Aluminium and an Acrostic Poem

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The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – will there be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Aluminium 2022 $280Billion

Happy Bi-Centenary Aluminium!

Yes, Aluminium, or Aluminum as the Americans choose to call it, was first discovered as a metal and element, in 1824, which for the element third most abundant in the earth’s crust after Silicon and Oxygen, is remarkable! Today Aluminium is ubiquitous in industry and domestically, wiring, aeroplane construction, building construction and tin cans are just a few of the obvious uses and because it can be recycled perfectly, it is estimated that so it is estimated that 75% of all the aluminium ever produced is still in use today.

Aluminium is mainly produced from the ore Bauxite which comes primarily from Australia, China and Guinea and China accounts for nearly 60 percent of global aluminium output. On average 4-5 tons of bauxite are needed to produce 1 ton of aluminium. It takes a lot of electricity to separate out the metal – about 15 MWH per tonne of output. That’s approximately as much as a 100-apartment block consumes in a month. This is why recycling is very desirable – 1 kg of recycled aluminium cans can save up to 8 kg of bauxite, 4 kg of various fluorides and up to 15 KWH of electricity.

Newly refined, Aluminium is a highly reflective silvery metal but one of its useful properties is that it quickly reacts with oxygen to produce a greyish layer of oxide which then protects the metal from further oxidation.

Graf Zeppelin under construction – Wikipedia

Aluminium is light – one-third the density of steel and so it is ideal for building flying machines – the first great example being the great airships of the 1920s but continuing to this day with most aircraft containing large amounts of aluminium – so as one ad for recycling points out, your drink can today may be your holiday jet tomorrow…

In the first years following its discovery, aluminium was hard to produce and so an expensive commodity, two examples of its use are as the cap of The Washington Monument completed in 1895 (due to its electrical conductivity it makes a great lightning conductor) and the statue in London’s Piccadilly Circus is the first to be cast in aluminium – often misnamed as Eros, it is in fact the Greek god of Requited Love – Anteros.

The placing of an aluminium pyramid atop the Washington Monument back when Aluminium was considered a “precious” metal.

On a commercial trading note, the price of Aluminium has been affected by President Biden’s announcement of further sanctions against Russia including trading in metals such as aluminium some of which is produced there, following the death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny so even hard commodities can be affected by unexpected events.

Aluminium Alloy car wheels

Aluminium readily combines with other metals to produce alloys – if your car has alloy wheels for example they are principally aluminium with a small amount of property-altering magnesium. Only one isotope of aluminium is stable – the one we mostly find on Earth, but all other isotopes are radioactive and it is thought that heat from decaying aluminium isotopes helped melt comets in the outer solar system. Aluminium compounds result in the jewels ruby, sapphire, aquamarine and emerald as well as the very hard mineral corundum used for abrasion.

And so to the poem – there are a plethora of poetic forms beginning with A to choose from, Acatalectic, Abecadarian, Aisling, and Aubade, to name but a few. I have chosen an Acrostic where the first letter of each line spells out a word – from the Greek for ‘at the tip of the verse’.

Aluminium

Aluminium your shining
Light was hiding
Under a bushel of chemistry
Mixed so thoroughly
In precious jewels and common sulphates
Never a native metal, but wait
In 1824 your secret was
Unlocked and ever since has
Made our world a lighter brighter place…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

I could not leave the letter A without mentioning Amber, once called “the gold of the North” and traded from its main source The Baltic, all the way to the Mediterranean. So one of the earliest forms of international commodity trading!

Narcissi Dreams

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Who would not fancy
a tête à tête
with a lemon beauty
in the golden dawn

The golden echo
of the love call
of luscious lingerie
and beautiful eyes

I wake with double smiles
to my catalogue of
narcissi bulbs, dreaming
still of orange progress
and pink pride…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Image created with Midjourney

Written for dVerse Poets Pub where merrildsmith in Poetics is challenging us to conjure a poem out of the names of narcissi…

A to Z 2024 Theme Reveal

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Consider this – you go to your local supermarket to buy, among other things, some orange juice. You find the right section where there are several brands to choose from, fresh in the chiller and long-life too – perhaps a hundred-litre packets all told. That’s just your local shop, imagine how many shops there are in your town or city each with a hundred litres of orange juice on sale at any particular time – and remember, this stock is turning over all the time – being bought and then replaced with stock from the store room. Multiply by the number of cities in your country and then by the number of orange juice-drinking countries in the world and you have imagined an ocean of orange juice! Where does it all come from – especially considering it takes eight oranges to make a litre of juice? Are there enough orange trees in the world to account for all this juice?

Of course, if you believe in Solipsism – then you will think that the world only exists because you imagine it into being and of course, you want to have plenty of orange juice wherever you go, so you imagine it into being present in all those thousands of shops worldwide. I am more of a realist and so I know that there must be enough orange trees to provide the juice – I just have no idea where!

Most people have no idea where all that orange juice comes from either and what about dried mint in all those expensive little jars – you may have holidayed in some sunny spot and seen oranges growing, but when did you ever see a mint farm? These things are Commodities – Soft Commodities in fact – which means they are commodities which are grown as opposed to Hard Commodities like metals which are mined. So this year, I am going to explore the world of Commodities!

Of course, to some people, Commodities as a term, means a form of investment and apparently, if you belong to the stocks and share-owning class, you should, apparently, diversify your share portfolio with commodities for greater stability – though this is well above my pay grade so don’t be expecting any tips! But the essential difference between gambling on stocks and shares and gambling on commodities is that they are subject to different forces of fluctuation – a company might invent a new product and its share value rocket or it might have a product superseded by a rival and plummet. Commodities also go up and down – soft commodities are susceptible to the weather, even shellac – the product of the Lac Fly has good and bad years whilst hard commodities are more predictable.

In case you think that commodities sound rather dry, I am going to include a poem – also with an A to Z progression about each commodity as the last nine months, I have taken to writing poetry in a big way – so a double whammy! A few commodities are missing in the Abercadarian and I will double up on one of the letters and poetry forms.

A Commodity Trader and a Poet contemplating commodities in their own ways…

Whether you come for the poems or the commodities, trust me, there will be amazing facts about gold, amber, pork bellies and yes shellac…

This is my 5th A -Z Challenge and you can find the previous years via the Menu at the top of the page – starting in the fateful year of Covid 2020…
2020 – personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis
2021 – I was trying to complete a sci-fi novel and it advanced me greatly and I finished it shortly afterwards
2022 – I wrote about foods which can be used as an ingredient
2023 – I wrote about phrases we know the meaning of but often, not the origin of – and a s a bonus Cant languages

Six Questions (from Pablo Neruda)

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Over at dVerse Poets Pub  Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft is our host and has asked us to write Ghazal using at least one of the lines by Pablo Neruda from his book of poetry – “The Book of Questions” in which he poses 320 questions and answers in couplet form, and she has asked us to use at least one of the six question lines she has selected. I found all six questions stimulating and linked them in this poem.

Why was I not born mysterious? – Sorrowful
Then nations would smite down my enemy furious – angry

Why did I grow up without companions – lonely
compadres and friends in this world so curious? – and unloved

And do unshed tears wait in little lakes – weeping
lurking to ambush we unwary and drown us? – vulnerable

And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes – landless
springing up in the rubble of our homes mocking us? – homeless

How long do others speak if we have already spoken – quashed
one hundred years, pleading, crying and dying in the dust? – and denied

Even hope itself may eventually die – we should be hopeless
Isn’t it better never than too late for us? – flattened too.

How long do others speak if we have already spoken? – We still
As long as it takes for you to hear us – cry out

And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes? – bear children
Because life must triumph, improbable, delirious – all we can

And do unshed tears wait in little lakes? – don’t hold back
Yes but cry them, use them, water the dust – start again

Why did I grow up without companions? – seek new friends
Because the world heard only another victim’s fuss – in a world of oppressed

Why was I not born mysterious? – we find other victims in common
See the wonderful in the ordinary which is us – our voices raised together

There are no especially deserving winners – give us all our due
no one deserves our land over us – “Equality now!”

Equal status and our own statehood – “Never Again!”
with nobody ruling over us – “Give us Our Due!”

Borrowing these six Neruda questions – “Now!”
the poet, Andrew, seeks to give voice to us…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Once on a plane…

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Dublin to Manchester
Once on a plane
I found a pair of sunglasses
a polarising pair
with circular lenses
of Matrix cool
left by the last occupant
missed between flights by the
cabin clean up crew
I have those glasses still
more than twenty years later
I’m a keeper.

Teneriffe to Gatwick
Once on a plane
I had the last moments
with my first great love
then she asked me to
hang back at the checkout
because her husband
was meeting her
and thought she was
holidaying alone.

Stanstead to Dublin
Once on a plane
I contemplated
flying to meet a woman
I had known only for
one chaste night
of intimations
who then sent me a ticket
for a weekend in County Leitrim

Manchester to Heraklion
Once on a plane
fleeing the pandemic
one step ahead of lockdown
I looked down on the Alps
a wilderness of mountains
as far as the eye could see
from thirty-five thousand feet
and saw not a trace of
human life, no villages
no roads, no smoke
as if already
we never existed

A Flight to Anywhere
More than once on a plane
I wonder about the lives
of Air Hostesses
or Hosts
or Stewards
as they are now called
whether they joined to
see the world
and whether they did
whether it’s true about
the crew parties
the god-like officers
marriage material
or just better advantaged
the ordinariness of
Ryanair crew
the haughty select of Air Aegean
each one as from the pages
of a 50’s fashion magazine
do the ordinary despise the haughty
meeting en passant
in some airport corridor
or do they share a common bond
of brother and sisterhood
is it just another flight
from one take off
to another landing
once on a plane…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Posted for Open Link Night at dVerse the Poets Pub

Learning the Ropes of Love

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How can I say I thank you
for the mixed bag of emotions
which I will call Love
for want of a better word –
which I learned at your knee
whilst having no inkling
of even being schooled…

Love is nurturing
– on a physical level
of feeding at least
and on the mental level
of stimulation
with books and ideas
and even a trip
around the world

Love is safety and
love is the absence of danger
which is not necessarily
the same thing

Love is consistency
which can go a long way
towards making up
for other deficiencies

Love is giving a sense of
who you are and
what your place is
in the wider world
– it is not sufficient
to teach you to talk to
anyone from a tramp to the Queen
if you don’t know what you want to say.


Imposter syndrome is
as transferrable as
a gene for diabetes
and like that disease
it will be a long time
before you even figure out
you have it – and what “It” is
there is no gene sequencer
for emotional baggage…

We learn to love like
layers of an onion
and so much depends
on the fertility of the soil
which is that original family
and however crooked
the plant grows –
be glad if you at least
had a family.

Love starts with a teat
your mother’s if you are lucky
or perhaps a bottle
freely given on demand

Love expands too
if you are lucky enough
to have siblings –
you add another layer
to your personal culture
when you go to school
when you expand your horizons
to town, country and
however much of the world
you are lucky enough to encounter

If you are not lucky
and your bulb grows amongst stones,
is not fed good food and
stimulation for the mind –
if you encounter trauma
by loss, violence or abuse
your multilayered onion
will reflect its origins…

Eventually you may break away
from the family home,
home town
and learn of other loves
but your affinity has
already set by
earlier lessons learned
This one is never secure
That one is self-centred
This one is restless
and That one puts up with
rather than taking care of themselves

Love is as varied as
the human beings who practise it
and the combinations in couples
as varied as the genes
they may mesh together
in the lottery of life

But lucky or unlucky
everybody needs to know
what they learned of love
and work out what works
for them and those they love…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Posted for Open Link Night at dVerse the Poets Pub

My Alice Blue Gown

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Sometimes knowledge comes in the strangest, most roundabout way…

This morning I started my day with my usual routine – that means flicking through my social media and emails before settling down to read “Letter from an American” from the incomparable political historian Heather Cox Richardson who writes daily on current political affairs in America seen through the lens of the history of that country. Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and Ms Richardson chose to take the day off and spend it with her husband Buddy who is a fisherman and instead of – as she sometimes does on such a holiday – posting a photograph, she re-posted what she tells us is her favourite ever post – a very sad Valentine’s Day tale about Theodore Roosevelt. You can find Richardson’s posts either on Facebook or on Substack where she has 1.4 million subscribers and if you join them, then you can, like me, get her posts delivered to your inbox every morning. At present, she is experimenting with podcasting so that you can hear her reading this particular piece here.

The tale she tells is of how on Valentine’s Day 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his mother, to typhoid and his wife to what was probably a strep infection within hours of each other. His beloved wife Alice, had delivered a daughter, their first child, just two days before. Theodore was so bereft that he never spoke or allowed anyone to speak of Alice again, and though his daughter bore her mother’s name was known as Baby Lee rather than Alice. Theodore was already a reformer by nature, but the death of his mother and wife to diseases of the poor – rife in the overcrowded conditions of the time and at odds with the riches of The Gilded Age which was then in full swing – confirmed Theodore’s determination to bring about change – but not before escaping to Dakota Territory to try ranching as a way of burying his grief over Alice. Following a disastrously cold winter in 1886-7, Theodore returned to politics with new determination, and the rest, as they say, is history.

What Ms Richardson did not mention, however, was what became of Alice aka Baby Lee. So curiosity piqued, I turned to Wikipedia who had a satisfyingly comprehensive article on Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Roosevelt eventually married for a second time and gave Alice five half-brothers and sisters and whilst her initial reaction to her stepmother was not the easiest as is so often the case with Step-relations, Alice eventually came to hold her in great respect.

Alice Roosevelt in 1903

Alice grew up to be a socialite, renowned wit and a bit of a clothes horse, which as the daughter of the now President, she could afford to indulge. So much so that the song “My Alice Blue Gown” was written about her. Now I confess to being a sucker for what we Brits call Victorian and Edwardian Parlour Songs but which for Americans would be Parlour songs from The Gilded Age and “My Alice Blue Gown” is a favourite as rendered by The McGarrigle Sisters.

So there you go, a connection that I never expected to find…

And if you are American or indeed anyone worried about the prospect of a second term of Trump, you can find some very qualified hope in Letter from American. I imagine that in choosing this title for her blog, Heather Cox Richardson might have been paying homage to Alastair Cooke’s Letter from America and if she was, then I for one name her a worthy successor…

Grant Me a Boat

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For goodness sake
grant me the bucket-list wish
of a boat
any boat will do
a picayune pram
to potter on a large pond
better still a proper rowboat
on a large lake
to drift down the wind lanes
a dry fly bobbing alluringly
on the ripple, gently retrieving
with the dream of a trout rising

A daysailer – better still
ducking the boom
on a dinghy is dodgy
at my age so day trips
on a Summer suitable sea
would fit the bill delightfully
sailing out and back
with the sea breeze
sometimes sleeping
in the cabin after stargazing
at anchor in some sheltering bay

And in the Winter
I would cherish
my little vessel
drawn up on the shore
cleaning and caulking
and laying on varnish
let me leave alliteration behind
and voyage forth
on real wavy waters –
so for goodness sake
one day
grant me a boat

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Written for dVerse Poets Pub which is tonight has Merril Smith ably at the helm as she invites us to Sail into a poem for Poetics…

Parting Prevarication

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Half my sister’s ashes
sit on my bookshelf
the thought flashes regularly
that I must fulfil her wishes
and bury her with our parents
let her out of the camel-shaped teapot
my favourite of her collection
and which bore her back from Ireland
disguising the grey substance
which is, unbelievably, half of her remains.

I think it is the distance to Dorset
which has held me back
from letting the once genial
out of the teapot.
The teapot will remain
ornamentally
on my bookshelf
to use my sister’s sometime sepulchre
to make tea might be
a step too far for a brother
though it would have made his sister
laugh like a drain…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Posted on dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night hosted by Grace.