So Sunflowers Grow

Of all the tear-jerking images of war on the edges of Europe, one or two have stayed with me: birds shocked from their treetop roosts by the deep boom of artillery fire; a woman handing out sunflower seeds to occupying Russian forces.

Ukraine sunflowers. Woman offers Russian soldiers sunflower seeds so they grow where they die.
Courtesy Guardian News and Media

This poem has grown from these images. Like In Flanders Fields (from which it borrows heavily and compares badly), it’s a rondeau. Sadly, John McCrae had first hand experience of war to inform his work. Glady, I have none. So please forgive any unintended insensitivity. It is, necessarily, a work of imagination.

So Sunflowers Grow

So sunflowers grow where you die
She said with hate-and-hope-pierced eye
Then handed the soldier a seed
It will grow when Ukraine is freed
Rooted in your blood, in your lie.

Air sucked from a bird-shrapneled sky
Lungs emptied before the reply
No thanks heard. Silent, unstaunched bleed
So sunflowers grow.

Shot once they said: sniped; head too high.
Crumpled camo, no time to lie
Unregimented – pulled up weed
Withered. Lifeless. Yet in that deed
Of decomposting spirits fly
So sunflowers grow.

Lost Words

Here’s how the dream unfolds:
behind the gritted lids of night is told
the story of an ironed-flat sea - 
moonlight over mercury. 

Soon out. Beyond the beach. 

Deep down below the folds and creases. 
Rapid eyes. Heart beat increases. 

Mouthing silently as they sink like
drowning men who twist and pike 
then slip, unsaved, beneath the surface
an un-remembered shoal of twisted faces. 

By morning out of reach. 

Untold. Unseen. 
So all that’s left is this blank sheet
damp and crumpled from the dream.

You know that feeling of loss when you have a really good idea at night but you’ve forgotten it by morning? Well this is a poem about that!

I used to keep a notebook (yes, a stupidly expensive and pretentious Moleskine) by my bed to scribble down random words and lines as they came to me. That, of course, meant turning on the bedside lamp. So now, for the sake of my long-suffering partner, I jot them down in the notes of my smartphone although I’m sure the blue light of the screen is playing havoc with my sleep pattern.

A Postcard from Tenerife

Dear Mum

Wish you were here!

El Medano reminds me of Swanage. 
Sand, sea, sunshine, taut salty skin. 
The tide of geological time turning as the waves wash in and out and in…
But then these days everywhere reminds me of Swanage. 

Wish you were here

In that jumper I’d now give anything to possess, dad playing on the beach. 
You camera shy just out of reach. 
A pair of empty sandals* in the cradle of the deckchair. 
There but not there. 

(How I) wish you were here…

Dear Mum

Like many parents my mum and dad dutifully plotted their children’s travels around the world by sticking our postcards home to the downstairs toilet wall. Partly geography, partly social history, it’s a family A to Z covering literally everywhere from Aberystwyth (my stay-at-home sister) to Zanzibar (her globe-trotting baby brother). But follow the path (easier when you piss standing up) you’d see the journey comes to an abrupt end. By the U bend…

A section of the downstairs toilet wall rescued before mum moved out.

The sticker-upper-in-chief (our dad) died. And shortly afterwards so did the tradition of sending postcards because, let’s face(book) it,  #holiday is a whole heap easier than buying a stamp and finding a postbox. Trouble is mum – like many women of her generation – has never really done social. “They’d have called in Wrinkly Facebook if it was for us,” she joked. Before dementia wiped the smile off all our faces. She’s still with us though. Her name is Sheila. And this poem is for her.

*This line was inspired by my mum’s sandals sitting on a deckchair in a family photograph I’d looked at a hundred times before but not properly seen. For me poetry is all about seeing things properly.

Mum’s sandals circled in red.

The poem was also written because I’d been asked to pen something on the theme of travel for The Big Live Breakfast Burrito on LinkedIn. If you haven’t listened check it out. I also penned an alternative based on the shows hosts...

Dear Mum

Wish you were here. You’d love Burritonia
Will couldn’t make it so I’m here with Antonia. 
Eric’s the rep a right Tam o Shanter
With a fella called Matt who’s a bit of a Ranter
Then there’s a woman named Van – Vin Extraordinaire
And Simon (and Craig with a chin-ful of hair). 

Day Two. 

The sun’s been quite strong so Eric’s turned pink. 
And Matt’s prone to whingeing so he’s kicked up a stink. 
And Van’s poured a glass of Canarian wine. 
Though it’s barely past breakfast and hasn’t struck nine. 
Now Simon’s got factoids he can’t get the cream
Craig’s knitting his beard like he’s lost in a dream. 
Antonia’s mouthing a mysterious word
And from Will only silence nothing’s been heard. 

Wish you were here. 

The father, the son and the surgical spirit

* wuldres wealdend || woroldáre forgeaf

“Take as long as you like he’s ready for you.”

Shit and surgical spirit. 
There, I’ve said it
It’s only taken 22 years 
A forehead kissed. No words. No tears 
Too airless. Two chests deflated. 
His dressed in half Windsor-knotted Sunday best. But on a Thursday. Curated. 

Dead cool. 
The book tented open at line *seventeen
Steepled where his stomach would have been
His word. Diminished. Unfinished. Small. 

Eviscerated. 

I can magic all this back. Son. Father, wholly ghost. 
But it’s the shit and the spirit I remember the most.
That and the piped music. Bland enough not to wake the dead. 

“Go up to his room. He’s waiting for you,” she said.

The print of him was already smudged at the edges of the unmade bed. 
Sheep hollow filling with snow.
So by mourning there’d be nothing left to show. 
Except a bible-shaped drift

Undisturbed.

Pure white. An allegorical rift
Between Christian and pagan. Beowulf stabbed with a pencil (marked thus * by heart line 17)
Now in the other scene. 

Morning. Curtains open shut then close. Blinking behind the veil as book and body burned. 

* The glorious Almighty, made this man renowned.

This is a poem about loss. About christianity and paganism. And how, ultimately (by which I mean in the end) they are one in the same thing. When my dad died there were two books on his bedside table: Beowulf (Seamus Heaney’s translation of the unknown poet) and the bible.

The patron saint of paint

He spoke to me in a dream on the road to Santiago
The pilgrim father. Ochre boots. Lamp black hair. 
“Any path can be a Camino.
“Just start walking. You’ll know when you get there.”

Now forgive me if I refer to the map. It’s long since I saw the legend - turned the key.
Winsor and Newton artists’ oils.
Humbrol enamels. Sable brushes. Airfix toils. 
Sunday school. St James the Apostle. Follow me…

Back. Past the pond. Iced over. 
Goldfish. Koi. Shubunkin. Locked in
Scarlet lake and silver slowly sparkling
Right at the tar-trunked pole. Under gunmetal transformer. 
Beneath blood red risk-of-death label and verdigris cable. Arc-ing…

To the garden shed

Drab olive door stuck in its dark oak jamb. 
Dull zinc hasp. Chrome padlock bright. 
Entrance to the relic of the saint
Fly-stained glass. Webbed light.
Burnt umber urn. Penumbra of paint. 

Gloss. Emulsion. Undercoat with a crust.
Cans made of plastic and tins turned to rust.
A screw top. Hand sized. Kilner-like. 
Scratchy thread. Preservative of the dead
And transfigurative. 

The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. 

Inside now. Muted. Hushed. Pewter. 
But every colour there ever was shouting:
“Son, you’ll know when you get there.”

Shaving

I see him still, his face in mine.
In this grey hair, that laugher line.
Me on a chair to match his height
Dad shaving in the morning light. 

Reflecting back a boy and man
The man now gone the boy a man
Dip the brush and whip the lather
Foamy-faced now I’m the father

And on the chair stood next to me
A little boy his dad to see
Now wet the razor scrape the skin
From neck to jaw from ear to chin

This morning though I’m all alone
The boy’s grown up and left our home
But when I look into the glass
I never let the moment pass

I see three faces not just mine
Young shavers standing in a line
Across the years and out of time.

The featured image is of my father, Brian, with me and my sister, Joanne, I think on holiday at Swanage, Dorset, in the early 1960s. Clearly the photograph was taken (by my mum I’m guessing) well before I started shaving. But sadly I don’t have anything other than mental images of the daily ritual that unites fathers and sons everywhere (or certainly those who aren’t bearded)!

Swift

First south and west, then north and east, I quarter up the sky.
I’m watching for your sickle wings to scythe across my eye.

I look, I look, then look again and listen for your scream.
But bar the clap of pigeon wings there’s nothing to be seen.

The mewl of buzzards overhead, spirals on upward air.
An aerial feat, though quite a treat, no answer to my prayers.

And still they go unanswered though the grass is growing long.
And the swallows and the martins have joined the heavenly throng.

I love their eaves-slung mudhuts and their lineups on the wire.
But you dear swift, my absent friend, you set my heart on fire.

So I look and look again for gracious airborne crescents.
Vesper flights in evening light please grace us with your presence.

And then you’re here and I thank god for sending you to me
Although I never crooked my neck the vicar’d church to see.

You are my priest of summertime. Your pulpit is the skies.
And when you leave and head back home a bit inside me dies.

The cock cranks north, the wind is cold, your ministry I need.
My neck cranes south beyond the spire I’m wishing you Godspeed.

The modest spire of St Peter’s Church, Coreley, across the orchard from our Shropshire home inspires many of my equally modest scribbles. This poem was written for when the weathervane swings back to the south and heralds the return of one of my favourite birds.

We shall sight them on the beaches

They didn’t want to be fishers of men
Women and children first hauled from the sea
And laid out on the deck like a prize catch
Gently by hands that are roughened by salt
Calloused but not callous softened by salt
Tears that fall from the blinking eyes of men
With their own women and children ashore
Where with warm feet firmly on the dry ground
We catch “chuck ‘em back in” on the air waves
Crashing hopes and dreams into a fine sand
Which next summer we will make castles from
And stand watching the fishing boats set sail
Disciples of cod not fishers of men. 
Red hulls, blue skies, white cliffs. Gulls in the wake. 
Christ! More people flock to a stranded whale 
Than this half inflated greying carcass
A little ship of Dunkirk lifeboats then 
But now no Newhaven, no safe harbour
From wars that are not finest hours but yours
You fight them on your beaches. This is our 
Landing ground and we shall say that this was
Our coarsest hour. 

This is a work in progress. So forgive the rawness and the rough-around-the-edges anger. But I wanted to post it while the inspiration is still fresh in our minds and on our news bulletins.

Since I wrote this draft the first victim of the mass drowning in the English Channel/La Manche off Calais has been named as Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin, a 24 year old Kurdish woman from northern Iraq. She was texting her fiancé in Manchester as the flimsy boat carrying her and 28 others began to sink. All but two perished.

Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin

Biology with Mr Fisher

Lesson one: let nature be your teacher.
No scrape of chairs indoors, no blackboard chalk
For him. Classroom fields. An outdoor creature
Who smelled of earth and planted with his talk…

Elms. Galleons afloat the pasture seas
But scuttled by scolytus. Now un-helmed
Hulls, boreholed by the scurvy of disease,
Sink. Memory leaves where landscapes are un-elmed. 

Above the broken hulks the ravens croak
While ivy-anchored masts are felled and fall
Then flare in pyres whose embers spit and smoke
On sunflower heads inclined towards the pall.

To school, to chairs, to books, to bells, to learn. 
Through windows daydreams fly like birds and yearn.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mr Fisher who taught me biology at Parkfields School, Toddington, in the early 1970s. My time there coincided with Dutch elm disease which ravaged the Bedfordshire countryside. He lamented the loss of these majestic landscape trees but turned arboreal tragedy to educational triumph by using it to explore nature in a way that has stuck with me ever since: up close and personal. Me and my classmates peeled bark to reveal the boreholes of the scolytus beetle larvae underneath. We examined the fungus the insect carried (the real killer) under microscopes. He sowed seeds in fertile young minds. Those seeds took root. There have been many fruits since. This poem is but the latest picking. Thank you Mr Fisher.

Dr. Mary Gilham Archive Project / Flickr / CC BY 2.0

An open letter to Strava

Dear Strava

I really like your app. I’ve been using it for many years now. In the early days and as an early adopter I even managed to be King of the Mountain once or twice. Or at least on those hillocks (that’s a better description) so far off the beaten track absolutely nobody else had heard of them, let alone ridden up them. Now I have to settle for Local Legend which again is easy to achieve when you live in the middle of nowhere. But that’s not why I’m writing. 

No, I’d like the boffins at Strava HQ to invent a new category of winner. Or perhaps I should say loser. I suggest you call it Local Bellend.

Local Bellend

Here’s how it’d work. Cyclists earn points for being polite, not just to one another but to other road users too, including pedestrians (no more seeing how far out of their skins you can make them jump) and horse riders (no more seeing how far you can make them fall). Say “hello” or “good morning” or “what a gorgeous day to be alive” or “coming through” and you’d get, say, 5 points per politeness. Okay, I appreciate it may be a bit tricky to design and will require accessing our ride computer or phone microphones. But, hey, if GCHQ and Google can eavesdrop on us why not Strava, eh Alexa? 

Now at the end of each week or month the cyclist with the fewest points would become the Local Bellend. One you wouldn’t want for your virtual trophy cabinet. But one I reckon there’d be stiff competition for.

I’ve been experimenting. When I go out on my state-of-the art, carbon-fibre, weighs-less-than-a-sparrow road bike, clad only in the most eye-wateringly expensive (and eye watering) stretch Lycra, fellow cyclists on similar bikes and in similar clothing say “hi” or, at the very least, raise their eyebrows slightly skywards (it strikes me it’s about the only part of their body they don’t shave or pluck). 

When I go out on my mountain bike wearing mud-spattered baggy shorts and a sweatshirt, the same cyclists treat me without so much as a wave. Fellow mountain bikers, however, don’t just wave, they do a bunny hop or a back flip or a forward roll. Like puppies pleased to see another puppy. 

Cyclism

A kind of cycling apartheid has emerged. Elitism might be a better word. What I call cyclism. And it’s got to stop. So calling out these cyclistes for what they are – Local Bellends – would be a good place to start. What do these guys (and it is manly guys I’ve found) call their rides when they get home? Misery guts? Bah humbug? Stop the world I want to get off? I’ll have to update You Can See the Dags to accommodate.

I guess it might take a few weeks for you to update the Strava app. In the meantime I urge polite cyclists everywhere to do what I do when confronted with a rude one. Call out (under your breath if they look bigger and faster than you) “Bellend!” Makes me feel better anyway.

You can read my other cycling-related posts here (if you’ve got nothing better to do – like go for an actual ride).

If you suffer from wind (a headwind or cross wind that is) you might enjoy this one. It’s called Beaufort for Bikers.

We Are Cycling UK
British Horse Society