Keep Poems Alive International

I don’t need to tell anyone that here in the UK we are reeling in the midst of political upheaval. But life has to carry on, and poetry with it.

These are poems conceived in the past, but human concerns don’t change with political storms. We walk in a landscape of present and past with Maureen Weldon. We imagine a recluse’s garden with Angela Topping on Emily Dickinson. Then back comes the grip of panic, confusion and loss of all sense of place or connection, with Gary Beck’s Pilgrim.

So we look for consolation to another poet from our tradition, Dylan Thomas. John Yates walks round Laugharne and discovers that even the larger than life Dylan Thomas has gone.

Hard times, my friends. Keep writing, keep going, with whatever it is that makes any sense to you.

Contributions to Keep Poems Alive may be sent via email to sallyevans 35 at gmail dot com. Poems first published at least three years ago, please, and they must be your copyright. Other languages than English are welcome with your own translation. Associated photos are optional.

Maureen Weldon
Rhydymwyn

Yesterday was a walking day,
in a Welsh Valley – whispers
past an ice age.
‘Invited guests only,’ we were told.
Like sharing dreams
we wandered to the wetland,
where teasel flowers live:
nesting boxes for sand martins:
big sandy cylinders on poles;
a sort of porch, an extension on the edge.

Yesterday was a walking day,
in the Welsh Valley.
Many things happened:
‘hush, hush’ World War Two:
the making of mustard gas,
bombs, and the nearly splitting of the atom.
Hush, hush bats live there now
in the high tower laboratory.

Yesterday was a walking day,
in that Welsh Valley.
It was Autumn.
being so old, yet young,
the sun dipped and dyed
colours on the trees. Wind
made a slight rustle around a sleeping Ash.

Published in Crannóg issue23, Spring 2010, The Chester Poets Anthology, Habitats of the Mind 2010, and Poetry Space 2014.

Angela Topping
A Garden for Emily Dickinson

There’s a bird on the walk.
The flowers are all white:
white roses, white lilies,
white blossom on the trees.

The small lawn is trimmed
precisely within an inch
of its roots. The path shines,
a parting finely dividing hair.

A frog is croaking ‘nobody’.
A line of white dresses wafts
decorously, showing no sign
that last night was a wild one.

 First published in Paper Patterns, Lapwing 2012

Gary Beck
Pilgrim

Leaving my land, place, roots,
another strange American
dazed with hungers,
breakfast cereal anticipations
for change, glory, just enough lust
to risk Moloch-belly flames
licking fire at asbestos bones,
spinning and circling a torturous orbit
returning me to beginnings,
stubborn, ruthless, orphan greedy,
playing no more rhymes on my toes, Granpa,
past twiddling, caring about rag clad dreams,
leaving me shivering for survival
from frostbite of vindictive atoms
unseen in the bustling commotion
in the churning harbor of unrest.

First published in Pigeon Bike, 2011

 

John Yates
Dyfed

We strolled around Laugharne slow paced,
the ghost of Dylan Thomas
guiding us along the way, or maybe
it was the sound the wind whistling.

We reached his garage, took a breather.
I recall its small size, green paint wood
overlooking the extensive estuary.

A picture taken we marched on
to Seaview his home
now a place of historical interest.
I smoked cigs under duress from staff
and imagined what was here
and has now gone.

 

The shabby underbelly of vengeance

Somebody buys gloves in New York. LS Bassen leaves us wondering why.  In Gary Beck’s Heartbreak, somebody wakes in the night, separated from a loved one. Panic ensues.

A shot fox (not for the squeamish), is replaced in the nature of things by another live fox, from the pen of Lesley Quayle.  These poems are followed by a child’s memories of a wartime train in 1943, memories that live in the poem by Maureen Weldon.

Finally, a touching elegy by Bob Mackenzie.

All these are fine poems, for  which we thank their international authors gratefully. To send poems,  just hunt about this site. You will find instructions in some of the posts

L S Bassen
Gloves

1

In New York City the wide avenues
keep all the light to themselves;
cross streets catch what sun they can
to illuminate the windows of small
stores where you can learn
all there is to know
about one item at a time.

2

They weren’t even a pair of gloves the girl had left behind.
One was stretched over a mannequin’s hand, the other clasped
within its plaster grasp like a lady at a garden party,
about to make acquaintance, about to be enchantee,
about to be so glad to meet you.

3

They were white kid, the kind
his mother used to wear and touch
his face in the sun before entering
a restaurant. She’d kept them wrapped
in tissue in her bureau drawer, flattened
by a velvet box that held her pearls.
Bottles of perfume breathed her many moods
on the glass-topped bedroom bureau.

4

The girl had never actually worn such gloves,
probably wouldn’t buy them,
certainly not here out of the sun.
Snakes, he thought, yearly shed their skin,
and every seven years we also seal
our surfaces anew. He stood
pressing forehead to cool, shaded glass,
asking himself, Where was she?
All the hands in the window waved goodbye.

5

He went into the store
and bought the gloves,
size seven. Lucky seven.

First published Stepawaymagazine.com, 2013

Gary Beck
Heartbreak

I awakened in the middle of the night
turned to you for warmth
because the sheets were cold,
you weren’t there.
I called your name….
I screamed your name.
Anguish filled me.
I remembered.
You lay in another bed
eyes shut to the light,
ears shut to the sound,
heart shut to me.
I ran
crying madly
into the midnight neon of the streets
past the hungry eyes of brooding Somalis
into the carnage of Central Park
past the clacking lips of lisping vultures
until I reached your house.
I stood beneath your window,
I called your name…
I screamed your name….
You did not answer.
I put my love into an envelope
and left it in your mailbox,
a dead letter.

Abandoned Towers Magazine, 2010.
part of the collection Rude Awakwnings

Lesley Quayle
Foxes

A new fox has come.
The last one lingered long after
a righteous but ill-placed bullet.
Our case was airtight, forty chickens,
fifteen ducks, one ancient goose.

We had glimpses now and then,
noticed blood spots over frosty pasture,
but vengeance rose up hard in us.
We gave no quarter –  but quietly glad
we hadn’t owned the trigger finger, lazy eye.

I found him in a cleaned out coop,
skin and bone, like a sack of knives,
his mangy corpse already flyblown.
Here is the shabby underbelly of vengeance,
this crawling picnic of flesh.

We buried him, opened up the same pit
where his victims were piled and dropped him in.
The mound’s still fresh, humped up, the soil exposed
like an unpicked scab.  And now, for lambing time,
a new fox has come.

 

(First published (2009) in Pennine Platform and The Spectator also in my chapbook Songs For Lesser Gods – erbacce press)      

Maureen Weldon
UK : 1943

They sat in the train – mother and small daughter,
the daughter a tiny child.
And all the soldiers, chattering, smoking, laughing.

How comfy the child was, how comfy and safe,
she hummed a safe tune, her ear pressed just below
the window – so she could hear a choir.

This was the night-train. They
were to spend time with her father;
brave soldier – on leave.

But for this night in 1943, the train sat, delayed –
delayed for a long, long time. Hiding –
hiding from jerry bombs, she heard them say.

And the black blinds on every window –
pulled down. And everyone whispering, while she
the tiny child sat safely on her mother’s knee.

Until, chu chu, chu chu, chu chu … the music
of the train. In the morning light, she watched
the high smoke, like a long lamb’s tail, puffing past.

First published by Poetry Scotland 2011. Published in Through A Child’s Eyes, Poems From World War Two Anthology 2013

 

Bob MacKenzie
*The Prairie Wind*
                    for C. H. Burton

If only you had known how,
being so easy to know
in life,
how hard to write about
after,
you would be.

You,
having known something of this and something of that
and, yes, something of almost everything.
You,
with your need to know what was beyond that door,
with your fear of what you knew was waiting there.
This was the tension,
this was the basis of all our love,
the Fire, the need that even as it consumes
burns as beautiful as a Phoenix until,
finally,
having known something of Earth and something of Air
and something of Sea, and yes, of Fire,
you chose to pass through yet another shining door.

I always thought of you as a sailor,
sailing the sky, high on a prairie gull.

written circa 1970
published: The Tower, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
Spring ‘75. Souldust and Pearls (OCTE Ontario Poetry Anthology),
St. Catharines, Canada,1981

 

It Must be the Heat

 

It must be the heat, our imaginations are playing up. These poems were written long ago but it’s now that we see them, notice them, now that people send them in. Angela Topping imagines her perfect refuge, and the illustration is her own painting of a garden which she did while at Lumb Bank. Perhaps it is her ideal garden beside the beach hut.

Sarah Watkinson sent one of the oddest of sonnets, complete with a scientific citation: Dacke, M., Baird, E., Byrne, M., Scholtz, Clarke H., and Warrant, Eric J. (2012) Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation, Current Biology. You can just imagine the dung beetles creeping out in a hot night after the sun has gone, guided by all those stars.

Then comes the longest poem this week, by LS Bassen. I don’t entirely understand it but wow. Hard to tell whether it’s a story, a wish, a dream, an analysis: certainly it fits our heated, imaginative, linguistically extravagant scenario this week. Thanks to these poets whose work we are happy to keep on keeping alive.

Disasters happen to all editors and they are maybe easier put right with the internet. Inadvertently on both our parts, the poet’s and mainly my own, we were including not a previously published poem but one that had just been written last week. Rules are meant for breaking but the rule couldnt be broken in this case. So I am breaking at least two rules of this site by substititing another summer poem I have just last week written myself. It must be the heat.

 

Angela Topping
Wish List for a Beach Hut

A raven’s feather and a seagull’s cry,
a speckled pebble found that morning
a piece of blue glass smoothed by the sea
keeping me company at my desk.

A creaking wicker chair, draped
with knitted blanket, soothing
as in the scrubbed morning light
words appear in my notebook.

On the wooden shelf in painted tins
is the last day I spent with my poet friend,
a 1959 cycle ride with my father,
the first day I held each daughter in my arms.

The teapot is never empty. Hot dark tea
in a striped mug warms against salt breeze.
My guitar leans in the corner waiting
until the poem is found.

From the author’s 2012 Lapwing book, Paper Patterns. Painting by the author

Sarah Watkinson
Dung Beetles Navigate by Starlight    

I track my treasure home on star beams, hide
my finds in caverns, steer them clean away,
before I’m stranded in the clueless day
with all my musky gleanings dull and dried.
Straightness is all. The constellations guide
my angled legs. The facets of each eye
lock on to glimmers, sensed how? Who can say?
The system works for me. I’m satisfied.

I know those lines of light shine down for me,
the dung deposited on dewy ground,
a providence. Through moonless dark I see
in multiple dimensions, beacons round,
and every blessed night miraculously
precipitates new turds for me to find.

Highly commended in the Norwich Writers’ Circle Open Poetry Competition, 2013, and published that April in the competition anthology. Due to appear in a Cinnamon Press book soon.

 

LS Bassen
Art in Search of America

Years after my young love left me, I knew I could no longer
live if I did not go in search of him. It was hard to leave
home with no hope of ever having him for my own. Rumors
in the north sent me south to seek for him on the beaches
of the Mexican Gulf. From Florida to Louisiana, I followed
the unmoving stars above us, both and all. The Mississippi
was yellow and slow. Oaks there wore rags of Spanish moss.
Whispers of his passage sent me west where hot desert
convulsed into mountains. I missed him on a mountaintop
in the Rockies, but his footprints were unmistakable
in the snow. When I came upon the Pacific, I was nearly
seduced by its windgnarled palisades.
                                                                            Had I come this far
on the memory of a youth, his arms hard as awe, eager
for my kisses, but shy of congress? Oregon was far away,
its rocks and ways oriental to the East Coast eye, and
my love had long before passed by. Columbia was a rapid
river and mighty. Clowns and acrobats rode its banks
on donkeys that brayed with delight. In a city in Minnesota,
I was sure to see him again. But I was too late and he
was gone. In the land of ten thousand lakes, on every island
I found immigrants who had come for political asylum.
In their native lands they’d been imprisoned for activities
against their governments. Some had even arrived as ghosts.
In the Minnesotan woods they shouted their blasphemies into
the deaf forests and yes, they recognized me from my
photographs. Chicago and St. Louis were urban centers
where loud music came from portable stereos and I was
mistaken for the law. Was my hope of him I loved so,
unfounded, I wondered as I stumbled by an empty playground.
A fisherman gave me the dappled portrait of a rainbow
trout he’d caught to eat. Faces and voices like his
kept me going. One night I slept in a field in Gettysburg,
dreaming of wars past, present, and future.
                                                                                        In the dream,
I saw the siloes of Iowa change into those that hold most
terrible missiles. I saw my hands with others’ on a
barbed wire fence, but I couldn’t tell which side we were
on. I saw those siloes as the future site of wreathlaying
and speechgiving, America’s concentration camps…
…Awoke, startled and shaking, ashamed, and always sad
not to have dreamed of my lost love. A Vermont friend
I hadn’t seen for years, whose burned-down house had been
rebuilt, said my love had visited without speaking of me.
I returned home, sore and unsure of welcome. My son
was playing the piano as one daughter sang and the other
danced. I am not emptyhanded though emptyhearted.
Before I sleep I tell myself, I may yet dream once more…
If he loved me truly even once, he may come to me again.

First published in Elohi Gadougi Journal, Oregon, 2013

Sally Evans
Haibun: A Poem on my Face

So hot in the middle of the day that one pauses instinctively and seeks out cool hiding places as the cats do under the bushes in green courtyards beside the street. Trees continue to thrive, their roots deep under paving stones. Travellers book their trips in advance, unable to take account of the weather that will confront them when they arrive: mixed, or rainy, chilly, foggy, clear, sunny. Only intense baking heat can be ruled out, and this has prevailed today and the whole of the week, unrelenting, unswayed by breeze or movement. Nightwear or swimwear has been brought into use for the day. City businessmen in unbecoming shorts, their pale chests bare in the sun, Stetsons on their unaccustomed heads, ugly sandals whose obvious home is the bottom of some ancient suitcase. Or women in loose cotton garments which seem to hide nothing, garish colours more suited to disco nights, bashful tattoos in the places they shouldn’t expose, but can’t help doing in this blazing, demanding sun.
    And when the sun goes the heat grows even sultrier, tense as a firmament preparing for a thunderstorm. Which does not come.

                    dozing in the heat –
                    wrote a poem on my face
                    with your fountain pen.

 

 

Keep Poems Alive International

ou

Two scenes of urban confusion, and two moons: the Seventh Moon for the salmon fishing in Canada, and the Harvest Moon in Wales – indeed in Welsh, with an English translation by the author. The poets are Tony Lewis-Jones, Judith Taylor, Margaret Gillies Brown and Evan John Jones. The season is mostly summer and the weather warm. Although there are economic stresses in the first poem and puzzlement over council craziness in the second, the other two poems turn to the moons for knowledge, mythology and comfort.
Thanks everyone and we’d like Your poems, from anywhere in the world, next time. They don’t even have to be in English if you can provide your own translations.
Make sure all work is your copyright.
(email to sally evans 35 at gmail dot com)

 

Tony Lewis-Jones
Solidarity Sweetheart

‘Say not the struggle naught availeth…’
Living on £10 a day,
Scratching around for work –
While the rich, for all their comforts,
Have their own issues also  –
All that money is a burden on the rising soul.

We are apart, but close
In a way that I don’t really understand –
A couple of lines on the email will conjure you,
Genie-like, into my life.
If only all problems were solved so easily,
As the picket-lines form again –

And bitterness and pain are our inheritance –
Still there is no breakthrough, no advance.

 

First published on The Writer’s Cafe website, 2013.

 

Judith Taylor
Scatter

Even the Council
tries to teach me moral lessons,
planting tulips in window-boxes
high on the side of the Hall.

Yeah, yeah, I know: look up.
Look at the sky between the buildings,
not the pavements leading me back to work.

The tulips opened above my head.
I never saw them.
One night at the end of their lives
stripped them, and I walked to town

next morning on a carpet of petals:
bruised crimson, streaked and dirtied gold.

From the author’s first pamphlet, Earthlight (Aberdeen: Koo Press 2006)

 

Margaret Gillies Brown
The Knowledge

“The early runs are there on the seventh moon.”
The line aspires to greatness
penned by some poet
but this factual talk of fishermen
describes one aspect
of a particular breed of salmon.
It’s all to do with moons – full moons.
All salmon make major moves on them.
If the first moon of the year is early
the runs will be early.

Sockeye of the Fraser river,
that grow through the Blackfish Sound,
salmon like no other,
are red transcendence on the full moon tides
of the seventh moon – always.

After fifty years of
waiting,
watching,
fishing,
this is the knowledge.

first published Poetry Scotland n0 31

 

Evan John Jones
Lleuad Fedi

Lleuad Fedi, naw nos olau,
Tylwyth Teg ar hyd y cloddiau,
ninnau’n ifanc a dibryder
efo’n dyddiau i gyd o’n blaenau.

Leuad Fedi uwch ein heinioes,
Hydref wedi cyrraedd eisioes;
dim ond Gaeaf sydd i ddilyn
a gweld colli ffrindiau cyfoes.

Author’s Translation:
Harvest Moon, nine nights of daylight,
Fairies dancing in our campsite,
and we.so young an full of fun,
with all our living to be done.

Harvest Moon, still there above us,
Autumn’s here and days are parlous,
Winter’s coming and not much fun,
rememb’ring friends who have moved on.

First published in Poetry Cornwall No. 37, then in
The Triumph of Love  Cestrian Press 2014.