From the broadcast on 21st December...
The readers were:
Introduction by John Rety
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Peter Howard
Learning to Fly
Childhood kites were either all
tissue-paper and glue, collapsing like
Victorians at the first puff of wind,
or serious macho fabric that should have
worn sideboards and handlebar moustaches.
They wouldn't break, but disdained anything
less than a strong gale. If ever one got
airborne at all, it would, without warning
fall out of the sky and have to be winched,
ignominious as a stretcher case.
There was one, I'd sooner forget, I in-
expertly made to my own design, threw
hopefully out of my midnight window...
(Crashed. Mistaken for burglars. Hot water.)
And then, five years ago, one windy day,
we impulse-bought a kite and watched it rise
above the beach. Higher, as I paid out
more string, which slipped between our fingers when
I tried to hand it to you. Then a chase
to find it broken in a back garden.
We put it in the summer-house. Someone
once tried to untie all the knots, but failed.
Today's kite was fibreglass and plastic.
A breath of wind - it leaped and rode the air
like a bird, restrained by two control lines.
We each took one: together held it there
tracking the sky. This is the only kite
I've known come back from its first flight intact.
© Peter Howard
The Last Science Lecture
Electricity is a thin blue liquid, faintly luminous,
concentrated in lightning, as anybody knows.
Heat is a sticky jam, attracting wasps,
warping vision, magnifying noise and smell.
Gravity is the overprotective mother
of all maternal instincts.
Space is indelible ink, staining a star-pricked cloth;
flight, therefore, is clearly impossible.
No-one is going to tell me
that the preferred state of string
is not to be knotted, or that,
with a microscope balanced
on the chimney stack you can't see threads
of TV pictures being sucked in.
Briefly, for we have little time left:
fire is a primitive form of life,
cold is an animal with many teeth,
magnetism is the politics of demons,
lead occurs naturally in rice pudding,
and gold melts in your mouth like butterscotch.
Finally, I would remind you that
guineas fall faster than feathers,
and always have done.
© Peter Howard
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Leah Fritz
Pilgrims and Indians
(i.m. John F. Kennedy)
And he provided coffee on the lawn
to warm us when in snowed in Washington;
when, peaceful through an all-night vigil, we
protested war, but missed the irony.
They kept us going through the unjust war.
They needed us, the perfect stand-ins for
people who lived ten-thousand miles away
who nobody knew half well enough to hate.
They hated us, all right---pampered in-
tellectuals, ungrateful citizens
who flouted the police and dressed in rags
to shout obscenities and burn the flag.
Unthinkable, the notion that we could
encourage evil, intending to do good;
to wonder whether, had we not protested,
the horror might, earlier, have ended.
The media focused flashbulbs on the worst
and most outrageous revellers, of course:
sons with their own agendas who resisted
deadly futures minding Daddy's business.
Not wanting to be merchant murderers,
they looked upon the business that is war
as mad extensions of the enterprise
their fathers plodded at, which they despised.
That we had coffee on his lawn, as if
it were an ordinary night, and this
our own backyard. That he was there, alive.
And surely it's American to contrive...
Stoic mothers, children in the way
of nightsticks, Nobel Laureates who prayed,
aging veterans of other wars
the tabloids found it easy to ignore,
for journalism is competitive
and human interest photos edited.
In the reflecting pool, intrepid nudes
made shots their cameras could not refuse.
...democracy from myths we're fed at school:
Pilgrims and Indians harvesting the fruits
of peace they planted in the spring together
to feast on at the first Thanksgiving dinner
Nightly we watched the burning of Vietnam.
It froze our souls. Some thought themselves so damned
they could not, living still, endure the guilet
and set their own hell-fires to end the chill.
These immolations made front pages, too.
We had our martyrs now, their ashes strewn
across the White House lawn to swirl away
with newspapers and leaves, one windy day.
as though it were an ordinary night
and this our own backyard, and he alive,
and everything that we had learned at school
(the Pilgrims and the Indians) were true.
© Leah Fritz
from The Way to Go, published February 1999
by Loxwood Stoneleigh.
Watching the Queen
(for Joyce Johnson)
The Queen had come to open the hospital,
down in the atrium. How very grand,
this moment out of time, as he lay still.
So strangely affecting, this ceremonial
...parched waves of breath ingurgitating sand...
The Queen had come to open the hospital,
ribbon stretched like birth's umbilical
in film reversed, scissors poised in hand---
this moment out of time, as he lays still,
you foraging for hope in tentacles
of ribbon scaling glass. Strike up the band!
The Queen had come to open the hospital,
a routine call, no powers magical
to conjure from her bag. She looked quite bland,
this moment out of time, as he lay still,
and you peered down through opaqued spectacles,
unseen, as heart and mind contract, expand.
The Queen had come to open the hospital,
this moment out of time: as he lay still.
© Leah Fritz
from The Way to Go, published February 1999
by Loxwood Stoneleigh.
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Chris Emery
Ingerland
Across the great cracked cities,
hormonal rivers, fields of lewd gold
saccharined with schemata
from the lab technician. Order and names,
chintz, beer, beef and kebabs, fags,
scrubland, scams and scabies, history as well,
the pitched ephemera of the building site,
the wired-off edges of the playing fields,
airstrips, barracks, boobs and mills,
weve come to horse around, to feel all slinky
in the crush of grins, the idle backwash and
foaming bust-up of some local news
of dogs and storms and clarifying councillors,
workers singed with frisky hopes and played,
each one, by irate toothless tattooed waifs.
Such fusty sense of old connivance,
cherished, chided, limned and stuffed:
England, blessd England, elected summer
noon of the rank and file, arcades, tyres,
Blues and Whites and good-for-nothing simpletons
and wasters, all begin leaving. Miners caulked
with dandruff, leaving. Teachers scrabbling
with conviction, leaving. Interfering priests
with affection for boys. Delegates and syndics
on antimacassars and ottomans of faded silk,
all leaving, jump to the left, all leaving,
jump to the right. As ports continue rusting
and the beatific counties glide through
articulated coastal plateaux to the dangly links
or shrinking cliffs where tourists have the squits.
Commissioners heave a sigh of relief
as the pebble-dashed, salt-demented
coastal resorts drone on with other kinds of ending.
And all the stinking red brick bishoprics
and business parks on dales and moors, the landfill
sites fuming with miserable accountants clearing
gutters and gardens, gulls on mountainous
waste, beer-filled sailmakers with prostate cancer,
the salt marsh commandant, petrol-widened
scally, spotty clerk and fat nurse all begin leaving,
as the ferries bolster the drunken recruits
and the penitent judge wheedles his whore
past the coal-besotted edges of a poisoned sea
and all thats left trembles with purity.
© Chris Emery
Zoning
Cruising the Avenue of the Temple of Assailable Gains,
theres no getting without owning. A datacop gleams
with chrome-tex as he ponders some skin job
on a neon sidewinder. The ratings are down, but his
kickbacks are pure juice since the judges perpetually
wallow in the argon cortex, crimson moirs
and polyps of the cloning tanks. One day hell shake
down enough New Yen to build a body swap and clear
out to the fatlands of Quertaro. On the Ramblas
a Seven Eleven is being pumped by some Yakuza
spanked on DZD. Theyre popping cocaine wuntuns
while zoning the debtors with Khazak Glocks.
Its all-new-guardian time again, but its nipped in the bud
by some homeboy Cleaners with xenon grenades.
Elsewhere on Liberty Day the apparatchiks
tour on mid-term primaries, no one confesses,
but the byte-doctors keep the news arcing for
a mega-spun Comdex poll: are the Curb Laws biting
enough? At the Whitehouse, tattooed Clones want the vote
and play cyberclips of the up-town seizures and rent fucks.
The graft business ropes a few squatters for a buck a limb.
New fissures in the SatLink are marking down the Nasdaq
by a quarter of one percent and brokers with thermal lances
fend off nano-raids to sink each deal, nosing for a fat one.
Ninety floors down, the Apprentices score whores
and shoot tipsters for laughs, waiting for the shift break,
as hackers come down to CityDeck to blast a few
hours on the Matrix. Its all styrofoam and chopsticks
in the steel grids and carbon backwash of the sushi parlours,
sweating with guanine, the losers blocked with dex
in the karaoke pots. One or two StatBars blare out
the uptime indices, and put the skids on the digital
come-ons feathering the geisha screens in the sleepless
grind of the megacorps. All life is streaming Id say,
the ciudad is fine and the markets never close.
© Chris Emery
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Janet Simon
The Universe is Glass
"Do not be surprised that you have sometimes gone bleeding along the road. The Universe is glass.
Your path is strewn with shards which the light kindles into a hundred borrowed colours."
Edmond Jabes
A fat man and a tiny woman
edge towards the curb.
They stop at the lights, lopsided.
Her head leans to the hollow of his palm.
He strokes her thin, soft hair.
Its fine strands slide
through his thick fingers.
The cars stop. He leads her
out into the middle of the road.
The lights change. She stumbles into him.
A dampness stings the corners of his eyes.
The lights - red, amber, green,
squint, merge and kindle
in the glistening of his tears.
The traffic is indifferent.
A drunk in a crumpled coat
lines up seven empty cans
of beer, salutes their royal blue,
produces an outsize bottle of cider
from his cavernous pocket,
and slithers down into the pavement
the better to drink it in.
Between glugs, he tries to see himself
in the reflection of his bleary jug
and catches a glimmer of something
which was once shimmering,
grinning at him
from the brownness
of a fading mirror.
A skinny boy in skin-tight leather
preens himself under a winking sun
that catches the silver of his rings.
They shine like shards in his ears,
his nose, and on his tongue.
They sparkle at a scaffolder,
at his shaven head,
at his mauve tattoos,
at his swollen biceps.
From ground to window
eye-beams cross, devour eachother,
but dare not touch.
A secret, splintered smile,
twinkles from mouth to mouth.
A mother, straining her neck
against the clock,
drags a reluctant child
as if she might tear
its arm clean from its socket.
The little girl looks back
behind her at her other arm
which trails a rainbow string.
Lost in its borrowed brilliances,
she is anaesthetized against
the frantic pull of black and white.
The clock blinks
on the opposite wall.
It ticks away too quickly,
its glass face cracked,
about to shatter,
like the face of a harassed mother
racing against time,
while her loose-limbed daughter
plays with light and colour.
© Janet Simon
Act of God
Because your tears rolled off the pavement,
flooding the High Street, Eastenders
rowed tall ships from Whitechapel
to the Bloody Tower. Stepney Green
became the Venice of my downtown childhood.
Its citizens forgot where curbsides ended.
Some of them bought gondolas and learnt to sing.
Even when your sobs subsided, The Mile End Waste
was still a river. Its stallholders complained
about the salt which got in everywhere
and spoiled their soiled seconds.
All hands manned the pumps.
It might have been the Blitz again
with all that spirit, except that
your invading force was less aggressive.
We two perched like penguins who no longer knew
how to belly flop into the Ocean Estate.
Stranded on the top step of our terraced slum,
earmarked for clearance, we grabbed at sides
not knowing whose to hold, which part was wing,
or where our hearts were.
Weakness made me reckless.
I put my fat arm round your bony shoulder
and discovered that you did not flinch.
As I hugged your washed-out soul towards me,
Ernest Street dried up and Beaumont Square
revealed a last remaining puddle,
a hand-sized peardrop of a final tear.
The Red Sea parted and the Israelites
drove through in Ford Prefects and Populars
to Limehouse. Dan O'Connor put fresh bunting out
for our year's First Communion Parade
and Manny Cohen danced a brave Gazutska
from the Wailing Wall to Gardeners' Corner.
But all we did was feel our clinging energy
oozing like loosened mud between us.
We had no need of further celebration.
Corpus Christi
Note - The 'Wailing Wall' referred to is not only the one in Jerusalem,
but the façade of the Tailors and Garment Workers Union, which used to be on Whitechapel High
Street. It had such a curious name because Jewish tailoring workers met outside this building
on Saturday afternoons to 'wail' about their trade.
© Janet Simon
from Victoria Park published 1995
by Loxwood-Stoneleigh
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Rosemary Norman
War Games
I ought never
to have let him have them; who knows
what dangerous little bits and pieces
he might swallow?
Too late: a battalion of
two-inch heroes is swarming the sofa.
His hand
guides the great, grey tank,
his throat rumbles,
his milk teeth spit out bullets.
To comfort, he explains
caterpillar wheels are designed for safety
on treacherous ground.
Those villains he hid
under a rocky cushion are flushed out
and fall, to a man, over the
cliff to the hearthrug
where they drown, and are eaten by sharks.
Now, here comes a helicopter, theatening
to defoliate the Busy Lizzie.
But he keeps his best bomb
at the bottom of the box: a deterrent
that works, just like the real one.
Pink cheeks, bright eyes;
I expect
tears before bedtime.
© Rosemary Norman
published in "Grand Children of Albion" 1992
Grandmother is a Crab
Grandmother is a crab, crook-legged
on eight high-heeled shoes.
I am too quick for her. She limps off
but only as far as she must,
leaving her scratch in the sand.
Then back she comes
in another uncomfortable colour,
to bluster and snap at my bare toes.
Grandmother's pool burns green
and shrunken at low tide. The sun
sucks half her water up. What's left
is crusty at the rim
and so salt it hurts her.
Her eyes are red. She crackles.
But night and the underside of the sea
roll in for her, like cold blankets.
Grandmother says she can dance
and not stop knitting. With a click
of leg-needles, she lifts off
into the oxygen blue,
scattering pretty new things.
I bite my lip and taste
Grandmother's gritty crab-seeds,
caught in my loose carapace of hair.
© Rosemary Norman
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Richard McKane
Russian Christmas
For Boris Pasternak
Mary sleeps deep.
The myth's rhythm and birth
at Bethlehem.
Broth from the inn. A moth -
death's head.
The thread,
Biblical, umbilical,
is twined and will unwind
from stable to the inevitable
cross. Crossed destinies,
as complex as twisted sheeps' intestines.
Shepherds whistle to keep out the cold.
Snow leopards' tracks are as old
as the fresh drift or the cradled
baby, sniffling flesh swaddled
in swathing bands.
These are things no one will understand,
not even the magi plunging through deep snow
to hear the plangent cries,
nor even the angels singing
in the clear starstrewn skies:
but both the Father and the Mother of the child,
and God who saw and blessed the deed.
© Richard McKane
(Two poems for which transcripts are not available)
Arithmetic
from the Turkish of Can Yucel
One Turk is worth the whole world, is a saying of Atatürk.
Leaving aside the distant and recent past,
but considering the events lately
in Shebinkarahisar and Gaziantep:
that is, if what the papers say is true _
some Turks have been tortured,
for whatever reason,
they were hanged from the ceiling by their feet,
were subjected to electric shocks here and there, etc.
So I repeat, that is, if the news is true,
and if as a nation we take to heart this statement
that one Turk is worth the whole world:
we _ I mean some of us
and we can't tell how many _
by torturing some of us
have committed a crime against humanity, against
many worlds _
nobody knows how many _
and against so many worlds beyond this life.
Translated by Esra Nilgün Mirze and Richard McKane
from Poet for Poet, published by Hearing Eye
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Julian Duffus
(Transcript not available.)
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John Haywood
Ken for Mayor
They say that Tony Blair
Won't have Ken for mayor.
There is a story
He'd prefer a Tory.
He'd become a marcher
For Jeffrey Archer.
He's deploying men
To stop our Ken.
"Britain's a mess
With this leftyness.
We'll be hale and hearty
With a Democratic Party.
People are fine
Who toe the line.
I want no dissent
From the man of Brent."
In London, the people say,
"We need a better way.
A most important question
Is our terrible traffic congestion.
We need a good solution
To the problem of air pollution.
A lot of us are poor
While the rich are getting more.
The racists are quite content
While a lot of the coppers are bent.
The factories are closing
While the Chancellor is dozing.
Thatcher with hateful glee
Closed down the GLC.
We weren't very happy then,
And so we want our Ken".
So Ken, what will you do?
"I'll give more access to the zoo.
I'll set aside left/right disputes
And build a sanctuary for the newts.
I'll modernise the underground
With City money (it can be found).
A few mph the buses will gain
If we kick the cars out of their lane.
Manufacturing will come back
If we take a different tack.
The entrepreneurs can't wait
For us to lower the interest rate.
Corrupt policemen will lose their defence,
I'll take from them the right to silence.
We'll have a lot of fun by half
And show we can both fight and laugh."
© John Haywood
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Adrian Green
Walking on the Estuary Hill
The curlew and the heron call,
the hissing mud and whispering wings
beat eery through the idle air
until the moonlit midnight silence falls
and then the tide flows softly
through the gut and sluice of estuary sands
and dark against the dreamlit sky
the trees arise from hedgerows,
and the hills
alive with monstrous shapes
are menacing with soundless fear,
and still below the blundering man,
the beery and uncertain head,
the stubbled fields hold secrets now
and silence fills the river bed.
© Adrian Green
(Previously published in Beachgame (Sol Publications)
and The Poets England - Essex)
This Fading of Summer
A line of distant music
imperfectly heard.
I strain at each note
and unaccountably remember
the autumn.
The seafront we wandered along
a wistful place and pale
in the afternoon sun,
arcades deserted
and flags hung limp
in the air stilled
between tides,
between lives.
A freighter waiting at the jetty
for the tide, mud
shining between shadows -
the angled and stranded yachts.
A couple hand-in-handing
along the promenade,
we laughed that afternoon,
shared lust for each other,
and we knew
this fading of summer
would be ignored
(if not forgotten)
as we left
the trivia of a season,
the wrappings of dreams
on the beach.
In your car
the same music
imperfectly heard
over the engine,
the year's turning -
our conversation drowned
in the rattles and bumps
of Marina Road.
© Adrian Green
(Previously published in the Southend Poetry series)
Mail Adrian
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Bernard Kops
(Transcript not available.)
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Philip Wells
(Transcript not available.)
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Dubravka Velasevic
The Olive Tree in the Heat of July Midday
(for Richard McKane )
A serpent-like tree
The trace of time carved on it
The emptiness of the ancient jars
The broken sound of amphora
Mocking the haze of a July midday
The lusty glances of the passers by
There stands
Like a scornful nymph
That gracious olive tree
© Dubravka Velasevic
Nirvana
(while looking at the drawing Head of a woman by Michelangelo)
I am sitting like Buddha
In the Empire of Sunlight
This silence is so diffuse
The invisible star-reader
Is whispering cosmic lies
I wish I were tonight
Just an unknown profile
Between lips and eyes
Trapped in colours
Like desire in the night
But
This is an ordinary evening
And the pictures are not descending in the darkness
© Dubravka Velasevic
Snow (Illusion)
On that side of the window
It has been snowing for days
On this side -
In a different world
Covered with snow I lie silent
The galaxies are standing between us
I am a daughter of the Sun
© Dubravka Velasevic
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John Rety
To my Mother
Once more I was in mother's arms
Dead she was and could not speak
She was a fading memory
Something separate and only in my head
And being a poet or at least
A possessor of the poetic mood
At times of great stress
She was called into my thoughts
But could not materialise.
No doubt she is still waiting there
Waiting to recompose.
Her picture does not keep still
She looks older in my head
Than when I last saw her
A bit like my grandmother.
I cannot keep them separate.
But as I was saying
At the time of the latest war
In despair I wrote a poem.
A bad, hysterical, vindictive piece
Written with tears and abandoning sense
And this is what I said.
© John Rety
The kitchen chair
Think of the kitchen chair
Then having thought,
Write down what you have thought.
Then having written down what you have thought
Think about the kitchen chair again.
Then having thought about it
Long enough
Ask yourself this question:
Has the kitchen chair changed
In your mind
Since you have written about it?
Read what you have written,
Then sit back and think
And having thought
Write it all down.
This will keep you ungainfully occupied
For the rest of your working life.
They will point you out at the Compendium:
"There goes the man who writes the kitchen chair poems.
Everybody thinks he is the new Maya Kovsky;
If you want my privatised opinion
I am sick and tired of his kitchen chairs -
Kitchen chairs this, kitchen chairs that,
Are there no other chairs in the world?
Chairs of this and Chairs of that, Boardroom chairs,
Chairs of Grants and non Grants,
Chairs bolted down at the DSS - He'll soon find out
And anyway if he wants to make a living out of his writing
There is more money in bedroom chairs".
Having heard all that, think again, write it all down.
Await no payment, no thanks, no fob watch of olden times.
Clear off and get out of the kitchen.
© John Rety
Perhaps
If you think there is nothing
then you have nothing to say
If you think there is something
then you have something to say
and if you think of honour
you will have something
honourable to say.
There were those people -
I'm talking of the past -
when there was still a choice
of occupation.
The word itself is an indication
as to the choice.
There were those whose occupation
was the occupation of territories
and there were those
whose occupation was work
small tasks slender hopes
in and on and for and with
their peopled land.
There was always a conflict
over the meaning of words
nobody ever agreed
except in groups of languages
certainly there were words in abundance
all those languages
each discussing the same
and each in their own language
nobody ever agreed
except in groups of languages.
So there was this word
occupation.
There were two languages
which misunderstood
each other's definition.
One said - right, I occupy,
let them work,
that's their lookout.
I'll take all their produce
by force or by hook
or by crook.
So some were forced
and some were crooked
and some were hooked.
The more abundance was produced
the more the occupiers took
the more the people worked
the more they got exploited.
Frequently they changed sides.
All because of a word with two meanings.
But even in those days
there were people
who were honourable.
Such a person, by what I hear,
was the poet Catullus who once
addressed Caesar
in the following lines:
Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere
nec scire utrum sis albus aut ater homo.
He had no desire to please Caesar
or wanted to know him at all.
© John Rety
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Postscript by John Rety
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