Little Rocket Man

A lot has been made of Jeff Bezos’s short jaunt into space: whether he might have spent his money more wisely; as world leaders gather for COP26 what impact his venture might be causing the environment; even what constitutes “outer space” given that he barely crossed the Karman line (the not universally-recognised end of the Earth’s atmosphere); and that 60 years earlier – the year of my birth and hence my interest in these things – the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, went three times further in Vostok 1. So I’ve been doing some maths.

Now maths wasn’t my strong subject at school (I famously resat my maths A level having gained a D first time round and subsequently got a U which is why I’m a journalist and not a rocket scientist)! What I’m saying is please do check my working out and tell me if I’m wrong. But if I’m right then…

Given that astronauts have been to the moon and back I decided to use the distance to the moon from Earth as my reference point. That’s 384,400 km give or take. Bezos’s New Shepherd capsule reached an apogee (maximum height) of 106 km. Dividing 106 by 384,400 and multiplying the result by 100 gives you the percentage of the distance Bezos got to the moon – a meagre 0.0275754% of the way.

Of course, it’s hard to imagine such a tiny percentage of such an incredibly long journey so I looked for an equivalent here on earth and settled on London to Leeds at 272 km as the crow flies. And here’s the stunning part. In comparison to the Apollo moon shots, Mr Amazon’s space flight was the equivalent of setting off for Leeds from Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square and getting no further than the north side of the square – just 75 metres – before turning round and coming back!

A bit more maths for you to check: I’m told he’s spent US $5.5 billion on the Blue Origin venture so far which means, in effect, that each of those 75 steps towards the National Portrait Gallery will have cost him an eye-watering US $73.3 million. Cheaper to walk Jeff. And better for the planet.

Image credit: Chuck Bigger/SpaceNews

Juji

Juji is a mynah bird. Caught up in the evacuation of Kabul along with a young Afghan girl and carried to freedom in a cardboard box, this is quite simply the most moving and beautiful story you’ll hear for a long time. Please do listen.

Credit: BBC Radio 4 Today programme

Photo credit: Xavier Chatel

Night farming

Furrows the Plough ‘cross the field of night.
Bellows Canis at the owls out of sight.
Callow Orion unbelted his might,
Shallow-breathed Virgo sowed without fight.

Sorrows the brow, Cassiopeia the queen.
Mellow the music of Lyra, unseen.
Hero Perseus his sword broad and keen.
Hallow’d Aquila surveying the scene.

Meadows by daytime all scattered with red.
Billow the poppies no sign of the dead.
Fallow the ground it was all in my head.
Fallow the woman beside me in bed.

Footprints in the snow

Eastern ashes astir aglow
As new moon lips mouth morning’s breeze
The arc then melts like springtime snow
Unshackling Earth from night-time's freeze.
Nocturnal creatures can’t be caught
By hieroglyphs to leaf-lined lairs 
Their secrets safe in shadows short
Billowing steam in sunbeam snares.
By eve the hearth coals shrink and cool
What was blunt is keen to sharpen
Penumbra from the blacksmiths tool
Hammer gripped and sinews stiffen.
The western foundry’s gutt’ring flame
Is sparking stars for night again.

At night the stars leave tracks in the sky and animals leave tracks on the ground. By day they disappear. Only to reappear as the sun sets and the moon rises. This poem was written as an exercise in sonnet form (ABABCDCDEFEFGG). According to convention each line ought to have ten syllables (the five “boom BOOM” heartbeats of iambic pentameter). This has only eight per line (the 2 x 4 of iambic tetrameter). I’ll let you, the reader, decide whether this disqualifies the piece as a sonnet.

Foz

Foz is from Somalia. 

She steers my mother slowly across the care home lawn. A ship of state adrift on a sea of green. 

“Here are my two favourite girls,” I call from the shade of the arbour. Because if I wasn’t jolly I’d cry. 

“Haven’t seen you for a while,” I remark as she lowers mum onto the garden seat beside me and relays two porcelain hands from hers to mine for safe keeping for the next half hour. “Been on holiday?” 

“I’ve been to Mogadishu,” she says and then adds quickly before I have time to ask something crass like oh what’s the weather like there at this time of year  “to bury my mum.”

To bury my mum.  

I want to reach across my mother’s head and hold her hand. But, of course, social distancing has made human instinct less instinctive. So words are our lifebelts. To stop the grief sucking us down. 

Her name was Fatima. She was 60. A proud mother of four. Two children seeking new lives in America. Two here in the UK. Widowed four years ago so alone in the Somali capital. Taken by Covid before Foz could say goodbye. So she went instead to bury her. And then had to pay for hotel quarantine on her return. Red lists and all that. 

These are the bare facts. 

I look down at the mother who’s left. 

“You can share mine. She can be your honorary mum.” 

Still Life

Shackled by time slippers shuffled
Stooped to the high-backed seat
Queen throned, grey crown ruffled
Prince and Princess at her feet 

The Prince takes a marbled hand
But a child’s touch cannot reach beyond
Their birth to a foreign land 
To retrieve lost memories fond

In her realm time and place are a synaptic jumble
Behind curtained lids sightless pupils dart
O’er a past decaying to a mumble
As mind and body part

On a pedestal a not-still life 
Head set in stone yet body moving
To the heart beat of a mother and a wife 
Her monumental presence soothing

This poem came to me after visiting my mother in her care home with my sister, Joanne. It was our first visit in six months because of Covid restrictions and only the second time we’d seen her in a year. I had originally planned writing about how hand holding is central to human relationships and that holding hands through surgical gloves is wholly inadequate – perhaps surprising given that latex is thinner than a sheet of paper. But it turned out there wasn’t much poetry in PPE 😷 and I was stumped until leafing through Poems of Today, an anthology of poetry I serendipitously discovered later that same day on my mother’s bookshelf. In it I was struck by Midnight Lamentation by Harold Munro and in particular by the last verse:

I cannot reach beyond
Body, to you.
When you or I must go
Down evermore,
There’ll be no more to say
-But a locked door.

The locked door image resonated as a metaphor not just for death but for the death of memory that is dementia. Another book on mum’s shelf (and on mine too) – A Shropshire Lad by A E Housman provided the metre.

Please make your selection…

Guinness, lager, shandy, coke
(You can go your own way)
Wisecracks, quips and sexist jokes
(Go your own way)
“This chair taken? No feel free!”
(You can call it another lonely day)
“Your shout Dave I need a pee.”

Please make your selection…

Fleetwood Mac then Britney Spears
(Sometimes I run)
Singles, doubles, mixers, cheers
(Sometimes I hide)
Earnest chats in cosy snugs
(Sometimes I’m scared of you) 
Pimms for toffs is served in jugs

Please make your selection…

ELO then Squeeze and Bread
(Mr Blue you did it right)
Abba, the Ungrateful Dead
(And then came Mr Night)
“No of course I ain’t been drinkin…”
(Creepin over)  
…on his phone to mum while winkin’
(Now his hand is on your shoulder)
Red braces clipped to pinstripe suits
(Mr Blue Sky)
Blokes in work-stained jeans and boots

Please make your selection…

The pound coin drops it’s Motörhead
(The ace of spades
The ace of spades
The ace of spades)
The juke box dies. The sound goes dead. 

I scribbled this on a soggy beer mat in a noisy, sweaty north London boozer pre-Covid and have only just rediscovered it. Reminds me of happier times – apart from the ending which, with hindsight, appears prescient. I hope you can “smell” the atmosphere too.

Nature’s fountain pen

For most of the year the field is like a sheet of writing paper covered with invisible ink. Words indivisible from the page. Blank every morning save for brown-blot molehills. But the overnight snow has rendered the lines for all to see. All at once. An animal track heat map, only cold. Footsteps frozen in time and place. 

Much is indecipherable. Unknowable. But some is observable. Or deducible.

The ink is barely dry on the sheep paths. Close up, the freshest, once-trodden tracks are, in fact, two closely-spaced furrows with a distinct ridge in between right and left ploughshare hooves. No such distinction in the oft-trodden lamblines where the front leg dots and hind leg dashes have worn through to the grass beneath. Feint blue becoming bright green.

Other writers have left strings of single letter words and flown. The Y Y Y of bird feet. Serif here. Sans serif there. Upper case. Lower case. Bold buzzard prints. (I know they were left by a buzzard because I saw it fan down from its perch in the snow-shadowed oak – gracious in flight, but grounded, stamping cold feet like an angry child in oversize wellies). Italicised wagtrails. Barely more than scratches on the crusted surface of the snow. Spokes leading to the stock feeder hub. Hay for the sheep. A meagre harvest of flies for the birds who’ve been forced down from their usual haunt on the clay tiles of the barn roof. 

By the brook where the flood water has congealed then dropped to leave a glass dance floor, there are the arrowheads of a pheasant. Pointing back from where it came. And ending abruptly. Mid sentence. With a tail-dragging smudge and a silent squawk. Only to start again somewhere else. In another field. The other side of the stream. On another page. 

The writing paper field.

Freed from the conventions of verse form, I find prose poetry easier to compose. So it’s my go-to style. That said I hope this latest piece in the Field series still has poetic qualities in its use of imagery, metaphors and symbols.