Birthday Reflections

humanist55

Seventy trips round the sun
My life has now journeyed
A race:
Times good, times bad, even times fun
In my body reflected
And face…

Reflection moves to centre stage
On loves and legacy
And how:
Did I with life engage
With passion, efficacy
– Weighed now…

© Andrew Wilson, 2025

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

Play

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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…

© Andrew Wilson, 2025

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…

Rotten Shark

humanist55

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…

© Andrew Wilson, 2025

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Poetics invites us to write about sharks as we approach Shark Week! So I dredged up this dark tail…

Turn

humanist55

…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…

The Chaos Section Poetry Project

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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

Print Edition 

ISBN Number: 979-8-9993042-0-9

Barnes and Noble
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/record-of-dissent-the-chaos-section-poetry-project/1147784379?ean=9798999304209

Bookshop
https://bookshop.org/p/books/record-of-dissent-poems-of-protest-in-an-authoritarian-age/9515d69e43f1f892?ean=9798999304209&next=t

Book People (Austin, TX)
https://bookpeople.com/book/9798999304209

Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FGCZB9B7

Enjoy – if that is the right word…

Record of Dissent

humanist55

I have had a poem published in Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age — Summer 2025

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…

Kintsugi World

humanist55

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…

© Andrew Wilson, 2025

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…

Blues and Twos

humanist55

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…

Triumph and Defeat

humanist55

Why does a Pyrrhic victory
feel like a defeat

Can peace be other than the
straightforward opposite of war

How often is a ceasefire
not the end of hostility

What might make an armistice
be the seed of new enmity

What if an enemy soldier
is often not the real enemy

If you should die for your country
is it for the regime, the people or a concept

How do you know whether
your enemy’s enemy is not your friend

If fifty-one percent of people are for a war
what about the forty-nine percent who aren’t

Can losers be
the winners of hearts and minds

Does triumph erode
the value of victory

When one rival triumphs in love
is only one heart broken

Is one man’s triumph ever
only the other man’s defeat…

© Andrew Wilson, 2025

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, merrildsmith in Poetics challenges us to write about Triumph and Defeat.