1.
I’ll be running a Poetry Breakfast in Chester, starting Monday sept 28th. At Beatons tea- rooms, Bell Tower Walk. 9.30-10.30, £6.50 to include simple breakfast. Poetry theme= City Life. All welocme
2. Thrilled to have a request for 3 previously published poems for 2nd Light’s forthcoming anthology “Fanfare”
3. Abridged online (N.Ireland) seeking submissions on the theme of forgetting. (They like serious poems!)
“Guests can enjoy the ‘full prisoner experience’
… including death threats…for $16 a night”
Daily Mail, 08.07.13
Sveiki, anglis.
Welcome to Karosta.
You know Winston Churchill?
No matter. You want tour?
You must sign paper, confess everything.
A little joke, anglis.
Hotel very clean.
Not like old days.
Yes, I am here in war.
Krievi, Vācu, karavīru
Germans, Russians
soldiers come.
Much blood, shit.
Much pissing on mattress
like ‘full prisoner experience’
it says here.
You want this, yes?
Please. Swear at me.
Call me bloody Yid, yes?
Call me fucking Latvian cunt
smash nose with fist
break legs
shoot in guts.
I die not too quick.
Maybe you don’t want?
Sorry for bad words.
Someone comes.
I go home to Ogre,
near Riga, you know.
Many Germans buried there.
I talk with them.
Just talk.
Time’s up, as you say.
Iron gates shut now.
Arlabunaki, anglis.
Sleep well.
I can fly from London to New York
in six minutes; you’ll never catch me
or even know precisely where I am.
I’ll send you messages, but
by the time you receive them
I’ll have moved on,
five billion kilometres from Earth
and counting, reaching out
to new horizons,
a Snow White searching
for dwarves in the Kuiper Belt,
playing in Neptune’s rubble.
I don’t phone often;
nothing to say to you,
yet so much to explain,
so much to transmit
but there’s no phone
in that Goodge Street flat
furniture pinned together,
rented from two old ladies
downstairs in the dress shop
that has no customers
and we imagine they are
mafia godmothers
raking in cash from randy students
exploring outer space
for the first time.
Dismounting
Philip pushes off and starts peddling
the ancient penny-farthing
he initiates talks with the National Trust
realising this is his only hope
wobbling alarmingly at first
on that high saddle above the big wheel
negotiations prove long and tricky
numerous issues need addressing
he grips the handlebars
and keeps his balance
one by one the problems
are sorted out
swishing past the tumbledown mansion
into the overgrown gardens
now confident the derelict estate he inherited
can be brought back onto an even keel
he knows how to avoid a crash landing
from that rickety machine
sure this is the way to save
Erddig and himself from disaster
at the end of his ride
he leaps down with aplomb
he signs the handover documents
and gets off in one piece
Family home
Here’s the National Trust guidebook
bought on my day out at Erddig.
Look how this great country house
has been preserved
as it was over a century ago.
Grand rooms, but also
kitchens, laundries, workshops,
stabling and gardens.
The whole place overflowing
with original furniture and effects
from the State Bed
to the two-man sawpit,
not forgetting that white teddy bear
dressed as Philip Yorke III.
You can’t help sense the presence
of generations of the Yorke family,
their servants and estate workers.
And here’s a photo
of the rather more modest house
where I was brought up
along with my brothers,
which was sold
after we all flew the nest.
My last surviving brother and I
recently returned there
for the first time in years.
That’s us standing arm in arm
between those sandstone gateposts
engraved with the name
of our old home.
That nasty front porch
has been added since our day.
We are glad we couldn’t see
the alterations no doubt made inside.
Here’s Colette Bryce’s ‘Full Indian Rope Trick’:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/full-indian-rope-trick
There are so many things this could inspire: leaving home, magic tricks, public outdoor performance… let’s go for leaving home, shall we?
Leaving home.