Two poems by Dorothy Pope

Published in The Spectator May 2020.

a great achievement

       Coronavirus Street

Only the early morning thief

quietly shovelling sand,

a midnight cheat

home from long drive,

med student and nurse

not volunteering

in the otherwise street

but the self-risked gifts

of food in the porch,

the faithful deliveries

of newspapers and fish

sustaining numbers

of phone calls, emails and post –

different play, same characters.

                 How Old

I am six and seventeen,

twenty-five and thirty-four,

and we all have to live

in this ugly, inconvenient house

but from upstairs,

you can see clear across

to Dartmoor

and the beaches beyond,

past the bomb damage

and the four old-fashioned schools.

In the foreground is the man

seated at his table in the window

reading the spread out

broadsheet version of The Times.

Intimations
     (at Finzi Window, Gloucester Cathedral)

Within that inner jewelled heart,
where all the colours gather back
into a whiteness of the soul,
I can reside complete and still –
between the words, inside the song –
at the essence of such beauty
and an inward sense of answer




© Anthony Pinching

& ante

What just denoted walking pace,
the leisured middle movement stroll, becomes –
with an exquisite error of transcription – the question:
“And before?” Nothing so simple as: “And then?”

To find a way into this mystery,
we could walk awhile, and then look back,
triangulate future and present
towards a not yet remembered past.

The sonata encompasses familiar patterns,
flowing and developing in its path –
but is this really “And before?”,
or just the prelude to a question?

& ante asks about the preconceptual moment
when the composer is imagined by the performer.


© Anthony Pinching

Published in:
‘Soundscapes – A Musician’s Journey through Life and Death,
by Paul Robertson. Faber & Faber, London 2016. pp. 221-2.

Dorothy Pope’s third book will be out in November 2016. 

Called 'A Mile of Kite String', 

it will cost £6 or £6 + £1.20 postage.

Get Yours Now!

A SPECIAL DAY

Imagine a city under siege:
it may be any such city
at any time
as long as old women
dressed in black
scuttle amid rubble.

Think how the miracle of relief might come:
soldiers advancing in a column;
raids from the air;
even pretended discovery
0f the fake relic of a saint.

Do they all see
how a slanting band of sunlight
pours from between two masses of slate dark cloud
to illuminate a distant tree up on the hill?

Any tree will do,
but shining out in that special way.


Peter Keeble

Restructuring

It was obvious he’d gone.

Twenty minutes later he emerged;

a year older (and an inch shorter),

for every minute he’d been before the boss.

Never seen a man so reduced.

He stood for an hour and stared at the car park.

Something had left him,

none of us knew what words to offer his shell.

Then Shivali asked if he’d still sort the Lottery

and Dave wondered if an office would be free.

The following week

hushed conversations stopped

whenever he came into the tea-room.

Might as well have rung a bell.

He’d eat alone, untouchable.

Then his desk was empty,

though  his screensaver still showed

a picture from the Christmas do;

dressed as an elf with Leanne on his knee,

he always liked a laugh.

Emails arrived with words like rationalise,

downturn and downsize.

It was like a damp we couldn’t stop from spreading

and it seeped from his department into ours.

Just now HR Jenny smiled at me;

my appointment ‘s Thursday, half-past three.

Neil Elder

At Last

Fairly well remembered

that final game for Stanley.

Boys spread out like

ducks across a floating pitch,

and me, under new rules

trying out my spec-less eyes

for blind spots.

Before kick-off,

the thirties brick changing room

reeked sweetly of

White Horse embrocation

and Fiery Jack

(chilli seeds ground into

rubbing-cream for

the grossly insane).

Today's ref, clogged up in

a starched Polaroid

of football through the years

read FA directive, 8liND,

for specs, I was no

longer allowed to play in.

Lens-less, I launched

myself frailly

like a fight in a blindfold,

a centre forward for once,

with no regard, and ostrich-like morals

as I could see nowt.

Second half we trampled

the over-wide pitch,

I picked up a short cross, Jesus,

and hammered toward goal,

forty yards out I blasted it,

under shock, it smashed the bar,

and jumped over.

almost my best ever goal.

But that final match

all seems a blur now.

Jerry Pike

Hear Harrow's Herga Poets Read Their Own Work.

https://soundcloud.com/tags/herga%20poets

October 9th 2014 WW1 Poetry Special by Herga Poets, at Harrow Arts Centre

Speak Your Mind

THURSDAY 9 OCTOBER 2014 7:30 PM - 10:30 PM 
THE STUDIO
£3.00
BUY TICKETS£1 BOOKING FEE PER TRANSACTION APPLIES

Words of War: Poetry of the First World War and Today

Featuring playwrights, novelists, storytellers, poets and more, HAC’s scratch night showcases the best of local writers and performers. All types of writing and spoken word are welcome, from poetry to rap and novels to plays. This evening is a special edition presented by Herga Poets to commemorate the First World War.

Herga Poets, Harrow's poetry group affiliated with the Poetry Society, has been running since 1992. Members critique each others work, which covers a broad range of styles and subject matter. Our programme on 9 October will combine our own work on the subject of war and peace with famous and not so famous poetry from the period of the First World War.

If you would like to perform at this or future events, contact Cate on 020 8416 8963 orcate.gordon@harrow.gov.uk

Find out more about Herga Poets on their website.  

Like My Daughter Says

If, like my daughter says,
you are now a million particles
orbiting in space,
may you keep on spinning.
Or else as I look out tonight,
I hope you fall like snow
and settle for a while.

Neil Elder

Louisa Bay Café

The blues merge

lose character

as faint-light tinsels

deep as damn 

into dusk-pools.

Day players,

fold salt-wet life back

inside striped canvas bags.

Parading gulls sulk,

their luminous screeches

jump out, brightly voiced

from nightfall's dirge.

A black and orange tug,

wakes by, checking,

dead shore

for the lifeless

and not so.

Sailboarders scoop

a sandpit fireplace,

slotting beach scrap

between tinder flames,

their barbecue group

enthused and vibrant,

patch a pirate's living,

to the fabric they hang on.

Two women's shell-likes,

eavesdrop the seaweed edge,

hearing distant cinema songs,

where the wrecks used to be.

They glaze over, unnoticed,

and the snack bar

crumples into nothing.

Jerry Pike

Betrayal

With your reassuring hum
I never thought you could be
arsonist or assassin.

You kept my food safe,
my drinks cool,
were a familiar friend.

It was only when I heard
how others like you
had caused fire and death

that I came to study you.
You continued humming
but I was no longer fooled.

A man came round
to change the condenser.
No short-circuit now!

We’re friends again.
I’ve almost forgotten
how nearly you killed me.

Jennifer Johnson

Published in Genius Floored: Uncurtained Window edited by Ruth O’Callaghan

Seasons

The procession of our seasons
carries us forward afresh, and
transfigures the dark and the grief.

The unfurling leaves of our spring
encode our own sure transience
in the cycle of creation.

The confidence of summer’s growth
allows a myth of permanence,
fuelling the cycles of our love.

Burnished, we prepare to transmute
this our flourishing, to free us
for the cycle of earth’s renewing.

For the seeming deaths in winter
are truly the transfigured lives -
resilient, transcendent, and ineffable

© Anthony Pinching

Coining It

A late March, along the pier
they group, too thin for weather,
all mod cons in gangs of old,
rubbing coppers the wrong way,
as static gambling drags their
carefree souls to sea level.
It slots you in, greases your palm
with spurious dollars,
a brief windfall energised by salt air
and your head screens guilt trailers.
You dig deep, finding the angry money,
you flick it dangerously with a backward spin.
The penny drops,
the penny pushes
and grips your small dreams tightly,
beside a teenage thump.

Jerry Pike

Fern Hill (After Dylan Thomas)

As I was young and uneasy far from the apple boughs,
About the silent house, unhappyas the streets were grey,
The sun above me cold and flat,
Life held me tight and sighing
Caught in the turmoil of my time,
And forgotten among commuters
I was lost in the timeless town
So when I sank to sleep
the farm peopled my dreams
Faded from colour to white
Down the rivers of the windfall night.
 And as I was dark and burdened,
alone among the stars,
Sitting in the school and listening
as the farm was born
In the poem that was young once more,
Time let me stretch and be
Golden in the mercy of his words,
And new and golden
I was loved and farmer, the fields
Rang to my touch,
the sunlight on the hills
shone clear and bold
And the spirit sang, glowing
In the ripples of the flowing streams.
All the day long it was humming,
it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as my home,
the sound of the swallow, it was free
And flying, food and water
And green as flame.
The sungrew round that very day.
Nothing I cared, in my sky blue daze,
that soil and mortar
In their dust and drying
and the cobwebs of dying things
Clung to the soles of my feet
Fir I sang in my chains like the sea.

 Jane Upchurch

DESPAIR

I used to think I knew the ways of verse,
and that I kissed its purposes and methods:
to amuse and entertain,
to admire, educate, describe and politicise,
to transform and to sustain
sometimes with just a simple list.
Then I read Terrier in rape
and despaired at my ignorance
and at how it gave no explanations
but held that mass of yellow smells
up to the dog within us all,
how seen from above by bees
it's only an atom's track immersed
within the yellow rape:
and how all this just is,
like the very universe.

Peter Keeble

The World's Gone Out

The World’s Gone Out.
 It stole my moleskin trilby
grabbed a beige Mack by the door
and scooted.
Leaving my dwelling
on the good times
of fourteen across,
pencilled in and near completion.
I sketched missing links on paper
got out of my brain
slid to the floor
and wandered about,
seeing things as they were
prodding past experiences into life,
and quizzing them
from my new freer perspective.
The world raced on,
and no one to stop me
I chased after it
sneaked through a window
and gazed back blurred
at a congealing mist
that crossed my essence,
as I ran moonward
Dancing unhindered,
empty as air
I smiled at the nothing I’d become.
Joking and talking to people
who couldn’t see me,
I bumped into another nobody
we hugged
the world stood still
and doffed my hat.

 Jerry Pike

Those Feet (With apologies to William Blake)

And did those feet, a lovely thought,
tread England's grasses sandal-shod
or is this mere idea, caught
in wishful thinking's web? He's trod

the walkways of the mind of man
world-wide for centuries and so
to want him here in Avalon
is natural but can we know?

The facts add up and there are years
of His life unaccounted for.
A thorn tree for his crown of tears
is rooted on this English shore.

The rational remain aloof.
"It's possible," our minds admit,
"though only that for lack of proof,"
Yet instinct clamours, "I know it."

Dorothy Pope

Holiday

The sun is a bowl
holding heat on my skin
like love,
soaking into my bones,
into my mood
like balm.

My knots unravel,
my pressures melt away.

I am butter, oozing.
I am apple pie,
peeled and baked and brown.

I have brought all of me
on holiday,
my toes, my tears, my ears,
the whole package
so we can each unwind.

This is meditation,
my mind not chasing plans,
past and future folded away,
just the glorious, sun-filled
present.


©Jane Upchurch

Record Shop

The hallowed deck
warmly rubbered
span to life
its beating art
sent thumping
into wood box speakers
watt-filled copper cables
topping up the shop's life
causing people to nod
rhythmically
to kick and snare
exploding mid range
Tannoys
and herding bass lines
route one
through the rib cage.

Jerry Pike