The Annual Pilgrimage

buds and yellow leaves
spring and autumn on one bough
stranger times to come?

On Sunday last, our annual pilgrimage to Wisley, the home of The Horticultural Society.(Actually we like to go much more frequently, but Sunday was the first time this year! Fortunately, we had perfect weather: warm sunshine. We were even able to have our lunch alfresco.

Two shots showing parts of the rockery

This handsome fellow (below) is called Bigfoot. We found him in the greenhouse. He is a member of the cucumber family - believe it or not! I should have included something for size comparison, but he is perhaps a meter across.

I saw the fellow below on the lake. He was some distance away, the zoom was up to the job, but my shaky hands were not. Ergo the shot is a bit fuzzy. I think he's (or she's) a heron. Does anyone out there know if I am right?

I was quite taken by these grasses.

Devil Birds

being my response to the picture prompt from Magpie Tales

Six years ago they came,
a dark smudge in the sky,
no more than that at first -
but then they came to Earth.
On land they were supreme.
Big as Christmas turkeys,
with wings that hid the sun;
claws fit to rip a rib
cage bar from flimsy bar
and take the beating heart;
and beaks like bayonets.
They'd run you through without
a flutter or a qualm.
They might have come from Mars.
No man or beast was safe.

The spellbinder was spell-
bound, for a change. Poleaxed
he was, with that same awe
he'd strike into our hearts.
For all he tried this charm
or that, wails to the moon
or potions by the score,
the birds just laughed at him
and wobbled on their way.

And then one day our plants
began to wilt and die.
Followed by our children.
"Disease," the charmer said.
Dunno if he was right
or not, not for meself.
Anyways, he mixes up
a new concoction: blood
and scrapings from the dead,
and disappears. Where to?
Your guess... soon after that,
the devils start to die.

So what's he do? Tells us
how we must hang them - string
them up to decompose.
Each day he takes one down
and roasts it - not to eat,
oh no, we has to smear
ourselves with grease and blood.
Protection's what he says -
from evil influence,
the birds themselves, their dread
disease... and from ourselves!
Can you beat that? Ourselves indeed!

Titchtown United

When they demolished the stadium
the fans bought squares of its turf
and took them home
and fitted them into their well-kept lawns.

Then nothing disturbed the tranquil ways
of their well-kept town until the day
when the brand new season dawned. Which was when
they found the squares were out of control
and the grasses therein were thicker
and longer and stronger and far far greener
than those which composed the lawns of old.

And then there was something else:
the grasses could not be cut, they found,
not with mower or shears or any mechanical tool.

And still they were growing
and not only growing but spreading,
and not only spreading but singing.
Yes, that's right, the new grass was singing,
horrendously singing, way out of tune.
It was singing the songs of the fans,
the songs that the terraces knew,
the songs that were green, but also blue.

And not only singing, but swaying
swaying in time to the singing.
And not only grasses, the town:
the whole town was singing - or so it would seem
if you happened to pass that way.

Soon it was taller than sunflowers, taller than trees,
and still it was singing and still it was swaying
and people covered their ears
and they closed all their doors
and not even a window was left ajar.
And only the fans and the players of football
enjoyed the songs that the grasses sang.

Then experts came with knowing ways
and examined the grasses, and let it be known
That: "of course they will sing, for their stems are hollow,
they've reeds in the wind to sing!"

For by now among them was pampas grass and several reeds
and sugar canes and tough bamboos,
and cocksfoot and fog and perenniel rye,
and the roughest of rough-stalked meadow -
though not one of these grasses and been in the squares
that they'd bought when the stadium closed.

And their little town became known as the town
with thousands of towering towers.
There were leaning towers and straggly towers,
thick towers and thin towers, all manner of towers,
and all of them towers of the living grass.

Next thing they found: the grass could be cut
as long as the cutter would sing along
in tune with the grass that was out of tune
and sway in time to the swaying grass. Next thing,
the grasses developed an orange stripe
- orange and green was the strip of their team.

So the fans cut wands of the waving blades
and took them along to cheer the lads,
and they waved and they sang and made such a din -
and never again did they win.

Jackson Pollock

Here is violence absorbed,
a wildness, a ferocity,
a turbulence of stick,
ferocity of knife,
pigment wildly thrown:
a clash of disparate energies -
all somehow harvested
as from a tangled garden bed
where buds appear
and tiny leaves
and trailing things
like brambles drawing blood.

"Be still," it said
"and know here is a god."
The canvas knows.

"Be still," it says to me,
be as a tree
with its deep roots
and broad reach of its arms.
Take in the world,
take the world's mess,
Be still as me."

image from Wikipedia

The German Way With Words

The Germans like portmanteau-words -
with not a single dash in sight.
New lexicons are for the birds,
their words will never see the light.

Inventors of a language glue
by means of which
a word will stick
to any other word they pick.
ThelongestwordthatIcanfind: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz:
(the labelling of beef, I'm told): like Topsy, it just grew.
Concatenation is their choice:
pronunciation takes your voice.

The words spool out, mile after mile -
and some are longer than the Nile
with words like trucks of endless trains.
They never have to scratch their brains
to find a word for something new
when strings of older words will do.

Or is it shortness that offends?
and joining makes the length that mends?

A World in Passing.

A response to a prompt bydVERSE Poets for a poem modelled on one by an established poet. I have chosen Ted Hughs's Conjuring in Heaven

Children's chalk games on the square,
squares within a larger square,
and in the squares are icons drawn -
though mostly scribbled out in blue
where two dead zebras white on black
in passing have been spared.
(The rain has washed out Africa.)
Close by, a circle,
top half sun with earth beneath,
the two at the equator met. All this to show
the two can live
in harmony?
that neither is a threat?
Pie in the sky while all the trees
burn merrily. Their leaves,
like insects, cover earth.

Then look again
where two white suns
collide in space
and ask of us, "Can earth survive?"
Incredibly, impossibly
they've chalked blue numbers on them all.
What do they do,
these children, skip
from one disaster to the next?

They've left some pieces on the ground...
personal belongings
scattered round
like tokens on a board:

a plastic man

theatre plan

a recipe for fish
beneath a stone for paperweight
beside the cataleptic beasts.

---

Conjuring in Heaven

So finally there was nothing.
It was put inside nothing.
Nothing was added to it
And to prove it didn't exist
Squashed flat as nothing with nothing.

Chopped up with nothing
Shaken in a nothing
Turned completely inside out
And scattered over nothing -
So everybody saw that it was nothing
And that nothing more could be done with it

And so it was dropped. Prolonged applause in Heaven.

It hit the ground and broke open -
There lay Crow - cataleptic.

Little King

I bet he walks two steps behind his queen.
Self-effacing little king,
he holds the sceptre of his power
and majesty behind his back -
not to be seen.
Bashful little thing!

He stands upon The Daily Rag,
the news of common man, consumer man,
but hasn't opened it.
Such outward things dwell not in his desires,
his mind is on some astral plane.

His ermine trim is faux, of course;
he's greener than the bees.
He sings from angel hymn sheets -
but when they sing, he leaves.

His morning coffee has been served.
He's turned his back on it,
prefers the nectar of the gods -

and walks two steps in front of them,
insisting on his right. But here, his queen

of six feet seven, blocks out all his light.

---

My thanks to Magpie Tales for the image/prompt.

"My best friend died here"

dVerse Poet's Pub Open Link Night speaks of superstitions and particularly those involving the number 13. This set my mind working along that particular track.

"BROMPTON HOSPITAL
FOR THE CONSUMPTION
AND DISEASE OF THE CHEST."
Big letters on Victorian red brick
above a too-imposing entrance.
(Red once, but soot-encrusted now.)
I and the day are both thirteen.
I'm not exactly superstitious,
but in the light of those dread words
can not afford to take too many chances -
or so I feel. I ask my mother
and my aunt, "What are my chances?"
My aunt is quick to reassure: "It's lovely here -
My best friend died in here just recently."

I should have brought the rabbit's foot
my friend had offered me. I am not ill.
Not now, but have been so each year
since I was five years old. I've come
"for observation only" - which, I reason,
should improve my prospects.
(The family are frightened of T.B.
I do not know at this stage
that consumption is T.B.)

Neither do I know the treats in store for me:
a stunning view across the London roof tops -
from the hospital's theatre;
and then a fun broncoscopy - a periscope
inserted down the windpipe. No fibre optics then;
a rubber pipe with lights and mirrors
like a prestidigitator's dream.
I didn't see the show. I couldn't wait,
went into shock and saw them all
back stage when it was done.
My aunt was still in form:
explained how many patients died -
though not me! (Which I
already had worked out.)

Who needs memory?

David Shechtman
Latest Nobel Laureate
for chemistry
discovered quasi-crystals
back in '82.

So everybody laughed.
(Not I, did you?)

First came the fractals
endlessly repeating
their own forms
on every scale;
now quasi-crystals,
exactly the reverse,
in non-repeating
patterns to infinity.

So they forced him
to resign. "No such
thing," they said
"as quasi-crystals -
only quasi scientists."

They knew - as did
we all - that matter,
all of solid matter
for that matter,
is composed
of crystals packed
in regular arrays.

Not so for quasi
crystals. Each stage
makes a transition
to the next, creates
the pattern
next in line.
The past
is meaningless.
It's strictly no repeats.
The process is
completely memoryless.

I and Quasi-crystals
have that much
in common.

Let me repeat...
except I can't, I too
am (almost)
sans recall! But I
shall sing it
from the rooftops.

Man achieves
what nature
pioneers... in
Medieval Mosques
mosaics have
this self same form.

Beauty can blossom
without memory!
Yipeeeeee!
There's hope for me!

The upper image is of some aperiodic (or quasi-) crystals. The lower one is of mosaic tiles laid to an aperiodic pattern.

Before You First Had Sex

Before you first had sex

you'd have mused a great deal
on how it would be.
What it would be like?

Then after you'd had it
the question arose:
Is that how it is for us all?

Like the sex film at school.
Questions: "Sir, what's it like?"
"Sir, how does it feel?"

And all of a sudden
they all want to know,
there's a fervour of "Sir, what's it like?".

The condom's forgotten,
mechanics are binned
for the sake of how it might feel.

It's not what you think...
Well, partly it is,
but they're anxious as well,

the worry is etched on their brows.
And you feel such a fraud
with no answer to give,

so you ask of your partner:
"do you have a word that says what it's like?"
but find she's no answer to give.

So you keep on asking; she'll say:
"it was "good", it was not, "terrific"
"not out of this world."

But go on asking as long as you will,
you will never hear - and I'm guessing now -
any way in which it was "like".

Then at last it occurs,
the thought that no answer exists,
that maybe it just isn't like.

And soon you're reflecting
on whether you've had the real thing -
and how would you know?

And does it exist?
For if it exists, then surely to God,
it would have to be something quite like!

How I helped to win the War

'I cannot stay to tea!' I cried,
whisked in through A and E
past sterilizers, stainless steel
that steamed like mother's pots at home -
I really hadn't time:
two armies poised for war, I'd left;
huns hunkered down among my sheets,
the allies ranged on Eider Down.
The stretcher was a magic rug,
but how was I to know
I'd pass a cushy war, laid back -
and most of it in bed?

I had expected gas attacks
(Dad warned of oxygen);
but with the ward a makeshift barracks
(itself a crafty ploy)
I tested secret weapons -
which even nurses, though they brought
those weapons to me, didn't know.
They'd bring me two huge bell jars
joined by rubber tubes,
one filled with purple liquid
or pink or startling green.
Then through another tube I'd blow
the secret fluids jar to jar.
And from those deadly juices
brave back room boys - like me! -
would conjure up the victories,
unsung, unknown, unseen.

The Kingfisher

This is a response to Free Write Friday at Magic in the Back Yard to write a poem based upon a memory.

A path forever darkening; and then
a light, a lightening, an eye
that winked between the trees to say
"Come on!". I found a lake, its shape
dog-legged, and on its bank
a solitary angler, oil-skin caped,
with whom I passed the time of day.

There, as we talked, from trees
behind us and above our heads,
a rending sound, as leaves,
confetti-like, showered down.
Then from the fisher-man
a muttered curse as though he knew
a flash of blue would come,
would tear the sky apart
the way it had the trees;
and while that sundering
yet echoed in our ears,
an angry seamstress of a bird
would rip the faulty work apart
and leave its ragged seam
stretched out along the lake.

My startled movement released more:
a flight of butterflies rose up
from somewhere on the path
and merged with the descending leaves.
Pale pink, they caught
the day's one shaft of sun,
a stab of blood-stained blade.

I saw him later, that bright bird,
brown-bellied, duffle coat
of cobalt blue pulled back,
white flashes shining in the mist.
He'd perched upon a stump
in splendid isolation in a stream
that fed the lake, but he
was like an emperor or bishop
on his throne, and in his beak
a fish, a scepter of a sort.

Haunted

Poets United's" Thursday Think Tank #69 provided for prompt this photograph and the thought that the house might be haunted.

My nightmare house. Night after night
I've dreamed this house. Exactly this.
Always the same house, never the same dream.
Sometimes, as I've approached the house
I've seen it shrink. Right before my eyes,
shrivel down to dolls house size, then
seen it all kick off: grinning faces
peering down at me from every pane of glass.
Sometimes the house has slid away from me,
a pace away for every step I took;
sometimes it shrieked at me, the boards
would move like mouths and scream obscenities.

But it was never real. Imagine then today
I lose my way, am driving down a road I do not know
and there it is: the house I dream about, the very same.
I stop, walk up to it, knock on the door,
it doesn't move or shrink or scream at me.
The door is opened by a lordly looking gent
who welcomes me and clearly is expecting me,
invites me in, asks why I'm late and pours
me out a drink. He knows my tipple to a tee.
He asks about my luggage - and then he disappears,
just vanishes. No puff of smoke, but might as well
have been. Except... he's still there in the mirror,
pouring whiskey at the bar. His image hasn't moved
beyond the movements of his arms and hands.
And then he's back. Comes back the way we recently
came in - and for good measure, steps out of the glass.

One corner of the room is very dark.
I noticed it before. It struck me then as odd
why light from elsewhere doesn't filter there.
I pushed it, I suppose, into the "pending" tray,
but now my mind is working on it, and I see
there is a cage, and in the cage a cockatoo,
some sort of green. My host puts down his glass
and turns towards me, says, "They should be ready for
us now!" And even as he speaks he undergoes
a transformation, morphs into the form of cockatoos,
whilst in its cage, the bird accepts his form.

It lasts a second. Half of that. No more.
So fleeting is it that I half imagine I imagined it.
But no, it happened right enough, the two
exchanged their states, though briefly it is true.
There's proof: the colours are the last particulars
to change. For seconds more, my host is emerald green,
the cockatoo a pin-stripe blue. I don't think
I will wait for "them" to see if they are "ready"!
I make extremely false excuses and let him lead
me to the door. The knocker hammers out a rapid
rat- a - tat tat tat. I look at it and see
it's jerking up and down. That's its "Good-bye" he says

Mixed Bag

My long(ish) poem Angel Bitch was published yesterday in Beat to a Pulp. You can read it here.

Tip: It contains a poem within a poem. If time is pressing you could skip it go back and read it later!

The Angel and the Sculptor

For months the sculptor had chipped at the rock,
yet no one could make out its form.
When asked, he had said; "It's an image of God!"
but at that they would laugh and wander away,
and the man would chip for another long day.

When at last he could see the end of the task,
when drawing close to the vision he'd seen,
an angel appeared and told him to stop.
He was getting too close to what no one must see -
the faithful reflection of God.

"Imagination is all I use!"
he said to the angel then. But the angel replied
that that in itself, was a perfect image of God.
"I could change it, perhaps..." the sculptor said,
"- if you could suggest what to change?"

"I've no idea," the angel replied, "not having seen
for myself, the force that lies behind the universe,
the multiverse and the things that have always been.
I just have my orders, I'm told what to do,
they pop in my mind, from where I don't know."

The sculptor, frustrated, took his chisel once more,
and hurled it with all of his might. It hit and removed
a great lump of rock. The carving glowed white
before a great flash and a darkness enveloped the earth
and the voice of the multiverse screamed.

---

My Aunt's Purse

My aunt (95) lost her purse earlier this year. She thought she'd dropped it in the road. Many weeks later her friend and neighbour found it. "His" fox, the fox that had taken out squatters' rights on his garden cold frame, had been looking after it for her. It was very chewed, but the money was still intact and the purse had been given pride of place among the fox's collectables: its private papers, old coins, gloves, a handkerchief - and a cardboard cut-out of an angel.

My aunt was so grateful to the fox, she cooked it a special dinner.

Missing Child

Something of the backstory to this is here

The children - if it was the children-
have restored the chalk world washed out by the rain.
Halfway across the square the squares have names.
Here is one tagged "HOME". The games
are not familiar to me
and change repeatedly. I think they are created
on the hoof. Two days ago, two doors from me,
a small boy disappeared from here, this square within a square.
Propped up nearby, a tattered Teddy Bear.
His innards hanging out, he squats
beside a faded rose. Are these
just two abandoned tokens of the game that they had played?
Have they no deeper meaning than dead zebras or the river,
lemon squeezer, jungle track or shark-infested sea?
Or are they something darker, a thing that should not be,
the trappings of a dread? anticipating grief?
I shiver at the sight - or maybe at the thought;
the thought that others had the thought
of how it might have been. It could be both:
the tributes were incorporated as they played,
became part of the apparatus of the game. Five hours
or thereabouts, his whereabouts remained unknown,
policemen calling door to door. The dogs
seemed out of touch - not knowing, I suppose,
how rapidly the scene can change, the game move on,
the children rearrange the landscape of the square.

Some dickhead, numskull, dolt invited them - the little boy
and friend - to his house to play their games, and they
had wandered off with him to see this somewhere new,
the patch of greener grass three streets or so away.

Now for the moment, men are laying water mains,
machines are in possession of the square.

Apples were never that sexy!

In full flight, running by the sea,
leaping ancient groynes like an immortal,
I've almost landed on them -
Adam and Eve on holiday.
They have been soaking up the sun, are sprawled,
half-buried in the sand -
and this, before they've eaten any fruit.
His arm round her
and hers round him, two arms
like serpents slithering together
and showing by example
how to - or not to - enjoy sex.

The Eden Method : Lesson 1.
(So what the apple taught them later on
was something other than we'd thought.)

Change of focus:
just below their feet,
the tree, the famous tree,
the knowledge-of-good-and-evil tree
with every fruit of every kind displayed
(a supermarket range) to say
that every form of good and type of evil
will be included in the deal.

The sea is almost on them and will soon
be washing them away - as if they cared!
Six hundred years might vanish in a day -
should they be bovvered? Not a bit!

Strange to see them wet and steaming in the sun
as if they have been skinny dipping in the waves.
Some wag has threaded sea wrack,
green and brown, between their thighs,
along their sensual contours,
and then - the whole point of the exercise, no doubt -
in buns to hide the nakedness of their pudenda.
(And furthermore, of all such pubic hair
as they possess at such an early adolescent stage.)

A stone's throw out to sea
the falling remnants
of the rest of Eden crumble
sand to sand and flotsam bits
back to the sea to float away;
then further up the beach, below the bathing huts,
a vision of their family some twenty decades on:
their sons and daughters, more experienced by now,
have found the joy -
enough to populate the world.

Then all is gone.
So what remains? A trace of memory?
A golden apple, aptly won:
This week's "Sand Sculpture of the Beach".

pictures from the future

The picture is this week's Magpie Tales prompt.

I switched my printer on this morning
and it chuntered out
a stream of images
sent back from the future
by processes as yet not understood.

They show the Earth as striped
with bands of heat and cold,
the sky is likewise barred
with streaks of black and gold.
These are not merely tints
but particles.
Sky, air, cloud: all that we know
as insubstantial,
bodiless
seem concrete to the core.

Stripes cut across
the furnishings of landscape:
trees are slashed with ice,
long icicles and fire;
the dance of flames on flowers
most grabs the eye;
then as flames die
the flowers return and then are burnt again.
Meanwhile,
ice bands are thick with "mushrooms",
fungi large as juggernauts
that last a moment then are gone,
reduced to smoke dots
before they drift away.

The bands move on,
almost impalpably,
as if controlled
by ghostly clockwork.
Tick-tock, tick-tock
fire into ice
ice into fire.

Small animals
have grown the signs
and attributes
that once were those
of trees and plants.
A dog has leaves
instead of fur;
a cat is bundled
in white twigs, has
buds for eyes and
bark upon its back.

Winged elephants
like startled geese
take off in clouds
of scattered dust like water
from webbed feet (They're startled,
don't you see,
by too much urban sprawl,
the creep of factories and cooling towers:
it's that has driven them
to grow their wings,
evolve - along with all life forms -
a conscious evolution.)
to scoot bare
inches from the ground.


No plane can fly
those metal skies,
no sun peer through
nor birds take wing,
it is a shutter
on the earth, as
if we're riding
out some massive storm,
some climate change.
(Could that be so?)

some mysteries can never be resolved

A man begins to read a book. We shall call him Alan. The book is the story of a man's life, but he doesn't know whose life it is. Alan has done what he always does with a new book: he has turned to the back to read the last few pages first to see how it ends. Alan cannot bear to read a book without knowing how it will all pan out. Partly because he knows the ending, he has become absorbed in the book. Obsessed by it, you might say. So much so that he cannot bear to be parted from it, and he takes it everywhere with him. You see, he has reached the point at which the hero is exactly the same age as himself. Furthermore, he has for some time nursed the growing suspicion that the book is the story of his own life. And now, with the account of Alan's birthday celebrations, he is certain of it. Indeed, to such an extent do these considerations occupy his every waking moment that he has absent-mindedly left the book on a bus. Of course, he will do all the usual things: ask at the bus company's lost property office, check with the local police to see if it has been handed in, advertise in the local paper, but he knows for a certainty that the book has gone for ever.

This is something of a disaster, for he now knows how he will die, but not how his life will get from where it is now to its end point. Not even how long it will take. And his death, he has inferred from what he has read of it, will be horrendous. It seems that it will be the result of some sort of train crash. Of course , dear reader, it's true that the remedy is obvious: all he has to do is avoid railways like the plague, stay right away from lines and railway stations, and he will live for ever! He realises this as well as you and I, but something gnaws at the back of his mind, saying that without the book and the rest of the story he is floundering.

What he does not know is that not far away, in the next village in fact, another man, whom we will call Bob, is reading the same book. He too, has read the end of the story first and has reached the point at which the protagonist is the same age as himself. (Consider at this point, dear reader, whether or not this indicates to you that Bob is the same age as Alan.) Either way, Bob can not longer bring himself to read on, and so has presented the book, along with a number of others now surplus to requirements, to one of the local charity shops. Not surprisingly, having made this spur of the moment decision he at once regretted it and is back at the shop hoping to recover the book. He is unlucky. Of the book there is no sign. What neither Alan nor Bob realise is that the book is their father's autobiography. Well, it's true: some mysteries can never be resolved.

To recap: all that we can surmise with any certainty is that until now their lives have run on identical lines, and that their deaths will be identical, but neither knows how his life will run between now and then. And although each is someone else, neither knows himself to be another person, let alone that he and the other person are one. Also, neither knows that the hero of the book they have only partly read (and that word "partly" is important) is their father

There is an interesting postscript to this story, though. That is to say, there has been reported in the press a strange incident which might or might not prove to be a postscript to this story. It seems that a man in a sports car and a man on a motorcycle were following a vehicle, a low-loader, up a steep hill when the low-loader's cargo came adrift and rolled back, crushing the two men, their vehicles and a pedestrian who had been waiting to cross the road. None of the three was killed outright, but all were rushed to hospital, where it was found that all three had lost vast quantities of blood. However, when their blood was tested, it was found that each had an identical, previously unknown, blood group and consequently none of them could be treated. They all three passed away within minutes of each other. Coincidentally, the hospital authorities confirmed that all three were about the same age.

Oh, I nearly forgot: the low-loaders cargo - it was a railway locomotive,

---

Not sure where this came from! I found it among my drafts in my handwriting, but can not recall writing it! If it's yours, let me know and I'll remove it!!!

Brain Tumour

Hugely disliked
when he could see,
his subject more so -
Latin Grammar. He,

harsh disciplinarian,
"cold fish"
who hated boys.
That was the general view.

Then came the tumour
and the head's announcement:
he'd not return.
Relief was palpable.

It seems he'd left
in the head's study
blank sheets of paper
for Latin test results.

Then came the change of plan,
the brave experiment:
he would return,
though permanently blind.

The head explained:
success or failure
would be down to us.
Cooperation key.

He hadn't changed:
he still was Mr Judge;
knew which boy where
was throwing paper darts;

whose homework book,
still blank, was on his desk.
He still could throw a piece of chalk
to hit the talking boy.

Plan B : On Writing Poems

I decided to introduce a plan B and hold over until tomorrow the promised poem on the second teacher, the reason being the suggestion from dVerse Poets that we should break all the rules and do what is never done in the best circles (and which of us could refuse an invitation like that?) and write a poem on poetry.


Words, originated
in the main for commerce
or converse over fences:
can they be crafted,
forged or hammered
to new purpose to express
the eeriness of life
and all creation?

Or could we build a whatnot
from a pile of kindling wood? (The tasks
are not a million miles apart.)

Yet we are pledged to try,
from meagre scraps of words,
to craft a furniture of thought,
for we are poets who believe
that words at times work miracles -
or call them forth,
we know not how. It's on a par
for mystery with the Big Bang:
the fashioning from nothing
(almost) of the all.

And that would be enough for most
if that were all, but when we add
that nix begat infinity, almost
our vision fades. We are perplexed.
So shall we versify perplexity?
And how should that be done?
Can craft alone atone
for loss of visionary heights?

Words on their own, I find
solve fewer mysteries
than they create.
Great poems excavate
the very depths of what we call
the self - the source
of what is most mysterious.

And can the grains and streams of words,
can rays they shine upon the riddles
be set by us in the right order,
be set to replicate
the world that Nature crafts,
the genius of their genesis?