Welcome To Our Website

We are a friendly local poetry group that meets on

the third Sunday of each month to read our own

poetry, listen to others’ poetry and talk about poetry.

Meetings take place on the third Sunday afternoon of

the month starting at 2.00 o'clock and finishing at

approximately 5.15. In December we meet on the

second Sunday.

They are held in the library of Orley

Farm School, South Hill Avenue, Harrow, Middx.


The nearest tube station is South Harrow. There is no

access by car from the South Harrow end of South

Hill Avenue. Entrance to the library is by a door

round to the left of the building.


Fancy yourself as a poet?


Come and listen or read
your own verse. This local

poetry group started in 1992. Visitors £3.00.

For further details and before coming telephone

0208 864 3149.



Below we will be placing some of our latest verse as tasters.

Monday 18 April 2011

One Man's Music

is another man's
noise
the beat throbs
through my head
ache
decibels blast
through my brain
drains
thought that withers
as feeling numbs
drums
against eyes closed
to block the pain
in vain
to shut out the
pounding sound
drowns
all while fans
jig and sway
swept away
sing and scream
a din, what a sin
to call it music.

© Sylvia Goodman

Soundtrack

The edit plus strings
Perform a sleight of hand
Upon your mind.
You think you've seen
Nude Janet Leigh
Slashed a dozen times;
Slow it down and look again
It's Hitch deceiving us once more.
Scorsese pulls a different trick in
'Raging Bull'; Mascagni
Finds beauty in violence,
La Motta smacks seven shades of
slow –mo black and white
from his opponent ,
and we watch wrapped
at the fling and flail of blood.

In the dark of cinemas
I try to find a soundtrack of my own.
Play the tapes again
with the sound turned down.
I leave; blinking in the light,
Ennio Morricone strikes up.
Nothing is as it seems,
and the horror is hypnotic.

N.Elder 2011.

Shanklin Chine

The tide line wallows
Trembles, hustles
Jumping terns
Dab their aerial feet
Into a ready-mix of
Old sand castles
and BC life.
Seaweed everywhere
Like wigs on big heads
Resurfacing after a heavy night
with Neptune
at the Atlantis Highway bar.

Jerry Pike

From A Chair By The Window

Thanks be that i am gifter with a garden
that's deciduous, alive with growth
and change, not stiff with static evergreens
but seasonally varying. These trees
ecah day present afresh aas tenements
for busy birds, as quick with leaf and hue,
and underfoot, from snow to crocus,
petalled earth to acorns, leaves then snow again.
This moving and maturing scene unfolds
the years, though imperceptibly, as sure
and certainly as aging ticks the tiny
seconds till a million minutes mount
up incrementally and finally
I find they've moved the present to the past.

Dorothy Pope

Hiatus

The threading pattern of the china beads
along the necklace friends have brought me back
from China is disrupted and this leads
me to imagine why, and who lost track.

Instead of long and round alternately,
at one point, I've two round beads wrongly placed
together and I fancy I can see
how this arose. Two girls, best friends, sweet faced,

work side by side at threading beads by hand.
Sometimes, they liven the monotony
by whispering a confidence behind
their hands like schoolgirls at illicit glee,

then work, still giggling spasmodically,
and having lost the rhythm they had had.
Their heads-together break has given me
a necklace with a flaw. And I am glad.

Dorothy Pope

Entropy

In junior school there was a book
that showed legionnaires
filing onto ships for their return to Rome,
deserting us to save their own far away homes.
I saw myself as the boy in the foreground
anxiously watching their departure.
We knew the story: Saxon and Angle raids
to destroy every treasured thing,
probably mixed them up with the Vikings
maiming and burning and raping,
to leave nothing safe or the same.

Now I repeatedly ponder and worry
about the galaxies spinning apart
and the gradual extinction of stars:
that dissolving of structure and order
by the simple arrow built into all things.
By then, of course, there will be no one to see
all the light slowly snuffed out,
no one to say at the end
that enough has been enough.


Peter Keeble

Toy Box

Looking down
Into the square of a toy box
I see yesterday’s playthings
Chipped and smashed.
Things that brought smiles
Just an arms stretch back
Bright coloured planes
And cars, stirred up
Like suds swished in a sink
Then drained.
I can’t touch them
Too far away
For a foreigner
So I’ll close the lid
To close my eyes
And dream another child of god
Will look in
And stack the building blocks
Back up
To the sky

Jerry Pike

Ghosts

Words
are my trade.

They build bridges of thought
and house dreams
to sublet.

They dig up old ground
like a sharpened spade,
turning it over
to catch the light
and let the birds
take the worms.

They can colour a palette
or pitch a tune,
they can pick out a pathway to heaven.

They are sturdy bags
carrying emotion
to tip into another’s
chest.

They are not ephemera,
chance remarks
cast on the breeze
that will blow them away.

They stay,
vibrations in the air,
ghosts peopling inner rooms
that replay old scripts,
roosting
not laid to rest.

©Jane Upchurch
www.janeupchurch.co.uk