Kerosene and a Kyrielle Poem

humanist55

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 – could 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 Kerosene 1998 $9 Billion – rank 151 / 771

It’s some times hard to find the exact date figures for each commodity and for Kerosene I commend this site for its excellent infographic on producers and importers of kerosene (even if it is 1998 and not 2022 as I have tried to stick to…)

The Lady with the Lamp…

One of the iconic images of the early Nineteenth Century, is that of Florence Nightingale depicted as “The Lady with the Lamp” and I imagined that she might have used some sort of oil lamp and that might be a good place to start with talking about kerosene, but the truth of this image is rather more complicated.

Uses of Kerosene

I already mentioned Kerosene under the letter H for Heating Oil as a commodity and Kerosene is a specific form of Paraffin derived from Crude Oil distillation. Kerosene can be used contemporarily as heating oil but also as aviation fuel, rocket fuel and it was one used as a replacement for whale oil in lamps, much to the relief of whales who were being hunted to the brink of extinction by the 1860’s. The growing scarcity of whales raised the price of whale oil as a commodity and drove the search for alternatives such as petroleum-derived Kerosene. So today I want to examine the historical importance of Kerosene as a major commodity for lighting.

A “fanoos” lamp from the Florence Nightingale Museum

Going back to “The Lady with the Lamp” for a moment – The Florence Nightingale Museum exhibits a Turkish Fanoos lantern which it claims is the correct type of lamp that the eponymous inventor of The Nightingale Ward would have used. This is a concertina-style paper lantern – a collapsible travelling lantern which would have had a candle inside. Candles, incidentally, can be made from Paraffin Wax – another product closely related to Kerosene. But the more romantic image of Florence Nightingale carrying a Greek or “genie” lamp burning some form of oil, caught the public imagination more after several depictions of such  – so much so, that “A further layer of meaning was added to the lamp with the foundation of the Nightingale Training School in 1860. The oil lamp was already a symbol of learning because it had enabled reading in the hours of darkness since classical times. Now the lamp came to represent nurse education.”

A so-called toy lamp (because of its small size) which burnt Whale Oil.

Oil lamps had been used for thousands of years often vegetable oils so in the Mediterranean countries this would have been Olive Oil. There were many seeps of crude oil around the world and one of the oldest attempts to extract oil for lighting oil, is the Persian scholar Rāzi, who created a form of kerosene by filtering petroleum through an alembic with materials like clay. It was not until 1854 that “a Polish pharmacist, Ignacy Łukasiewicz, invented the kerosene lamp – a device that quickly went on to light up Europe. He also went on to open the first oil mine and kerosene refinery in the world, becoming a pioneer of the oil business.” In America, “Until the late 19th century, an oil find often was met with disinterest or dismay. Pioneers who settled the American West dug wells to find water or brine, a source of salt; they were disappointed when they struck oil”. But with the perfection of the method of extracting kerosene from crude oil, the new commodity was set to take over from Whale oil and literally save their blubber.

A Sperm whale being hunted for the spermacetti oil in its head which made the best quality lamp oil…

Later, the major commodity to be extracted from Crude Oil, would become Gasoline which we encountered under “G” – which just goes to show how commodities can change over time. Whole industries such as whaling (1780-1860) can rise and fall in less than a hundred years. Likewise, the shift from crude oil’s importance as a source of kerosene lamp oil was eclipsed by the advent of electric light although it gained a new lease of with the advent of jet engines and as a heating oil and the gasoline fuelled the growth of the motor car and the asphalt created the roads for cars to run on until every fraction of crude oil was utilised for something – spanning many separate commodity markets.

Con trails – the water vapour resulting from burning Kerosene in aircraft jet engines also releasing CO2

The other narrative running through this evolution of commodities, is the way that we humans have exploited the natural world for whatever riches our burgeoning “civilisation” has required. Vegetable oil lamps were sustainable, whale oil lamps nearly extinguished whales and fossil fuels are largely responsible for the unfolding disaster of climate change! Hmmm…

And so to today’s poem which at “K”, brings us to a French poetry form called the Kyrielle. “written in quatrains (a stanza consisting of 4 lines), and each quatrain contains a repeating line or phrase as a refrain (usually appearing as the last line of each stanza). Each line within the poem consists of only eight syllables. There is no limit to the amount of stanzas a Kyrielle may have, but three is considered the accepted minimum.
Some popular rhyming schemes for a Kyrielle are: aabB, ccbB, ddbB, with B being the repeated line, or abaB, cbcB, dbdB. Mixing up the rhyme scheme it’s possible for an unusual pattern of: axaZ, bxbZ, cxcZ, dxdZ, etc. with Z being the repeated line.”

Kerosene – A Kyrielle

Homes once lit by Whale Oil lamps
were the reason why whales were hunted
– long before the “Save the Whales” camp
‘twas Kerosene saved the whales.

Kerosene a component of crude oil
scars our skies with jet vapour trails
but when whalers ceased their toil
then Kerosene saved the whales!

Electric lamps made safer homes
then aviation took up the slack
made tourists of us – ones who roam
but kerosene saved the whales!

Whale watching is the latest fad
no matter how much Kerosene burnt
do you not realise it’s mad
when Kerosene saved the whales

only to have them share our fate
and all die from global warming
we denying it till it’s too late
– did kerosene save the whales…?

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Jute and a Jazz Poem

humanist55

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 – could 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 Jute and other Textile Fibres, 2022 – $285M – the world’s 1115th most traded product representing 0.0012% of total world trade.

A Jute field, Jute stems, Jute fibres and rope made from Jute.

“Jute is a long, rough, shiny bast fibre that can be spun into coarse, strong threads. It is produced from flowering plants in the genus Corchorus, of the mallow family Malvaceae. The primary source of the fibre is Corchorus olitorius, but such fibre is considered inferior to that derived from Corchorus capsularis.” quoth Wikipedia and it has a long history of use in making string, rope and traditional packaging such as hessian (burlap) sacks. You might think that this is old hat but the quest for sustainable, biodegradable materials to replace plastics in everything from rope to packaging, is leading to a renewed interest in Jute. Furthermore, the story of Jute illustrates some earlier geo-political shifts and has – in the UK been responsible for some serendipitous sweet things.

Jute fibres come from the “skin” or bast of the jute plant just as linen comes from the bast of the flax plant. The only plant fibre grown more than Jute is Cotton and other natural fibres include hemp and more recently, bamboo. Due to the nature of the Jute plant, a single fibre from the bast can be up to 4 metres long and also very strong, making them extremely effective in applications such as string and rope. Jute is sometimes called the Golden Fibre on account of its strength and cheapness. To read a briefing on Jute as a Commodity for investment – look here.

Craft products from Royal Begali Jute

Jute is mostly grown in South Asia – especially India and Pakistan and in the mid-19th Century, it made the fortunes of industrialists halfway around the world in Dundee, Scotland. The first bales of jute fibre arrived by ship from Bengal in 1820, and by the 1890s, more than 120 jute mills were in operation, employing around 50,000 people. The industrial revolution was producing machinery that could operate in mills together with a population of cheap labour – mostly women and children – to process the fibres into products. However, those same industrialists were among the first to recognize the benefits of outsourcing because they abandoned their Scottish workers between the two World Wars and set up factories in Calcutta (Kolkata) where the labour was even cheaper and the raw material was on hand. Thus the finished product could be shipped around the world rather than the raw material and then shipping out the finished goods – in this respect Jute was an early adopter of a practice that has decimated many “First World” countries. During the Second World War, there was a great need for sandbags in particular and government subsidies protected the Dundee mills from competition from India, this kept some of the Jute mills open a little longer, but the industry really died progressively until the last shipment of jute arrived in 1998 and the last mill closed in 1999. You can see the Dundee Tapestry which commemorates the industry here.

The Dundee Tapestry

There was an unexpected side product of shipping Jute to Dundee. There is a story of a storm-beset Spanish ship forced to shelter in Dundee and selling its cargo of oranges to an enterprising local greengrocer who, on discovering that they were bitter “marmalade” oranges – made just that! Dundee is adjacent to the Scottish Lowlands which are renowned for their soft-fruit growing and since jam was a way of preserving fruit in the pre-refrigeration era, to make marmalade was an obvious thing to do. Whether this is the real origin of Dundee Marmalade – what is certainly true, is that ships bringing Jute from India, having made a long sea passage from the Cape of Good Hope, northwards, or more likely zig-zagging back and forth across the Atlantic with the winds, would be very short of water, fresh fruit and food generally by the time they passed Spain and Portugal and so they would often call into port there before the final leg of the voyage to Dundee. The time of the Jute harvest in India meant the ships would be passing Spain/Portugal at just the right time for the orange harvest and without the need to fully stock their larders, there was room to take marmalade oranges to Dundee and keep the nascent marmalade industry going.

Victorian Marmalade jars from the famous James Keiller and Sons

And so to the poem, J turns out to represent a paucity of poetic forms – the only one being Jazz Poetry “poetry that “demonstrates jazz-like rhythm or the feel of improvisation,”. Originally this was merely poetry that referenced jazz music and jazz musicians, but as Jazz has evolved, so has Jazz Poetry and the latest iteration of it in modern times is hip-hop music and the live poetry events known as poetry slams where Rap is the poetry form…So that is where I am heading today SHMG (So Help Me God).

Jute Rap

Ajay’s a worker on a jute plantation
bringing in rupees for the Indian nation
and when the harvest’s in – like done
and dusted – he moves to the mill f’yet more fun
handling jute is rough on the hands innit
and breathing in dust might be his finish

Dem original factory owners came from Scotland
its now in the portfolio of an Indian non-dom
hiding her taxes between the nations
while poor peeps like Ajay expect no vacations
either planting the jute or bloomin’ growin’ it
or working in the factory sepa-rating and spinning it

They say jute’s good – gonna be good for the planet
do away with the plastic and rubbish innit
So Ajay na worry ‘bout lack of work
Ain’t never get the chance for him to shirk…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Investment – hedging against Inflation and an Ideogramme Poem

humanist55

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 – could 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!

I could not find any Commodities beginning with I and so I decided to focus on the idea of Investment and how Commodities are used as a hedge against Inflation in a portfolio of Stocks and Shares.

Commodities are the only major asset class to provide a hedge against inflation, new research by London Business School (LBS) experts Professor Paul Marsh and Dr Mike Staunton and LBS alum Professor Elroy Dimson confirms.

But these same inflation-hedging properties also mean commodities tend to underperform in extended periods of disinflation.

London school of economics

Dear Readers… I know that among the readers and writers of the A-Z Challenge, will be found Poets, Novelists Genealogists and other exotic bloggers and each of you will have your own particular jargon – Iambic Pentameters, Inciting Events, Ahnentafel number and as for the writers of Erotic Fiction – let’s not even go there… So I ask you to admire for its sheer jargon and general opacity – the following statement from a London Business School article:- “Based on historical returns, it seems reasonable to assume that a balanced portfolio of collateralised commodity futures is likely to provide an annualised long-run future risk premium of around 3%.” Anybody know what that means?

What I do understand, is that there are “Soft” Commodities, often referred to or bought as “Futures” – things like crops which are bought ahead of time, before they have grown, and if there is a bad harvest, then the person who bought the futures, is going to do well and if there is a good crop then he may have paid over the odds because the market price will be low. But in a period of rising inflation, commodities – especially soft commodities like foodstuffs, also rise because the price to the end consumer also rise as a response to inflation – hence commodities are among the few things which protect an investor – and I guess that’s what that jargon-laden sentence means! “Hard” Commodities are things like metals but although they are not subject to the vagaries of weather, they have their own “levers” that cause fluctuations in the market – you only have to look at the sanctions which have been applied to trade with Russia as a result of her unwarranted war on Ukraine to see how certain hard commodities from Russia, not least of all oil and gas, have had profound effects on the market prices. Germany, for example, has had to scrabble around to try to replace its unwise over-reliance on Russian gas and that has affected the price from and for, other countries.

So moving swiftly on to today’s poem which is an Ideogramme which is a form of poetry that relies heavily on typographical elements, design, and layout. It is a form of Concrete Poetry where the shape of the typeset poem depicts the subject.

Investment (Moneybags)

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

What does it matter that the stars we see are already dead…

humanist55

Today over at dVerse Poets Pub – dorahak in Prosery has posted a prompt taken from a poem by Amy Woolard. From her poem, “Laura Palmer Graduates” based on director David Lynch’s surrealistic Twin Peaks, she has chosen this line for you to use creatively in your prose composition:

What does it matter
That the stars we see are already dead.

What does it matter that the stars we see are already dead? What anyway, does it mean to be alive, for stars or human beings? We all swim through the one way river of time temporarily fighting the tide of entropy.
The Big Bang inflated a world of chaos to which everything must return but meantime stars form – according to laws of physics and live and with their death make ever more complex elements which finally pave the way for us – living beings…
If stars flow counter to entropy then so too do we – garnering sustenance in seed and womb and creating order from our genetic blueprint. Growing up to have our brief moment gazing at the light from stars already dead before our own demise and deliquescing back into the disorder of death… Alive or dead the river is never the same again.

Heating Oil and a Haiku

humanist55

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 – could 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!

25% of the yield of a barrel of Crude Oil is Heating Oil and the Crude Oil Market reached a value of US $ 1424.38 Bn. in 2022 so $356.09

I mentioned Bitumen amongst nearly-rans for “B” commodities and we just covered Gasoline and we now come to another derivative of Crude Oil – Heating Oil – all four of these substances can be traded as commodities and they all have their niche roles in trading portfolios – Heating Oil, for example, is a product subject to seasonal demand – alternating depending on which hemisphere you are in. Heating oil is actually kerosene or paraffin and these terms are often used interchangeably but I will be returning to Kerosene under K and in any case, Heating Oil is traded as a distinct “futures” product. But what I want to talk about today, is the process by which the three derivatives are extracted, simultaneously, from crude oil – Fractional Distillation.

Some of you may remember this from school days though I am not sure whether it would have been taught in Geography or Chemistry classes – but the diagram below is one of those “once learned never forgotten” things – a piece of magic at the heart of the 20th Century industrial age. Elegantly simple in principle, probably a fiendishly tricky piece of engineering in practice, a Fractional Distillation Tower is what you see in oil refineries and crude oil, once heated to the point of becoming a vapour, enters the tower at the bottom and as the various components rise and cool at different points in the tower, they condense and are drawn off separately. The most volatile reach the top of the tower – Butane and Propane whilst the heaviest and thickest remain at the bottom of the tower – such as Bitumen or Asphalt.

Although this particular diagram doesn’t show it and most of the items appear to be fuels, there are also substances like Naptha which go on to be used in other industrial processes – Naptha is a very volatile solvent. Other industries also use hydro-carbons to make plastics with the addition of certain other chemicals and all of these things, fuels, solvents and plastics can be seen to be releasing stored “fossil” carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere causing global warming or in the case of plastics contributing a material which will not breakdown easily in the environment and which is slowly poisoning the food chain…

A typical oil refinery

There is no choice about what components come out of a fractional distillation tower except in as much as different sources of crude oil do contain slightly different proportions of hydrocarbon fractions. It makes one think what might happen if we ever do get near the “bottom of the oil barrel” – we might have weaned ourselves off petrol and diesel vehicles but we might still need some plastics or we might still need bitumen for building roads for electric cars and yet whenever you distil crude oil – you get a whole selection of products, whether you want or need them all, or not…

A Haiku

And so to the poem which today is a Haiku. And yes, in my Theme Reveal, I promised a Heroic Ode and that would be a difficult one to write about Heating Oil although some might consider a Haiku about Heating Oil equally challenging – however the Haiku is an extremely popular poetry form these days having spread far beyond its native Japan and Heroic Odes are decidedly out of fashion, so I decided to meet the challenge of writing about Heating Oil with a Haiku…
Infamously, the Punk poet John Cooper Clarke wrote:-

To write a poem
in seventeen syllables
is very diffic…

But the haiku demands more than seventeen syllables, the syllables need to be distributed 5-7-5 and the theme of a Haiku should be related to nature and also “focus on a brief moment in time; a use of provocative, colourful images; an ability to be read in one breath; and a sense of sudden enlightenment.” You may say, with some justification that Heating Oil is not a very promising subject for such a philosophical, traditional, and compact form – but I have done my best…

Heating Oil – A Haiku

Autumn advances
We dip the heating oil tank
Dark smell of Winter

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Gasoline and Gold and a Glosa Poem

humanist55

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 – could 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 Gasoline 2022 $16.86 Billion
Worldwide Trade in Gold 2022 $14.568 Trillion

When I first researched a list of “Commodities”, Gold and Gasoline were the only two which came up for “G” on the best list I could find, but what a pair! Gold has been sought for centuries – valued for its incorruptible nature though it has arguably been one of the greatest sources of corruption of the human heart. Similarly, crude oil – the source of Gasoline, has shaped the political map ever since its component “gifts” were discovered and exploited with disastrous consequences for many peoples and for the world and its environment as a whole. So I decided to deal with both these commodities together – one constant and immutable, the other volatile, expendable and dangerous…

Gasoline is used for transportation and energy production worldwide and is severely implicated in global warming as a result of CO² emissions. The spread of the motorcar through the 20th century reshaped our lives and living arrangements and wars have been fought to secure, steal or destroy other’s oil sources. Arguably. The US, as the largest consumer has fought an undeclared war against the Arab nations since the Second World War to assure the flow of oil although it began with an alliance with Saudi Arabia that promised guaranteed oil supplies in return for non-interference with the Wahabist-based sect of Islam which was espoused there. The consequences of that are another story, but Iraq and Libya (a country that shared its oil wealth amongst its people in an unprecedented way) are but some of the victims of US-led wars designed to keep the best oil flowing in the “right” direction. The oil lobby is the greatest source of “climate deniers” although the car lobby and many car drivers are equally denying that Climate Change is happening and man-made.

One of many vehicles owned by members of the Osage Nation. COURTESY RAYMOND RED CORN

A salutary tale of the corruption that surrounds commodities such as oil (and gold), is the recent movie Killers of the Flower Moon, in which members of the Osage tribe of Native American Indians are at first surfeited in wealth (see above) derived from the rights to oil found on their land but how an unscrupulous local politician then seeks to murder them and acquire their lands into his family.

Gold Bullion

Gold has also been a source of conflict and a regulator of success in wars as this article outlines. Paper money used to be backed by reserves of the actual gold which it symbolised and this was known as the “Gold Standard” and although this system has been replaced everywhere by the Fiat system the prevalence of inflation as a result of the severing of the link, has risen worldwide. Having gold bullion reserves finances wars – for example, it is estimated that Californian gold was responsible for 10% of the cost of the American Civil War. The UK had access to gold produced by mines in its colonies such as South Africa which the mines were obliged to sell to the treasury whilst over the course of the two World wars, Germany had no such access and so the UK was able to pay for some of the food and armaments that came from the US (and borrowed the rest which it only paid off in 2006).

Gold Fields South Deep Mine The Twin Shaft Complex comprises a Main and Ventilation Shaft. The Main Shaft extends in a single drop to 2,998m below
surface, while the ventilation shaft extends to a depth of 2,947m below the surface. That’s almost 3 kilometres…

Oil and thence Gasoline prices are also levers of power in war e.g. the embargo on Russian oil in response to the war in Ukraine although to pull those levers means adversely affecting the price of oil commodities and the US has to try to persuade its Arab producer allies to release more product to stabilise the market. The price of gold and oil or gasoline (their markets show some different behaviours) are some of the most important commodity trading standards in the market and the first thing that many in the know will look at each morning.

A gold Mycenaean brooch in the form of an octopus, Mycenae, mid 2nd millenium BCE. (Archaeological Museum, Mycenae)

Of course, gold has decorative and cultural uses as well as bullion – jewellery, crowns, ceremonial cups and it is because it doesn’t tarnish or corrode that it has had this value since ancient times and so is one of the earliest commodities to be traded.

And so to the poem and having recently written a Ghazal, I decided to try a Glosa…

Glosa, or glose, is a form originally from Spain, featuring a quatrain epigraph, and four ten-line stanzas with the last line of each stanza being the corresponding line of the epigraph. The key to the form is that it incorporates the words of another. The glosser, or glosador, advertises a connection to a prior text.

Gold and Gasoline

Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold […]
Hoarded, bartered, bought and sold, […]
Price of many a crime untold …

                  Thomas Hood, ‘Gold’

Gold has commanded lust of kings
and beggars both who wish for things
or for gold’s sake alone
a useless dragon’s hoard
coins, bullion bars and rings
miners gave their lives for it
soldiers died protecting it
across the globe merchants trade
the metal that will never fade
Price of many a crime untold …

Shallow mines are damp and cold
deep in the Earth’s heat lies the gold
where miners in the new South Africa
still sweat to feed the dragon’s hoard
a ring with which to have and hold
a brooch to sparkle and attract the eye
a sovereign, symbol of King and country
pays for the soldiers’ dice with death
to die or win and maybe loot a little wealth
Price of many a crime untold …

And gasoline’s story is much the same
black gold fought over in the Great Game
of nations tampering with other nations
to keep their cars moving, lights burning
the destruction of Libya a tale of infamy
the treasures of Iraq to the winds scattered
because compared to oil, culture didn’t matter
and wars are won and lost by oil’s logistics
and the market’s fluctuating statistics
Price of many a crime untold …

Whilst gold has spawned so many crimes
it doesn’t threaten climate-changing times
it will not end our human hubris
and rarely even give us bliss
as when we ring the wedding chimes
both have brought us good and bad
and if we perish, though very sad
we only have ourselves to blame
for seeking gold and gas – the same
Price of many a crime untold …

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

A link to dVerse Poets Pub for their Open Link Night where I have decided to give this poem an airing…

Frost Futures and a Free Verse Poem

humanist55

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 – could 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!

Frost Futures – yes you read it right – you can buy futures in Frost and other weather phenomena! This is at the heart of trading futures as a hedge against the unexpected and though you might argue that frost itself is not a commodity, yet its impact on many grown commodities is potentially devastating and trading in weather futures is a way of insuring against loss… What I have not been able to find are any meaningful figures for the trade in Frost Futures since this is still a rather exotic trade!

Here are some quotes from the CME Group who specialise in Weather Futures:-

“The common cliché is that every conversation begins and ends with the weather. That’s probably because weather is the most common and pervasive risk factor for individuals or businesses. […] a decisive majority of senior finance and risk managers confirm that their businesses are significantly impacted by the weather and a stunning eight out of 10 warn of a new risk: that the emergence of global climate change and accompanying volatile weather patterns will require changes to their business models in the decades ahead. […] Weather cannot be controlled. But with the introduction of the products we offer, its blame for company losses is no longer justifiable. Weather, like any commodity, can be traded and its risks mitigated. Our Weather products offer the ability to manage volumetric risk or the risk due to variability in sales revenues, caused by weather-related fluctuation in levels of consumption.”

Forgive the corporate language but in essence – trading in futures is gambling and weather futures are a way of hedging your bets… That’s it – short and sweet, other commodities beginning with F include Feeder Cattle and Fish and if you are wondering what Feeder Cattle are – they are young cattle which are sold on (often a byproduct of dairy herds who need repeat pregnancies to maintain milk production) for fattening up before selling.

And so to the poem which today is Free Verse – a form which often seems to be the most ubiquitous among modern poets. Free Verse does not use meter or rhyme, but is still are recognisable as ‘poetry’ by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole. (Language is a Virus…)

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Frost

A beautiful assassin calls at night
you can never be sure when
you may stand guard in your garden
gazing at the glittering array
in the heavens
revealed by a clear sky
and feel in your bones
she is lurking
but she will wait till
cold has driven you
to your warm bed
and in the early hours
she will grip plants
squeezing them to death
by freezing the life blood
in their very veins

You will awaken
to a white wonderland
of sparkling crystals
coating the world
and await the sun’s
sufficient elevation
to melt the assassin’s work
and reveal the extent
of the damage
the body-count
the wilting and the dying
the seedlings cut down
in their infancy
and even as you curse
the late and unpredictable
frost’s devastation
counting the cost
planning the re-planting
you cannot help
but admire the beauty…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Ethanol and an Erasure poem

humanist55

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 – could 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 Ethanol 2022 $83.5 Billion

As a commodity, Ethanol is alcohol made on an industrial scale, from various grains – in the US for example – it is corn which is either dry or wet milled. Wet milling is the same process that has been used for millennia to make alcoholic beverages such as beer, first soaking the grain to convert the seed’s stored starches into sugars which are then boiled out of the “mash” and fermented. If your town has a “Maltings” – that is what it was for… Further distillation at the artisan scale rather than the industrial, produces spirits such as Whisky and in the distillation – another type of alcohol which has formed during fermentation, is separated out – Methyl alcohol which due to its lower boiling point, is the first product to emerge during distillation and is discarded. Methyl alcohol would do you no good to drink – wood alcohol as it used to be known, will send you blind as “Meths” drinkers and drinkers of Absinth found until that drink was outlawed…

Modern Absinth is all Ethanol and no Methanol

Ethyl alcohol is used for medicinal products such as moisturisers or bath salts, and in the car manufacturing process for the production of plastics for dashboards and seats and in a lot of personal care products. Ethanol is also added to petrol making it marginally more carbon friendly but any move to switch over to all ethanol would not work due to the extra land and other resources needed. Methyl alcohol on the other hand, is manufactured from fossil fuels and is used not only as a solvent for many products, but is also further processed to make many other chemical products.

The uses of Ethanol

The value of Ethanol worldwide production in 2020 was 98.6 billion litres, the value of alcoholic beverages in the US alone was US$1,055 bn in 2024 so both alcohols for drinks and industrial alcohols are big commodity business! The beverage side is made up of many sources and producers, vineyards, many distilleries, and breweries from very large down to craft beer small. There are also many drinks manufacturers of liqueurs, for example, who use industrially produced ethanol as their product base and ethanol is also used to extract many flavourings for the food industry. I once worked in a factory which created ginger flavouring for Gripe Water by steeping dried kibbled (raked apart) ginger in pure alcohol at this concentration, the liquid would do you serious damage however, after the quality control samples had been kept for the relevant number of years, instead of throwing them away we added water and sugar to produce a ginger liqueur (for our own consumption I hasten to add and naming no names). You may not be surprised to learn that the alcohol is no longer permitted in the gripe water and the warming, soothing ginger flavour has to be extracted in other ways. But this is mere extraction and addition of a flavour, the really interesting thing about the production of some alcoholic drinks, is how the flavours come about inherent to the process.

A bodega in Jerez – the city for which Sherry is named…

Take for example Sherry. In Spain and Portugal, only certain parts of the grape harvest are considered “dry” enough to make sherry and that which is too sweet is sent to the UK where the  apparently unrefined taste of maiden aunts and secret drinkers, is for sweet sherry drunk from tiny glasses – a product that would never pass the lips of a true Iberian! So having made wine from the suitably “fino” grapes, the sherry is then subjected to something which every other winemaker desperately seeks to avoid – oxidation – albeit in a very limited and controlled way. Bodegas are places where the nascent sherry is put into huge barrels to age but which have an airspace at the top separated from the liquid below by a blanket of yeast known as “flor”. It is critical that the flor is not broken and so as sherry is drawn off from the barrel, it must be replaced with fresh wine at an equal rate so that the flor doesn’t sag and split. Whilst in the barrel, the air penetrates the flor and gently oxidises the wine producing the complex flavours of sherry. The Bodega is thus a dynamic blending process in which no batch of sherry will ever be quite the same an another. Some bodegas have a brew which is hundreds of years old and the process of moving sherry through several bodegas produces a beverage of immense complexity and of gradually elevating price. This is different from the blending of whisky where various single-malt whiskies, not all of which would be considered palatable on their own, are mixed to achieve a consistent blended flavour. There is a link between whisky and sherry however, because traditionally, the whisky industry used empty sherry casks to age their whisky and since the refined spirit is excellent at dissolving flavour, it must be supposed that the whisky picks up some subtle notes from the sherry barrels. “Isca” is a Gaelic word for water and whisky is considered “the water of life” in Ireland – as long as you don’t drink too much to often that is…

And so to today’s poem which is an Erasure poem in which you take another poem or piece of prose and cross out words and lines until you are left with a new poem. The text I took is a poem by Hristo Botev a brilliant Bulgarian poet and revolutionary. Born in Kalofer on January 6, 1848. Died a heroic death in the western part of the Bulgarian Range on June 1, 1876, as part of a voivode of 200 rebels who had set out to die for the liberation of their enslaved Fatherland. The inscription chiselled on the granite rock by which he was killed reads: “Your prophecy has come true – you live on!” The poem he wrote is about drinking to forget the dire situation of kin and country and my erasure poem does not substantially change the meaning of it but condenses it into a somewhat more modern form. This can be a good method for editing and sharpening one’s own poems but since I hadn’t written anything alcohol related…

Ethanol

Give me wine
so I can forget
glory and disgrace
forget my birth
my father dear
and souls never curbed
fighting their bequest
forget my family
my father grave
my mother’s tears

The rich man with
his aristocratic airs
the merchant his plunder
the priest reciting holy mass
rob people who must hunger
rob them, you wanton band

We drink, we sing
every hand holds a glass
snarl against the tyrant
taverns too small for us
we shout…
                    but sober…
we forget pledges, phrases
say no more, roar with laughter
at the people’s sacrifices

While the tyrant rages
ravages our home
slaughters, hangs, flogs
then fines the people tamed

Fill the glass
let me drink
bring my soul its soothing
kill the sober way I think
let my hand grow soft
I’ll drink despite
despite you patriots
– nothing near and dear
and you?
Idiots…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Here is the erased poem…

And here is the original poem…

In the Tavern

by Hristo Botev

It’s hard, it’s hard, so give me wine.
Drunk, I can forget the face
the thing you fools cannot define:
where lies glory – and disgrace.

Forget the country of my birth,
my father’s dear homely nest,
and those whose souls were never curbed,
whose fighting soul was their bequest.

Forget my family in their need,
my father’s grave, my mother’s tears,
and those who’d steal a crust of bread
with all the aristocratic airs.

The rich man with his crookedness,
the merchant thirsting for his plunder,
the priest reciting holy mass,
rob from the people who must hunger.

Rob them. All you wanton band.
Rob them. Who will make a fuss?
Soon they’ll be too tight to stand:
every hand holds up a glass.

We drink, we sing with recklessness,
we snarl against the tyrant foe,
the taverns are too small for us –
we shout: “To the mountains we shall.

We shout, but when we’re sober
we forget our pledges and our phrases
and say no more, and roar with laughter
at the people’s sacrifices.

While all the time the tyrant rages
and ravages our native home,
slaughters, hangs and flogs and curses
then fines the people he has tamed.

So fill the glass and let me drink.
Bring my soul its soothing gift
and kill the sober way I think
and let my manly hand grow soft.

I’ll drink, despite the enemy,
despite all you, great patriots.
There’s nothing near and dear to me,
and you… well. you are idiots.

Copper and A Duplex Poem

humanist55

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 – could 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 Copper 2022 $ 304.79

How beautiful is Copper!

Hang on I hear you say – that’s a “D” poem form but Copper is a “C” commodity – what gives? Well I simply couldn’t find a commodity beginning with D – I looked at Dates but whilst in one sense, everything that is grown and traded is a “commodity”, but this A to Z is looking at commodities in the stricter sense of things that are traded in certain special markets – often as “futures”. A future is something that is bought ahead of time on the gamble that it might have gone up in price come harvest or delivery time. Seemingly Dates are not traded as futures in the way that Cocoa is. So no “D’s” but there are so many “C’s” to choose from hence Copper but with a Duplex poem. Other contenders were Cheese, Coffee, Corn, Cotton, and Crude Oil…

We often refer, often disparagingly, to the Stone Age and somewhat more respectfully to the Iron Age as if that is where the real technology that defines our human race, really began. It’s true that the Stone Age went on for a long time with certain tools remaining unchanged for many thousands of years but there were three great “metal ages” of which Iron was the third – before that, metallurgists cut their teeth during the Copper Age and then the Bronze Age, from which we can say that Copper is one of the oldest important commodities. Even when the second metal age – the Bronze Age began, bronze is mainly copper – an alloy of copper with a small amount of Tin added together (alloyed), the properties are different and better than either on their own – that’s the magic of Metallurgy! To smelt Copper, you have to reach 1,085 °C but this is still less than the Iron of the Third Metal Age would require (1,538 °C) however copper and more so bronze tools were an improvement on the stone tools that preceded them – in fact, it is thought that a shortage of good material for making stone tools in Mesopotamia, was the driving force behind the development of Copper smelting – this is the same area where Barley had been part of an agricultural revolution. Agriculture produced a surplus of food liberating man to develop trading leading to the Urban revolution and this in turn, was a pre-requisite for the research and development of metallurgy.

A Copper Age axe…

There is a fascinating timeline of the development and importance of Copper here. Initially, Copper was cold-worked because unlike Aluminium, copper occurs as a native (pure metal form) metal in nature and it is both soft and malleable to work into objects. However, as people experimented with smelting, they discovered that the addition of sometimes small amounts of other metals could improve the qualities of the resultant alloy – qualities like stiffness or the ability to take and hold a sharp edge (necessary for weapons – sadly a driver of technology through the ages). And so the Copper Age gave way to the more significant Bronze Age. Nowadays, this alloy is still used, famously for casting statues, whilst Copper in its pure form has expanded to many more uses – especially in the age of electricity due to its electrical conductivity – electrical wires, telecommunication cables and digital devices. Copper pipes replaced the water poisoning Lead pipes and although other metals (including Aluminium) are used for electrical wiring, copper is the most widely used – even so the cost of copper is high enough to that its scrap value makes recycling a profitable enterprise and ripping copper pipes out of empty buildings a crime of the desperate or unscrupulous… Copper is also important in the medical field due to its anti-microbial properties and has been shown to increase agricultural yields.

As a Commodity – Copper was the third-most-consumed industrial metal in the world, after iron and aluminium, with an estimated 22m metric tons mined in 2022 rising from 16m metric tons in 2010 and in spite of this increased demand, there is more of the metal available today than at any other time in history according to the Copper Alliance.

Some of the ores of Copper

The main producing countries of raw copper in 2020 were

Zambia – $5.77bn

Chile – $1.88bn

Namibia – $1.37bn

Bulgaria – $1.01bn

Democratic Republic of the Congo – $710m

Morenci Copper Mine, Arizona

Whilst the main importing countries were

China – $5.34bn

Switzerland – $2.3bn

Belgium – $1.29bn

Namibia – $1.18bn

India – $1.03bn

Makes you wonder what the Swiss are doing with all that copper – but that is the kind of unexpected fact you discover when you start to look behind the scenes of all the Commodities we take for granted…

And so to the poem – a Duplex is the invention of Jericho Brown and is known as a gutted sonnet—that is, part ghazal, part blues poem. The duplex is comprised of fourteen lines arranged in couplets, wherein each line is between nine and eleven syllables, the second line of the first couplet is echoed in the first line of the second couplet, and so on, and the first line of the poem is also it’s last. This repetition drives the poem along at a pace, I find…

Copper

What price the copper of a redheaded girl…
Before Bronze, or Iron was the Copper Age

Do copper bracelets ward off old age arthritis?
No copper can catch the thief of time…

Cops were known for wearing a copper badge
Good luck catching thieves of pipes from buildings

The price of copper makes the theft worthwhile
Pipes carry water – wires electricity

Wires construct the web of our digital age
The internet monitors the price of Copper

The price of raw ore and refined metal
Cuprite, Digenite, Malachite, Azurite

The prettiest of these – green Malachite but
What price the copper of a redheaded girl…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

One of my favourite songs is by The Incredible String Band – “Red Hair”

Cocoa and a Cento Poem

humanist55


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 – could 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 Cocoa 2022 $46.4 Billion

Cocoa perhaps above all others, exemplifies the aspect of commodities whereby they are the raw materials for other things that we consume and in the case of cocoa, from which we get chocolate – literally consume! And yet, how many of us know where our chocolate comes from, how it’s raw ingredient is grown or by whom and how it turns into our favourite sweet treat?

If you want the full facts I suggest you go to the Fair Trade Organisation commodity briefing because they are tireless campaigners for better prices for cocoa producers since of the 4 million tonnes of Cocoa produced each year around the equatorial globe, worth 20.3 billion dollars, 90% of it is grown by 5-6 million small farmers whereby close to 50 million people depend on cocoa production for a living. From them, the product is mainly concentrated into the hands of just 9 companies. But I am going to take a more personal look at the world of Cocoa.

The world of Cocoa production is in crisis at present

  • Processing plants cannot afford to buy beans
  • Consumers around the world will have to pay more for chocolate
  • The market could be heading for a fourth year of deficit

You can read more about it here, but here is the essence – and you might want to stock your cupboards with the sweet stuff…

In normal times, the market is heavily regulated – traders and processors purchase beans from local dealers up to a year in advance at pre-agreed prices. Local regulators then set lower farmgate prices that farmers can charge for beans.
However, in times of shortage like this year, the system breaks down – local dealers often pay farmers a premium to the farmgate price to secure beans.
The dealers then sell the beans on the spot market at higher prices instead of delivering them at pre-agreed prices.
As global traders rush to purchase those beans at any price to meet their obligations with the chocolate firms, local processors are often left short of beans.
Ivorian and Ghanian authorities normally try to protect local plants by issuing them with cheap loans or by limiting volumes of beans that global traders can purchase.
This year, however, plants are not getting the cocoa they pre-ordered and cannot afford to buy at higher spot prices.
Already, chocolate-makers have raised prices. U.S. retail stores charged 11.6% more for chocolate products last year compared with 2022, data from market research firm Circana shows.
The International Cocoa Organisation (ICCO) expects global cocoa production will fall by 10.9% to 4.45 million metric tons this season.

Reuters

Talk about ignorance – I can’t remember how old I was before I finally pinned down the relationship between cocoa and chocolate – and it was drinking cocoa and drinking chocolate that forced me to look it up – drinking cocoa is just powdered cocoa and you can make it into a drink or use it as an ingredient in cakes, savoury and other dishes. Drinking chocolate might variously contain. sugar and milk powder to make a sweet chocolate drink.

As a child, in a Western, first-world country, my sisters and I had plenty of chocolate – especially at Easter with Easter eggs. We had white chocolate courtesy of The Milky Bar Kid and we gradually became aware not only of Milk and Dark Chocolate – gradually acquiring a preference for the latter with its more bitter taste – or not. We also started to notice the difference between cheap chocolate that melts in your hand, and the crisper snap of better quality chocolate such as Lindt cast chocolate Easter Bunnies. But it is only in recent years that I have come to understand the whys and wherefores of these different aspects of chocolate.

In 1968, en route back home to England from Australia by ship, we called into Trinidad where a taxi driver took us to a tropical beach with picture postcard palm trees leaning down across the sands and he also stopped at a roadside stall to buy a Cocoa pod. Breaking open the pointy-ended yellow oval pod, he revealed the cocoa beans inside coated in a white flesh which he broke out and gave us to suck. The white flesh was pleasant and slightly like lychee if I recall correctly but bite into the beans and it was a bitter disappointment! Could this be where chocolate came from? The answer is yes but only after considerable processing.

Cocoa pods broken open to show white flesh covered cocoa beans

Jump ahead some 50 years when I worked and still work for a factory that makes a lot of sweet chocolatey cakes and puddings, and I was lucky enough to spend a day at the UK plant of Barry Callebaut AG – the top processer in the world of cocoa yet like all the big processors, with the exception of Nestlé who also make finished chocolate goods, most people in Britain and probably any of the countries where they have plants, will say Barry who? In the UK, the best-known chocolate sweet manufacturer is Cadbury (Bourneville) and in America, the names Hershey, Nestlé and Mars dominate the chocolate market, but I discovered on my day at Barry Callebaut’s that it is they who provide the chocolate to Cadbury – BY THE TANKERFULL!!!!!

Ruby, Dark and White chocolate

Huge 1-ton blocks of cocoa have already been processed by taking the farmer-dried beans, crushing them and melting them slightly into giant blocks. Callebaut then refine the cocoa further into chocolate solids (the principal ingredient of dark chocolate) and cocoa-butter (the principal ingredient of white chocolate) and by mixing in milk solids and sugar, they produce milk chocolate. Most of Callebaut’s output is in the form of tiny pellets of chocolate or the aforementioned tankers of liquid chocolate. They also sell a small amount of “cocoa nibs” – a health supplement and occasional food ingredient and they sell pink chocolate – the product of years of selective breeding.

I also learned why cheap chocolate melts in your hands and expensive doesn’t – it’s all down to the tempering – something I knew of in relation to metals but not chocolate. It costs money to repeatedly heat and cool chocolate until it is tempered hence the greater cost of tempered chocolate, but if you want to cast fine detail and not have it melt in your hand and get a snap when you break it – then temper it you must…

I left Barry Callebaut with a secret yen to become a Chocolatier but I fear that sampling the goods would not be good for my diabetes!

One more personal connection with chocolate – as a student I lived in Birmingham – not far from Bournville the model village set up for its workers by its Quaker founders. Bournville sells chocolate products under the name Cadbury…

Part of Bournville Village showing the Cadbury factory in the background.

And so to the poem which is a kind of “found” poem where I searched for lots of poems referencing cocoa and took lines from them to make a new poem known as a Cento.

Cocoa Poems

To attract you to the front of the store
Chocolate candies abound
In a cocoa river
palate tales abound
What a rich flavour
with hints of cocoa

Make hot cocoa
Black confection triple thick
triple chocolate
I was a Christmas drink almost to sweet to sup
A chocolate star lay at my helm, scrumptiously tasty

Or when it’s cold enjoy warm cocoa
Our fireside chat
to hot cocoa
With one thought in mind…
We enjoy winter, the more
we enjoy cocoa!

In this mug, memories steep
hot chocolate whispers, soft and deep
Carnation instant hot cocoa… my Mom’s treat with a kick of nutrition.
Each morning for one mug, I visit with Mom.
Like a little fur in my Mexican cocoa said my old grandma…
Saw a furry creature sitting in her cocoa cup!

He ordered a cocoa, not expecting anything extra
the smiley face at the top almost changed his mood
Tentative brush of a cheek in a cocoa crush
Knocking back the sepia potion,
Cocoa coursing through their veins.
I miss my cocoa butter kisses,
hope you smile when you listen

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

This Cento poem incorporates lines from poems by Ilene Bauer, M.L. Kiser, Anne-Lise Andresen, Caren Krutsinger, Heidi Sands, Albert, C. J. Krieger, Billy Ros III, Sara Etgen-Baker, Gwendolyn.Queenofself, Lucia Heffernan, John Betjeman, Stanley J. Sharpless, Keke Davis.