeeze
I ache in the places that I used to play sang Leonard Cohen – he was definitely a player play us a song play with your hair wrap it round your fingers like you mean to wrap me too play with your fan and send secret signals play me like a harp with playful fingers plucking at heart strings gently please for I am still bruised from previous playtimes play all night and play all day play chess like a warrior play Monopoly to practise world domination flirt play sport play game play cos-play and don’t come home if you’ve dared to play away
life is not a rehearsal but they don’t tell toddlers that, when you grow up they’re not playing any more but try to make room for playing somehow some day just to keep you supple keep on playing…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, sanaarizvi in OpenLinkNight invites us to post a poem of our choice. This poem was written to the monthly theme of my local library group – a small group of poets almost none of whom have an online presence. Keighly Library is one of many in the UK which were funded by Andrew Carnegie the Scottish-born (in poverty) US Steel magnate from the Gilded Age, which presents me with an awkward feeling – he was typically, for the times, exploitative of his workers but then donated huge amounts of money to foster literacy in Britain – grey areas, not black and white.
Anyway, I resolved to try and write about subjects other than the current appalling state of the world and so this topic fitted right in…
Is it a crime to sup on a Sleeper Shark Genus: Somniosus microcephalus the solitary fish swimming in the dark waters beneath the Arctic ice so few and far between this shark is seldom seen but in the photographs captured the curves confirm this clearly is a shark but unlike its cousins – sleek Silvertips the Greenland Shark is no beauty it’s skin blotchy and rough…
On an exchange visit to an Icelandic ladies’ choir did I commit that crime? Our own ladies, scandalised at the first stop on our itinerary a swim in the Blue Lagoon – by naked women brazenly European walking around in the changing room were equally horrified in Reykjavik’s covered market to be offered seagull’s eggs and Rotten Shark – kæstur hákarl a national delicacy but foodie as I am I agreed to give it a go… “Best hold your nose” our host’s advice but not before I’d caught a whiff like ammonia I took a small white cube upon a toothpick and ate nose pinched it was not as bad as some wimpy celebrity chefs have claimed…
I was not told that this was Greenland Shark nor that it is now known to be the longest lived vertebrate thought perhaps to live as long as four to five hundred years one hundred and fifty before the poor creature is ready to breed imagine then it’s lonely search for a mate deep in the Arctic dark and the secret of this shark’s longevity – slow living – snail’s pace metabolism which is why, flesh full of bodily toxins the freshly caught Sleeper is poisonous but the peoples of the Arctic are not ones to waste a food opportunity and so they figured out to bury the shark for six to twelve weeks weighted to press out fluids whereby fermentation detoxifies to feed the nation it’s infamous dish at the midwinter festival þorrablót
Now that the Methuselah nature of the Greenland Shark is known it is not legal to hunt or kill this oldest of fish but fishermen’s bycatch provides sufficient specimens to feed the Icelandic appetite for Rotten Shark – so it was no crime to taste this long-lived being whatever my fellow singers said of the smell, but now that I know of what I ate, I carry the thought swimming in my imagination of this patient, slow-living denizen of the dark depths the Greenland Shark…
…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…
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…
The Chaos Section Poetry Project is an anthology of poems of resistance in the age of Trump and other authoritarian miscreants. You can read all the poems here, including ones by Merril D. Smith and Melissa Lemay as well as by myself, Andrew Wilson.
Furthermore, they are making the anthology available in print Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age
This is the first online publication by The Chaos Section Poetry Project and they selected my poem “Ubuntu”. Merril D Smith and Melissa Lemay, both of dVerse Poets Pub also have poems in the publication…
When the last redneck Republican realises his true enemy and stirs with his Democrat neighbour the great melting pot of red and blue to an unroyal purple
When an eighty-year-old Israeli and Palestinian jointly place the last skull in the Nakba-Holocaust Ossiary Memorial and agree to share a country
When single use plastic is abhorred and the use of oil for virgin plastic rationed and whole towns comb their beach for plastic to recycle
When the last billionaire gives away his last coin to the last poor person weeping as he is buoyed by sheer relief
When global warming is stabilised and the last bird species threatened with extinction breeds the first nest of the rest of their species
When the last petrol head learns to love the glint of sunlight on windmill blades and drives off in a small electric car which is no fashion or status symbol
When the last piece of the fractured world is fitted into place – fastened with a seam of shining gold and balanced once again
When I dropped a jar of jam on my favourite butter dish, I turned to Kintsugi to fix it…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Mish in Poetics invites us to write about “Building from the Broken” which could be a reference to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, in which a broken piece of porcelain is mended with a glue containing powdered gold resulting in a new and enhanced aesthetic…
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…
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…
