November Argument
Will you break the silence or shall I?
Like the glass carpet on the Cam deep winter
or shall we sit in shrieking silence quietly smouldering
breathing pure resentment like oxygen,
as watching the gardener’s bonfire late afternoon
Slightly spitting and fading to bitter orange.
But perhaps we’ll brush it all aside - just for now
dress up, go out, talk small
like neighbours meeting in the town pretending everything is fine
in the creeping fog of an afternoon’s blank white sky.
Possibly we’ll just push doors, exit rooms, seethe frost
but best of all - I hope we’ll pull on our boots and coats
go out into the winter woods, snap some twigs, disturb some leaves
and talk it through until we melt.
Karin Bane
Eating Passion fruit
Like Eve eating the first fruit,
I savoured the fruit’s
passion, luscious like milk-
weed in my mouth. I picked
and ate and ate again until
in the lucent indigo seed-
core, mouth-watering seed
after seed, sustained me.
The initial itch and scratch
stung my soft skin, reddening
my belly like the fire-scorched
specks of red soil cleaving, crackling
under the sun, craving for rain.
Rain clouds, I imagined,
reflected on the wild foliage
of the neighbour’s garden –
ceaseless rain, I imagined,
cleansing the wild passion’s ivy-
shadow darkening our shared
wooden fences unevenly.
Emily Capulet-Bilman
All Rights Reserved.
The Stranger
Inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight"
The lithe blue pellicle-flame fluttering
in my heater's glass window, the sole
unquiet thing in my icon-home,
whispers my warmth "sotto voce"
to every room linked by the flame's pulse-
rhythm, my companiable form, as I dress,
comb, preen, and groom myself to meet
my mentor, that other stranger, then behind
bars, but who helped free the quivering
stranger in me, helped me make
the inkling of a pellicle into a home-
pledged poem given to the pure
in heart like the frost's crystal
ministry secretly growing in me.
Emily Capulet-Bilman
Breakthrough
Like the glass-maker’s lit breath
blown into the red-hot molten glass-
belly as he blends liquid colour
into the glass core, swirling
fire-plasma into shape, I break
into language with light
traversing each word, with light
on everyone, on every word,
transmuting every poem,
transporting the crowds, the oceans
like lit water-swathes scattering, then,
unscathed, gathering myriad crystal
specks, bathing beast, bird, bug
and man in light alike.
Emily Capulet-Bilman
Otherwise Known
My room feels crowded, stuffy,
and I open windows wide.
The tallest officer stands close
as he stares out at my garden.
He asks the names of flowers
and trees: Sophora, walnut,
sweet chestnut. He points
to the flame-coloured flowers
pressed against the wall –
Fritillaria imperialis, I reply,
otherwise known as crown imperials.
It seems someone has died, alone,
whose name I have never heard.
And in another continent.
I do not know, I say.
No relative of mine.
I hope you trace his family,
he had a sister, did you say?
They thank me for my time, drive off.
Left on my own, I know. I know.
I pick up the phone, call them,
tell them that I know.
I know.
Diana Brodie
(The above poem was previously published in Poetry News)
AGAINST THE JOSTLE AND THE THRUST
First, against the jostle and the thrust and
the buffet's inroads, insula trembled,
disorder girt, bare living, clinging fast.
The simple amoeba, tyrannosaur
of warm ponds, would eat all lesser life forms,
their entropic grist, turned into itself.
Enteric guzzlers of others' order,
big coelenterates, broad-sailed sea-pirates'
stinging clasp by two-layered trap of cells.
Exploding Cambrian in a wet world.
Such plethora teeming by shallow shore,
welling planktonic gusts, nutrient fuelled.
On sun-warmed surfaces, light accumulates
in energised bonds that tempt a new trick.
Always and again, fresh phyla turn up.
From long littoral drench and drying came
the rooted reaching after light and then
the worm, with metameric grappling gait.
Soil makers turn and sift as by shuffle
and whirr and veined wing caught in amber bright
or coal dark shaft and the settle and fold.
Tegmina, testa, bark, bristle and bone,
upright against pull, support for the push.
Arc guarding eye, skull, beak, talon and claw.
Skin soft Africa ape, with knowing thumb.
Enjambment across mountains, plains and seas,
stride far reaching covers dreams, covers worlds
and.......................
Harry Goode
Gardening – by Joshua Moore
That great British pastime – nurturing bulbs and plants
Handling with love this gentle life, dealing with weeds and ants
What a thrill to see that tiny shoot making its way towards the sun
So richly rewarding for all who indulge, and of course a great deal of fun
Up with the sun, whether chilly or pouring, sweating when it’s hot
Too dedicated to inside for a nap – grab a kip on my gardener’s cot
The effect all those beautiful flowers have – they really make people feel great
Mustn’t dawdle too long over tea and cakes, for I can’t have my darlings wait
Oh what a satisfying life it is, working hard with gardening all day
Never actually done any of course, but it’s addictive – so they say
Brahms – Haydn Variations
For decades I was always told that Haydn wrote the theme
But it’s Ignace Joseph Pleyel’s work, strong hints now make it seem
A pupil of Haydn, but of course nowhere as great
He composed it in a five bar phrase
Was that why Brahms just couldn’t wait
Some will say they loved that piece for nothing all these years
While others ‘never liked it at all’ – except after several beers
But whatever all the arguments and intricate explanations
I’ll always adore those beautiful Brahms – Haydn – Pleyel variations
Joshua Moore
Norma Jean's Death Song
Goodbye Norma Jean.
Fame, that vampiric victory
of form over content,
has airbrushed aside your pale peroxide frame
in favour of younger fresher fleshtones.
He gave you a song, sending it to your lonely L.A. apartment,
when just a young man in the twenty-second row
of some Hackney Empire.
Now just another hockneyed Californian, he has recalled
his rhymes,
redirecting his male hormones
over the Bridge
of the Soul
to rest upon the people's princess's estate.
Those of us who do remember you,
our eyes - awash with romantic travesties -
raised in wonder at an altared nude Madonna Puttana,
cherish your image as though your essence.
Yet conspiracy covers conspiracy,
the abyss calls the abyss:
We know you could not have stomached oral barbs,
that, though punctured and bruised,
your swan-like pose was painstakingly arranged.
You believed you shared a birth sign
more with Whitman than Garland;
but your diary is gone, your phone record gone,
now even your song.
They changed your name, they gave you fame,
they made you dumb, they made you blonde,
they stole your song, now all is gone.
Leslie Ray
Empty Pole Land
Perverse primordial transmission mast;
in the square
on a cartwheel
horizontal on a roof-high pole
sits a loose collection of sticks, stems,
mud,
rustling, creaking in the dry dust wind.
It is the village at dusk;
noiseless, voiceless,
the white storks
have finally flown.
Those long-distance migrants
- now flapping and soaring,
seeking pairings for breeding,
strangely settling
for nests near human clutches -
now dispense blessings on humbler huts,
eat swarming locusts,
share sacred pastures.
Gregarious flame birds
feed in solitude, fly in formation,
gather to roost at the end of the day.
Meantime,
dispensed with under empty poles,
the villagers despair
of a return.
Meantime,
patented cash seeds blow
over geometrical prairies,
strewn by Saints of monoculture.
No hedgerodents,
no pondbeasts, no wildweedbugs,
to fill their motley pantry,
the storks have flown
surrendering
their candid cloths
to barren homes.
Leslie Ray
Call to Prayer
(Taroudannt, Morocco, September 1998)
"Wake up and pray!"
"No time for sleep!"
Five o'clock in the morning,
the minaret's megaphone crackled into life.
Could these be the mysterious words
the muezzin wailed
from the watchtower of the faith
just a block away?
Shaken from sleep,
I listened
as, with a jazzman's dexterity,
he plucked the single-string tamboura
of his plica vocalis,
always returning to the drone note,
through labyrinthine byzantine designs,
to the drone note,
from amazing peaks and flourishes,
to the drone note.
Drained of divine meaning,
to this atheist
not looking to leap into faith,
Allah's clarion wake-up call became
an affirmation of life against death,
of enthusiasm against somnolence.
As I lay there in bed, insomniacked,
the improvised Word
from the beckoning beacon
still bell-ringing in my ears,
I knew I must answer.
As though compelled,
I got up to walk the streets;
in the ochre light of dawn
I felt the town's senses awakening,
bursting free from the chrysalis of sleep.
Leslie Ray
Yell Fire!
Let us pan along a terrace, one of fifty fishbone streets,
to a house upon the corner, windows sealed with metal sheets.
You can buy it up with plastic, if you want to take the risk,
but beware the boys with matches, they're out looking for a frisk.
When out sniffing for the crack,
they go sneaking round the back
and deal the wall a beaming blow with sledgehammer attack;
then they wait until it's dark
and then - only for a lark -
make a bonfire in the kitchen, apply petrol and a spark.
Who will wreak recriminations in the angry light of dawn,
as the sooty settee suttee sits there smouldering on the lawn?
First there's policemen, parsons, firemen, gasmen, hatchetmen and hacks,
then come councillors and counsellors, arson specialists in packs:
When their properties are void,
kids are bound to get annoyed;
they're left derelicked by circumstance, underrated, unemployed.
So they take some brownfield site,
set it blazing in the night,
then they merry-make and celebrate and watch their world ignite.
It's a Molotov of Moloch, Agni's message from on high,
it's beneficent, malignant, an oblation to the sky;
showing man's force over nature, it's his progressential tool
to alight upon inventions, increase energy, control.
It's creation's scared spark,
slash-and-burn, release from dark,
it's the centre of discussion or a throwaway remark.
So our ashes we bestrew,
hoping fresh growth will burst through,
after firing out our final flare to beckon in the new.
If we pan along that terrace, one of fifty fishbone streets,
to the ruin on the corner, windows sealed with metal sheets.
You could buy it up with plastic, if you cared to take the risk;
but the shadow boys with matches, they're out looking for a frisk.
Leslie Ray
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