I love this poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It’s a commentary on the fact that – even in the darkest times – simple acts of unexpected generosity and kindness have the capacity to remind us that not everything is bleak and hopeless even in a nasty, brutish, trumpian world. Optimistic Little Poem Now and then it happens that somebody shouts…
Mustn’t Grumble We mustn’t grumble We have wireless and cable And there’s food in the shops. Beyoncé had a birthday and the game is on tonight. We have work to do. And all the really bad things like weather and politics are a long way away so we don’t have to worry. And there’s always pizza delivery. We can still walk…
There’s a drainage ditch runs alongside the rail trail where we often take our morning stroll. It runs with water after rain and provides an excellent damp environment for the cardinal flower (lobelia cardinalis). It’s a showy deep red spiky flower native to the US. Apparently most insects find it difficult to navigate the long tubular flowers so the cardinal…
Amazing how hard it sometimes can be to find things on the intertubes. There was a poem I remembered from my London teaching days and I tried every which way to find it. It was about fruit piled up in a market so I tried all kinds of variations on a search theme and came up with nothing. I even…
Two quite different wartime farewells at Charing Cross Station: The first is from Vera Brittain on the eve of 1915: At Charing Cross, with half an hour to wait for the last train to Purley, we walked together up and down the platform. It was New Year’s Eve, a bright night with infinities of stars and a cold, brilliant moon;…
She never! She did! Well blow me A right carry-on What a palaver It’s always something More out than in so they say You could have knocked me down with a feather Well I should say so …
Soodle – it means means to walk in a slow or leisurely manner; to stroll, saunter. With so many alternatives to the word ‘walk’ it seems superfluous to promote more. But “soodle” just seems so right especially for this time of the year when it takes effort to move at all when the heat is high and the humidity stifling.…
In 1975 the poet Allen Ginsberg was in hospital. At a later poetry reading he explained the causes in an introduction to a poem that he had written from his hospital bed.: I got real angry and wound up sick in a hospital, for various karmic reasons, and woke up looking out the window, and started taking notes on what…
It’s graduation season and across the land schools are saying goodbye to students and students are moving along and into the next phases of their lives. It’s all very heartwarming and etc. I usually couldn’t wait for them to be over. All that dressing up and ceremony and sitting and waiting in uncomfortable chairs. At least at the dentist you…
It started with a tweet from yesterday morning: So off to google where I found the same inaccurate one-line biography pretty much everywhere, including Wikipedia. May Herschel-Clarke (1850–1950) was an English poet. She is chiefly known today for her Anti-War poems Nothing to Report and The Mother, the latter of which was published in 1917 as a direct response to Rupert Brooke‘s famous poem The Soldier.…
Update: 15 October 2020 I’ve heard from Lyn who is the Project Lead for ‘Away from the Western Front’. ‘No Parades’ was commissioned by them as part of their First World War centenary project. The project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund in the UK and accordingly, they were able to commission Chris Hoban to compose this song for…
They had all watched him die, in a foreign landA warning to others from the High Command. Forfeits medals (sentenced to death). Sentence Duly carried out. This grim notation is in the UK, WWI Service Medal and Award Rolls, 1914-1920 entry for Private 7429 Herbert Morris of the 6th Battalion of the British West Indies Regiment. Amid all the cruelty,…
I’ve been looking for a particular poem for a while now. When someone used the hashtag #SherlockPoems in a Twitter conversation I posted my inquiry. The poem I remember – but can’t find – is about a market stall heaped with glowing and colorful tropical fruits. It was used in a GSE exam paper sometime in the 1970’s. I didn’t…
I began this post in 2017. The original focus was Louis MacNeice’s’s poem “Brother Fire”. MacNeice was a fire-watcher during the London Blitz which meant that he spent nights on rooftops watching for, and reporting, fires caused by incendiary bombs. The poem expresses a human kinship with the destructive power of fire: O delicate walker, babbler, dialectician Fire, O enemy…
Eighty years ago today – on January 26th, 1939 – the poet W.H.Auden – accompanied by his friend and sometime lover Christopher Isherwood – stepped off the boat and arrived in New York City. It wasn’t their first visit. They had spent two happy weeks in the city in 1938, arriving by train from Vancouver on their way back from…