An Ode to Worcestershire and her People

This land of ours once dreamt a place,

And called to our forebears to base

New settlements upon the Severn’s banks;

And here, we give those pioneers our thanks.

It’s Worcestershire you seeded;

This place which England needed.

For who can live without a heart?

Right now, we’re proud to state our part:

If Worcestershire’s the heart, then we’re the beat

You’ll hear in all her towns, on every street.

This land is an enigma, though,

To those whose radars may not show

Provincial towns or cricket grounds; of course,

They think that Worcestershire is just a sauce!

We mention Worcester pears?

They give us vacant stares!

But even they know Hope and Glory,

Whose notes sing out our county’s story.

The truth revealed for all to see unfurled:

The place which put her stamp upon the world.

This land of ours we hold so dear

Within our hearts – this Worcestershire –

Is where we found the loves which built our lives:

Our friends, our homes, our husbands and our wives.

This land breathes the profound:

Those hills, that vale, this ground

We stand upon throughout life’s day.

We are as one when we all say,

“In Worcestershire, we’ll live for all our years!”

Proclaiming it so everybody hears.

Combien?

For Jon and Liz

http://www.saintecroixvins.com/winemaking.htm

Not famed throughout the Kingdom for my spatial

awareness, when you asked, “How many bottles

d’you think could fit inside this tank of wine?”

I made great play of estimating length

and height of tank, and even asked if I

could climb atop said tank to carry out

some calculations (spurious, of course)

before I plucked, quite randomly, the figure

of twenty-thousand bottles. Sorry that

I didn’t give you cause to laugh at my

numerical ineptitude, but how

was I to know my guess would be spot on?

Domaine Sainte Croix, Summer 2013

Poeticality

Like an art instillation by Tracey Emin, I don’t inspire neutrality,

As I navigate my way through the tepid waters of vacuous banality,

Demolishing the profound to a rubble of triviality,

Confusing unintelligibility with individuality,

Thinking that enervation is synonymous with vitality,

While the audience pray for an at-the-mic fatality,

Or, at the very least, a change of bloody rhyme scheme.

Sorbet

The half-moon lit the figure of a cat,

but when I looked again the shadows moved

revealing nothing quite so feline as

a pot-plant. Once again I found myself

duped by the night; reflecting on the need

for proper observation from ‘the poet’.

What chance of that from me? That half-moon wasn’t even

a half-moon; any fool could see that it

was one celestial scoop of lemon sorbet. 

Prelude

The Prelude opens with a chord,

Whose barbed-wire notes are grimly scored,

And from whose depths a melody is born,

A tune to make both Youth and Old Age mourn.

With bugle, fife and drum,

It tells us what’s to come.

Disharmony and tune compete:

Advance-withdraw; attack-retreat.

No cheerful leitmotifs for those who wait,

But gas attacks and bayonets and hate.

A shrill, forbidding choir joins in,

And sings of shells, and next-of-kin,

And life amid the ruins of despair,

Where shrapnel-shaped crescendos fill the air.

A military beat,

From tired, arrhythmic feet,

Is tapped like Morse code with no scheme,

And warns that things aren’t what they seem.

The Prelude plays the coda’s closing phrase,

And rumour speaks of dark, demonic days.

As Youth prepares to be betrayed,

The Prelude’s final chord is played:

Off-key, off-beat, and fading far too fast,

This Prelude to the War could never last.

Its tense, unquiet calm,

Was simply War’s alarm,

Which woke up Albion, who found

Vast armies with no common ground

Prepare to fight, whilst trying to ignore,

What really happens when we go to war.

Horse Shit on Stilts

I do not mean to conjure up

the image of this thought, but rather

draw your attention to the silly

sibilant stutters of its sound.

Horse Shit on Stilts, though? Made me laugh. 

Perhaps I laugh too easily.

foxcat

midnight

on pavement:

fox

stares at me

from

twenty yards

fox turns head

becomes calico cat

cat turns head

becomes fox again

what chance pattern of shadows

transforms this cat to fox?

fox becomes cat again

cat becomes fox again

stands on all fours

reveals side profile

wrong shape

wrong size

for cat

and

that feather duster tail? 

a dead giveaway