Hottest and driest Spring. It’s getting real:
dry soil’s already dust – it’s only June.
Unease alone seeps, our dry souls feel
damp fear. However this all ends, it’s soon.
But not today. Look round! The sky cloud-wisped,
deep-shaded hedge, shadows of Shropshire hills.
Listen! The soft, assuaging trees whisper
“the world is old beyond imagining.
Be still”.
The sun has brung out a low spinescene
against the brush housing thrush and pheasants
My father moves as death, silhouetted
A proper Shropshire lad I hang my neck
In shame and solidarity. The brittleboned,
the sky-minded, evicted from their homes
by the bullet, blinded with momentum,
shrieking with hunger, begging for a crumb
of flesh or feather, asleep or awake.
No bullet I’ve known will discriminate.
There is love in the hunt, in trigger wrought Death.
It comes! Comes softly as my father’s breath.
Perfumed with gunpowder, the bullet’s kiss
The pheasant’s hollow spine parted like lips.
Aladdin rubbed an English lamp
And found the genie rather damp
He made a wish
For chips & fish
With a pint in a nudist camp
The Clockhouse's A. E. Housman Suite at Halloween
Alfred Edward Housman's apparition
Recites "A quieter place than Clun(ton)
Where doomsday may thunder and lighten"*
A E Housman's ghost does frighten
In the Arvon Clockhouse Retreat
Downstairs, stays a lass with time to write
Upstairs, stays a poet in the A E Housman Suite
Housman's ghost is an awesome sight
Ghostly pacing, floorboards creak mysteriously
The lass disturbed in the night
Hearing strange noises clairvoyantly
Seeks answers in the daylight
Is it a Halloween trick or a treat?
* Poem 50 (L) from A E Housman's "A Shropshire Lad"
Folks in Old Coppice have been heard to say,
Sometimes a swirling evening mist comes down,
And glimpsed as in a waking dream they may
See wraith-like figures wandering on the lawn
In silent converse, they're so pale and wan,
And to a man, they've all got nothing on.
A hearty game of volleyball they'd play,
If weather wet, then maybe dominoes.
Earnest discourse on issues of the day,
Over tea and buttered crumpets, who knows,
Who can recall, such days of old, long gone?
In innocence, they all had nothing on.
Their pleasure was the sunshine on their skin.
Unfettered by the clothes of everyday,
Their harmless actions seen by some as sin,
A wicked presence on the Shropshire Way.
The trappings of the world outside forgone,
Their happiness, they all had nothing on.
These days, enlightened, we no longer judge
Their simple pastime as abomination.
Sun lovers all around the world indulge
And imitate the dawn of all creation,
Reflecting on a paradise that's gone,
One man, one woman, each with nothing on.
Blue Cheese
There is Cheshire, Red Leicester, Emmental and Brie,
Double Gloucester and Edam, a delight for all to see,
Stilton, Caerphilly, or Cheddar mature and mild,
Lots of subtle flavours to drive my taste bud’s wild.
There is Lancashire, Wensleydale or Derby to please,
So why, oh’ why, would you serve me Blue Cheese?
That smelly Blue cheese you know I cannot stand,
Give me Shropshire Mild, or something rather bland.
I don’t want that stinking dairy, in my salad box,
Opening the lid to an odour of sweaty socks.
So, hear my request I am begging of you please,
No more, no more, of that smelly blue cheese.
Mikey is an Invictus man,
Gets many medals in archery,
Sporty and keen he continues,
From his previous Army career.
In the Queens Dragoons Guards,
Whilst training he got stuck, fell,
From a rope bridge: broken neck,
Spine, and paralysed from chest.
Help for Heroes helped him live,
He joined the recovery programme,
Several sports took him clean:
Cycling and Ironman triathlons.
But the moment he held a bow,
He knew that archery was his,
To reap with and to sow, build,
To elevate his wins and attempts.
And he was so good at it, supreme,
That HfH asked him to start, set up,
An archery programme for them,
At Phoenix House Recovery Centre.
He took individual bronze, Invictus,
And also team gold. In Holland,
He won a solid individual gold,
And also the team bronze, in 2015.
In Czechoslovak Mikey landed,
The team with a bronze to boast,
And is determined a medal to win,
In Rio, at the Summer Paralympics.
He was born on the 20th of July,
In the year 1975, crude rock days,
And lives in St Martins, Shropshire,
Shooting at Scorton Archery Club.
Proud stands the solitary chestnut
to embrace each coming year
memories cowed deep in the bark
memories of yesteryear
Few share the old trees secrets
so few can pass that way
but every step that treads her path
leaves dreams of Shropshire days
IRONBRIDGE SHROPSHIRE
River Severn’s now a fishing spot.
Two centuries ago it was not.
The cradle of industrial revolution
Rocked fastest here - Iron construction
Arching proud - Telford’s bridge was born
Among the elder and the hawthorn.
Coal mines, furnaces, stony quarries,
Early train-tracks - sooty glories.
Now the river sweeps silent south
From hilly birth to ending mouth.
Smoke and soot have had to cease
River Severn has returned to peace
…………………………………………………………..
Note:
Ironbridge is the name of a small town on the River Severn
in Shropshire, England. It derives its name from the famous Iron Bridge, built 1779.
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