Now We Are Five

Now We Are Five

The Hall Writers’ Forum The Hall Writers’ Forum was launched online in 2013 with a view to fostering dialogue, collaboration, and creative writing. Its members include current and former students of St Edmund Hall, members of the Hall’s academic and non-academic staff, and associates from outside the college who have been nominated by Forum members.

Now We Are Five has been edited by Darrell Barnes with (more than) a little help from his friends, Lucy Newlyn and Tom Clucas.

First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Chough Publications St Edmund Hall Oxford OX1 4AR This collection © 2018 Chough Publications Copyright for the individual contributions remains with the authors except where otherwise indicated Further copies may be purchased at https://goo.gl/PGNXTz Cover illustration © 2018 Jude Montague ISBN 978-0-244-05769-5 3

Table of Contents

Foreword ..................................................................................................................... 9 Introduction .............................................................................................................11

Part One - Pieces written for the Fifth Anniversary 5th Anniversary by Justin Gosling.......................................................................15 Hope by Mohammad Talib .....................................................................................17 The Forum by Neville Teller .................................................................................19 Anniversary Anthem by Lucy Newlyn ...............................................................20 Hive Mind by Tom Clucas.......................................................................................22 Floreat Forum by David Braund ..........................................................................23 To my fellow writers by Tony Brignull ..............................................................24 You are old, Father William by Neville Teller .................................................25 The Poet Confesses by Peter King .......................................................................29 .five repeated, by Sonja Benskin Mesher ...........................................................30 Iron sharpens iron by Jared Campbell ...............................................................32 What has the Hall Writers’ Forum ever done for me? by Darrell Barnes .......................................................33 Forum by Alex Matraxia .........................................................................................35 The Party by Tony Hufton .....................................................................................36 Heroical Verses on the Occasion of the Fifth Anniversary of the Hall Writers’ Forum by A Gentleman ..........................................38 4

Birthday Party by Cazzie Winterton ................................................................... 39 In Memory of CHARLES BACCHUS by Natasha Walker ................................. 40 A sequence in Ottava Rima by Stuart Estell..................................................... 44 A Table of Delights by Jamie Whelan ................................................................. 47 Shapeshifter by Carolyn O'Connell ..................................................................... 48 The Boring Limerick Challenge by Rose Anderson ....................................... 49

Part Two - Pieces written previously The Robin Redbreast’s Song - a Duet for Soprano and Bass by Justin Gosling ......................................................... 53 Munni Mann: or, A Vision in a Dream by David Braund .............................. 54 Vale by Cazzie Winterton ....................................................................................... 58 The Case of Otto Schwarzkopf by Neville Teller ............................................ 59 Reclamation by Mohammad Talib ...................................................................... 61 Impedimenta by Peter King .................................................................................. 63 The Gibbon by Jared Campbell ............................................................................. 64 Trier, the Moselle cranes by Jamie Whelan ..................................................... 65 Shakespeare Goes to a Poetry Workshop by Peter King ............................ 68 My Soul is a String by Alexander Bridge ............................................................ 69 A fig for Tony Harrison by Sandie Byrne .......................................................... 71 Haikus by Rose Anderson ...................................................................................... 72 A Poem Is by David Braund ................................................................................... 73 5

The biographer’s lament by Tony Brignull ......................................................75 Muse by Lucy Newlyn ..............................................................................................77 Wensleydale in Winter by Sandie Byrne ..........................................................78 Metrical Experiments by Gerard Lally...............................................................79 Listening to Grace Jones by Alex Matraxia .......................................................81 Lady Spens at the window by Stuart Estell ......................................................83 Found Poem by Tony Hufton ................................................................................84 Apocalypse by Tom Clucas ....................................................................................85 The Enemy by Brian Smith ....................................................................................87 The Mirror by Jude Cowan Montague .................................................................89 Re-hash by Tony Hufton .........................................................................................91 Ave atque Vale by Brian Smith .............................................................................92 I’ve news for you by Mike Spilberg .....................................................................93 Boy playing the cello by Carmen Bugan ............................................................94 Romance sans Paroles by Brian Smith ..............................................................95 Troublemaker by Natasha Walker ......................................................................96 The Bodrum Carol by Brian Smith ......................................................................99 From Deciduous to Evergreen by Carolyn O'Connell ................................. 100

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Part Three - Editors’ Choices Oxford Times by Jamie Whelan ........................................................................ 103 Banksy by Gerard Lally ....................................................................................... 109 RA-MI-SI-SU’s riposte to P.B.S. by Mike Spilberg......................................... 111 A Villanelle by Tabitha Hayward ...................................................................... 112 Paradise Road by Chris Mann ........................................................................... 113 The Governess by Amelia Gabaldoni ............................................................... 116 The Golden Goose by Anonymous Critic ........................................................ 117

Part Four - Dialogues Parliament of Fouls, or The Foulest of Parliaments by the Hall Writers' Forum, Brian Smith and David Braund ................ 121 World’s Most Boring Limerick

by Darrell Barnes, Matthew Carter and Lucy Newlyn ............................ 134 Who wears the trousers?

by Lucy Newlyn, Gerard Lally and Jude Cowan Montague .................... 142 The Poetic Garden Centre by Darrell Barnes and Lucy Newlyn ............... 156 Heidelberg - ein Wiedersehen by Natasha Walker and Darrell Barnes . 160 The Elgin Marbles ............................................................................................... 164

by Darrell Barnes, Gerard Lally and Anonymous Writer The Lost Romantic by Lucy Newlyn and Jude Cowan Montague .............. 171

Notes on Contributors ....................................................................................... 175 7

Foreword In 2003 Lucy Newlyn instituted some Remembrance Day Commemorations at which people were invited to play some music, sing or read a poem or piece of prose - anything suitable for the occasion. Some of these were original pieces, but most were treasures dug out of memories of things heard. Some of those attending just came to listen. These occasions were well attended and very moving. I remember one where it had been planned to retire to the bar afterwards, but those attending had been so moved that the bar seemed crudely inappropriate.

Having experienced these, many felt the call for more events, but of a less lugubrious nature; and so they became interspersed with readings etc. on more varied topics, some quite frivolous, so that it seemed appropriate to accompany them with nibbles and drinks, in some quarters known as Lucy’s Bistros. There was clearly an interest in self-expression, but it seemed inconsiderate to confine it largely to current members of the Hall, (many of the younger of whom found it daunting to stand up and read even someone else’s work), and to such few occasions. So in 2013 the Forum was founded, by Lucy Newlyn and Stuart Estell, which allowed exchange of productions, and a wide range of discussions on contemporary issues, to take place without the elaborate arrangements of an EVENT. It was also hoped that undergraduate members would feel less inhibited about taking part - a hope which has only recently started to be fulfilled to a really satisfying extent.

It has been a great resource for its members (comprising both present and one-time members of the Hall) with a flow of poems - good, bad and indifferent: it provides an unthreatening context - prose of all sorts, (including on many contemporary issues), music, and vigorous discussions on all. The exchange of works and views has been very fruitful not just ‘artistically’ but in building relations between people of very different ages (one often has to guess at the age of one’s interlocutor) and careers.

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I am delighted to be a member of a college whose members can produce such an enlightened contribution to education in a broad, rich but perhaps not very modern sense of the word.

It has been a great success, and I would recommend any member of the Hall, present or past, to dip their toes in the water.

Justin Gosling

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Introduction Five years of the Hall Writers’ Forum is surely something to celebrate! During that time, the Forum has been through several incarnations and its genius loci (Chough) has roosted on several different severs. Throughout, it has continued to grow and prosper.

Thanks must go, firstly, to Lucy Newlyn and Stuart Estell for founding the Hall Writers’ Forum on 9 February 2013 and giving us all somewhere to share and discuss our writing. I think everyone would agree that the Forum has been a terrific spur to creativity. At the time of writing, there are ninety-nine members, who have collaboratively authored more than thirty thousand posts on over three thousand topics. Many of these pieces would not have come into being - at least in this form - without the Forum.

Thanks must go, also, to the team of Forum Facilitators, who have helped to steer the Forum along its path, and to all of the members, who have contributed creative and critical writing with so much thought, perceptiveness, and dedication. The Forum has grown to become a formidable archive of collective memory and creative exchange, with a gift economy all of its own. None of this would have been possible without Andrew Breakspear, who provided generous technical support until the Forum’s ‘migration’ away from the College (it is now privately housed by Lucy Newlyn).

In recognition of this great archive of writing and sharing, it was decided to celebrate the Forum’s fifth anniversary with two publications, distilling some of the copious highlights. Many pieces on the Forum grew out of the various Challenges which members have posted along the way. Recently, the Weekly Challenges set by Alexander Bridge have become a mainstay of Forum life and creativity. The winning entries to these challenges will feature in their own, separate online publication.

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However, there are also many pieces which members have posted spontaneously, either as standalone pieces or as parts of a sequence.

These pieces have been offered to the Forum for communal discussion and constructive critique. Several of them have also evolved in dialogue between Forum members as a result of critical and creative discussions on various threads. The aim of this volume Now We Are Five - is to celebrate this rich aspect of Forum life by offering what must necessarily be a small selection of Forum writing.

The book is structured in four parts. Part One contains celebratory pieces, which the contributors have written to mark the Forum’s fifth anniversary. For Part Two, members were asked to select favourites from among their own collections of writing on the Forum. In Part Three, the book’s editors have offered their own, necessarily brief selection of exemplary pieces selected from the Forum’s great diversity. Finally, Part Four collects some of the stand-out examples of creative dialogues that have emerged between the Forum’s members.

For both of these anniversary publications, thanks are due to Darrell Barnes, who has edited them with great skill and attention. We hope you enjoy perusing this volume and that it captures at least part of the wonderful talent, dedication, and camaraderie which exist on our Forum.

Floreat Aula!

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Part One

Pieces written for the Fifth Anniversary

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5th Anniversary 1 Once like a mustard Seed, minute; now the largest Tree in the garden.

2 “How beautiful is the quincunx”, Cicero said, thinking of vines those serried ranks on the southern slope, with their promise of joy.

“How beautiful is the quincunx” - but this time thinking of wines and a loosened tongue, 3 It started on Remembrance Day - a solemn day and we read and we sang and we wept.

So we moved to bistros and changes of topic mini-orgies. But oh the frustration: only one piece per bistro, and little time to talk.

Oh, the frustration, the pent-up longing for release!

And then the Forum came, and the floodgates were opened; everything anyone posted, someone took seriously; and poems poured out like beer from a bottle.

And so much exposure: in poems even the most reserved expose themselves to the wind and sun of criticism and praise.

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And now, after five years, are we any of us browning?

What of it? - so that some of us are blooming: small flowers, trees and middle-sized bushes.

Justin Gosling

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Hope Nothing remained of the ship after the wreck.

The body swooned; the scores of rafts strewn.

Most passengers were gone.

Some found their lifeboats.

But one drifting afloat.

The swimmer to wear out.

The eyes missing on their view.

The dotted green at the far end that seemed promising disappeared.

The night sky, and sunlit heavens wore the same ashen faces.

Before the final stroke into oblivion, a lone plank, riding a wave’s crest – like a javelin from the clouds aimed at the swimmer’s grasp.

In an immortal clutch, like an artist’s brush, the swimmer seized the splash and revealed colours, which colliding with the grey and gruesome waters, released a reclaimed breath, and a revived surge.

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The swimmer’s wreck opened to a reverse course.

The body pulling its lost parts back towards its fold: limbs, bones, spine.

Even the eyes caught their view.

Something slowly rising out of nothing.

Mohammad Talib

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The Forum Consider how five years of living, spent, For some were seconds dripping from the tap By drop and drop a life of sapped content An aimless leaden drift bereft of map.

But happy those who filled the hopeful time Fulfilling that creative urge we own In bending mind and pen to prose or rhyme To share their journey, not to walk alone.

An open forum opportunely came Inviting those to share their work who would To seek not publication, not acclaim But praise for that which colleagues rated good.

Over the years the cultured riches grew Who dreamt a five year treasure would accrue?

Neville Teller

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Anniversary Anthem We’re the Hall Writers’ Forum; we come in all sorts: Young Turks and Old Fogies, retired, still at work.

Whatever we think, we’re at one with our thoughts.

When we don’t feel like posting we ponder and lurk.

We read what we want, we critique what we write; we comment, we query, we edit, we learn.

We’re free in our spirits, we fight the good fight, we dole out our praise and we get what we earn.

We’re the Hall Writers’ Forum, we know the best way to share our new work and our thoughts and our dreams.

We’re better than Facebook; we don’t waste all day In ‘Liking’ the trivia, reading the ‘memes’.

We’re hidden and safe from the eyes of the public; there’s nothing we say here that’s stolen or lost.

We resemble a family, we’re a republic: no-one can better the spirit we boast.

We’re the Hall Writers’ Forum; you won’t find us shirking our duty to write and our deep love of writing.

While others relax, you will see us all working: we’re mending our metre, not fixing the lighting.

We’ve been here for years, not a moment too long.

We have courage and talent, we don’t hide our lights behind bushels, or cower - we just sing our song which is fearless and proud; we have much in our sights.

We’re the Hall Writers’ Forum, we’ll not be deterred by attempts to prevent us from crafting our verse; we are strong and determined, not easily stirred, we will stay on this patch, not be moved to one worse.

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We are friends through our Forum; this bond will go on till the glaciers are melted, the energy spent; the cynics all buried, the nay-sayers gone (you won’t find a member who’s sad that they went).

We’re the Hall Writers’ Forum. Please think about joining.

You won’t find a Forum that’s better on earth for poems, discussion and words that need coining.

The Hall Writers’ Forum is all that it’s worth.

Lucy Newlyn

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Hive Mind The Forum is a beehive in my mind; at work, I have to keep it tightly sealed, but in still moments, checking it, I find fresh hexagons of honeycomb which yield the meaning that sustains me through the day.

Lately, one has to be so circumspect against the stinging words that others say; it is so rare that trains of thought connect or two minds meet in simple unity.

But still the Forum brims with joyful peace; the members read and write in harmony and silently the honey stores increase.

Behold, our common beehive slowly fills with gifts to sweeten life and all its ills.

Tom Clucas

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Floreat Forum I surfed as idly as a wink Through web and blog but all at sea, When all at once I spied a link, A forum full of poetry; Besides the verse and commentary, Articles, stories, all for free.

Encouragement beamed from every line And twinkled in a friendly way, The words of all just seemed to shine As each contributed their say: So many minds to share their thought, No more could anyone have sought.

The more I looked, the more I found, The wise, the daft, the full of glee, The draft dashed off, the work profound Within such joyful company: I wrote - and hoped - but little guessed How all my fears would lay to rest: For inspiration throngs me round, A welcoming and helpful guide Who does not turn away or frown, There’s always someone on my side; Now, when I feel I write in vain, The forum lifts me up again.

(With apologies to WW).

David Braund

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To my fellow writers Your poems ask me if I’m true.

Do I feel what I say, say what I feel?

And is my saying always mine or tricked out like an autocue to pretend that I’m addressing you?

Are these diamonds which I steal, or is costume jewellery more my line?

Friends, you are my Pangur Bán, you claw my hand to hunt for one fresh word, one startling metaphor, a grain of gold in a ton of ore.

Poetry’s our joyful preceptor, your truth insists that I discard my lies: writing’s easy, honesty is hard.

Tony Brignull

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You are old, Father William

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said, “And your hair has become very white, And yet you incessantly stand on your head – Do you think, at your age it is right?”

These days I am increasingly inclined to take the Reverend Dodgson’s admonition seriously. That I am old, a glance at the archive note appended to each forum contributor will reveal. My time at Teddy Hall was spent in the dim distant past of the early 1950s. Most of my contributions to the forum - I began contributing in May 2013 - are in the Journalism section. That, in itself, is enough to tell you that I have incessantly stood on my head. Venturing even the most innocuous of opinions on political events is a chancy business. Ten to one you will be proved wrong within a few weeks.

I suppose opinions should be distinguished from beliefs, though they do influence each other. There ought to be no shame in adapting an opinion in the light of changing circumstances; perhaps beliefs should be more firmly held. Even so, the older I get, the less flexible I become, and I am finding it increasingly difficult to change my opinions, and almost impossible to change my beliefs. In short, do I think at my age it is right to stand on my head? Answer - no.

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You adapt as you age, but it’s surprising how little you change fundamentally. Here’s an admission: back in my Teddy Hall days I was a little right of centre politically; I’m still a little right of centre. I was accused then of “sitting on the fence” - it’s an accusation that has pursued me down the years. I was radio-mad then; I have remained radio-mad to this very day. Drama and the stage fascinated me then; they have continued to fascinate me ever since.

So that 24-year-old, sitting on the Teddy Hall well in 1955, raising a glass to celebrate the end of Finals, was to go on to pursue his radio dream as a freelance alongside a more remunerative, as well as more conventional, career. Incidentally, he was 24 because, before coming up, he’d had to undertake two years army service. Back then conscription was compulsory. Yes, the past is a foreign country.

Talking of foreign countries, my family background, ancestry and religion inevitably directed my attention to the Holy Land. Ours, I may say, is an Aularian family. Two of my three sons followed me to Teddy Hall. When one of them began an academic career at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and years later the other took himself, his wife (also an Aularian, by the way) and family off to Israel, my wife and I eventually followed them.

But not before a full - some might consider over-full - career. A first period in the 1950s and ‘60s was spent in the exciting world of advertising, marketing, and general management. In 1970 I gained direct entry into the Civil Service, where I passed the next twenty years in the Department of Health and Social Security. Compulsory retirement at age 65 was followed by a 10-year stint in what is now Macmillan Cancer Support. Finally, a second retirement at age 75 allowed me to devote myself full time to the literary and dramatic work for radio and audio that I had been pursuing for the previous 45 years alongside my other career. After five years of this, my wife and I decided to join that part of our family that had set up home in Israel.

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“My old man,” my wife might have said (but didn’t), “said Follow the van, And don’t dilly-dally on the way.

Off went the van with me ’ome packed in it…”

Except in our case, the home was packed into vast containers that were shipped down the Channel, round Spain, through the Straits of Gibraltar, out into the Mediterranean, and across to Ashkelon, perhaps, or Haifa. The operation took in all some eight weeks. Far from following the van, the van very much followed us.

Once there, and settled, I resumed my radio and audio work, but it wasn’t enough. What else could I do? The political situation in the Middle East could never be described as without incident. So I began writing the occasional letter to Israel’s leading English-language newspaper, The Jerusalem Post. Encouraged by publication, I tried my hand at an article. In July 2012, exactly twelve months after arriving in Israel, my first op-ed, as these pieces are dubbed, was accepted. A regular weekly article on matters political followed.

It is amazing what follows regular application to any endeavour. In my case the articles quickly accumulated, and I could see how a book could be fashioned from them. Another volume followed, and then another. I ran a blog, opened a Facebook account, began to tweet. I had turned myself, willy-nilly and almost by chance, into a fullyfledged political journalist. Once a month or so I would select the best of my recent articles and post them into the Journalism section of the Forum.

No topic arouses greater emotion than the Middle East in general, or the Israel-Palestine situation in particular. I have no extreme views on these matters, or so I firmly believe - but some found what I wrote objectionable, and I generated some strong reactions. They remain on view in the Forum, which is fulfilling its purpose of generating discussion and the interchange of opinion.

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I have contributed also to the Drama section, where I make freely available a radio dramatisation for any aspiring radio producer who needs a radio script. And I am also represented in the Translation section, where I write about translating poetry with particular reference to a poem in Hebrew which I translated, working closely with the poet for whom English was not his mother tongue. It was subsequently published several times, and was used by Ralph McTell as the lyric to one of his songs. It appears as track 11 in his CD album “Sand in Your Shoes”.

Neville Teller

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The Poet Confesses My name presents me to you in a certain way, tells you much of who I am, affects the way you read my words.

Names, though, can lead astray, can lie and cheat and even steal.

For I am slim and shapely see how my breasts strain against the thin fabric of my pseudonym, see how the deep warm melanin creates the glossy richness of my skin, and how the epicanthic folds produce twin almonds of my eyes.

Go back and read my many posts now what do they mean?

Peter King

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.five repeated, the battery is low, yet it has to be said, that five are anonymous, the photo is random to embellish the tale. they wish to be private, yet cared for when i am gone. a promise is made. meanwhile they carry on. good work, company and care. while we need to recharge, move on. spoken sweetly.

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Sonja Benskin Mesher

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Iron sharpens iron It’s solitary work to hunt the muse, or so I thought. How else to make it new?

A scribe can follow someone else’s clue, a poet treads new paths in his own shoes.

So I set out - I burned my map, refused a guide, resolved to my own self be true.

A solitary genius through and through, I walked in circles. Barren, blank, confused.

Iron sharpens iron. Only when one walks with friends can one avoid the snare.

Many hands can build a poetry like a cathedral - larger, grander than each builder is alone. Join us, and dare to hunt, or else construct, the lyric ‘we’.

Jared Campbell

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What has the Hall Writers’ Forum ever done for me?

Can it really be five years have gone since first the Forum started? Goodness me!

I often wondered if I’d hold my own against so many others skilled in verse when I could only rhyme. But I was wrong: the Forum welcomes talent far and wide.

A challenge got me started. It was wide: write a fable, now that Æsop’s gone, about our modern times. What could go wrong?

Write in terza rima (new to me I’d never come across that form of verse before, yet now I claim it as my own).

Challenges to stretch the mind: I own they’ve broadened my perspectives far and wide.

What fun to play with novel forms of verse!

I little thought from sonnets I’d have gone to write a pantoum, villanelle. For me at first it seemed unstructured verse was wrong: I couldn’t understand free verse. How wrong to think it less demanding than my own attempts at discipline I forced on me.

Modern forms evoke a care as wide as my own love of metre. Had I gone to follow others’ writing, would my verse have blossomed more? At any rate, my verse needs the Forum’s fertile soil. It’s wrong to think it never would take root, but gone to flourish undiscovered on its own; instead it blooms! My eyes are opened wide by all the help the Forum gives to me.

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So what’s the Forum ever done for me?

Exposed my mind to other forms of verse, engaged in deep discussion with a wide circle of opinion, right or wrong.

I’ve learned to fight my corner on my own.

Without the Forum, I wonder where I’d gone.

So - five years gone, five years have meant for me expression of my own delight in verse, and, if it’s wrong, who cares? The Forum’s wide.

Darrell Barnes

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Forum Valleys of voices are like the best of kitchens without the life-denying domestic polish.

Make an experiment and see your guests eat it.

If it doesn’t kill them, you’ve done something great.

Alex Matraxia

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The Party I arrived late with a cheap bottle of plonk. It had been hard to find the place and first impressions weren’t favourable: it was one of those buildings from late last century that had been thrown up quickly and had already acquired an old-fangled look. Some rooks flapped overhead and seemed to mock me with their cawing. When with some difficulty I got through the front door, I found a party in full swing: loud music, people dancing, voices raised in laughter, and in disputation too. A smiling woman I recognised from long ago came straight up to me, thanked me for coming and greeted my poor bottle with the gratitude a vintage burgundy might bring forth. She was our host and made everyone feel welcome. I watched the dancing and listened to the music a while. Sometimes it was folk and I wondered if this was my sort of party at all; the next moment, crazily, it was Bach; and then for a seeming eternity Bob Dylan. The older people danced with admirable ease and skill. Around the walls were younger folk, and sometimes they would join in too, with a spontaneity that was to marvel at. Braver now, I made a tour of the house. From the kitchen came the sounds of an almighty stramash: our host was all for the women and an ironical man with the look of death about him was all for the workers, someone else weighed in for the working women, and another for the working women of our oppressed colonies, and never a foul word spoken or offence taken. Upstairs, I opened a door and saw a lady with a harp singing a pure spare simple song. In the next room weather-beaten travellers swapped tales of the dusty trail. On the stairs a group of inebriates argued the merits of the famous tenors and sopranos of the old days, singing snatches of their airs. Back downstairs people had begun to challenge each other to dance, and many joined in, while the onlookers clapped and shouted encouragement and the old people taught the old steps to the young.

They danced reels you had never seen before, of impossible intricacy, performed with incomparable grace; and also dances of no real steps at all, just pure energy and flux. It was noisy one minute and almost silent the next as people fell into slumber until a new guest would arrive and the party revived. Our host swept in with trays of 36

trembling blancmanges and sweetmeats in tinkling epergnes. Had she baked them just now? What energy, what hospitality! Dawn’s first beams filtered into the room, and everyone added their voice to a final chorus - young and old, the shy and the bold, those who loved the songs of the past and those who would make a new music for this new dawn - and out of this great multifarious company came a sound that was glorious.

Tony Hufton

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Heroical Verses on the Occasion of the Fifth Anniversary of the Hall Writers’ Forum So - five years on and fresh as if new-made Vigorous, strong, the years mere half-decade, HWF is as yet but in its prime, Rose-tinted platform not half as old as Time.

Hail! Ye Felicitators of the Forum Empowering mortals, lesser, to post for ’em.

Hail! Scribes and scribblers all, both sexes, (Or p’raps ‘neither’ added, lest that vexes), For all wisdom and poetics here enshrined, For politics and puffery whereso’er mined, Hail! Art and Music also those shy virgins Who trip out on the stage with but scant urgin’ (A rhyme I owe the Virgin Sturgeon poem I confess But without it and heptameter all would be mess), Hail! Like wise the critic, firm but fair, Prepared to say that comma’s “too much” there, The rhyme could be improved, the ending changed, Yet all so lightly done no-one’s estranged.

Far from’t. Suggestions sought and freely offer’d Are part of what we’d seek from any Prof; err’d We may have, but the light of reason (Tempered by encouragement in good season) Is what the Forum was, and is, and will be For. Huzzah! Doff your cap or mayhap trilby As I sing out three cheers for th’ HWF That make the welkin ring, e’en for the deaf, And may the fanfare sound for the Forum’s Lucy, Loud and long from Launceston, to the Vale of Pewsey.

A Gentleman 38

Birthday Party Catch my words and serve them at your party, a great wax five set atop the cake.

I can offer a lighter for the flame though plenty do the same.

Plenty can offer one better, in fact, without a temperamental wick.

I only offer, try this flicker, because they make me want to persist.

Cazzie Winterton

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In Memory of CHARLES BACCHUS (an African) who died March 31. 1762.

He was belov'd and Lamented by the Family he Serv'd was Grateful, and Humane and gave hopes of Proving a faithful Servant and a Good Man. Aged 16 Here titles cease! Ambitions oer!

And Slave of Monarch, is no more.

The Good alone will find in Heav'n, Rewards assign’d, and Honour giv'n.

I had slept very lightly since the fever took my brothers. I was my mother’s fifth boy and we were owned by Thomas Bond. We slept under the Blue Mountains at Mona Plantation with more than two hundred slaves. Jamaica was sugar, Mr Bond said. And there were more than four hundred and nineteen sugar-mills when I was born.

Mr Bond said I was too beautiful for the fields and the canes that scarred my hands.

I smiled at my weeping sisters when I was taken away to the big ship at Port Royal. My mother had wailed on losing her first son, and her tears had dried up now, she said. My father died the day before I was born. Mr Bond said he was a good man and loyal, though weak.

The boat slid away like a frightened fish, and I spent weeks in great fear and discomfort. We unloaded seven of their sailors and fourteen other slaves, their bodies disintegrating before our eyes as their convulsions ceased.

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I served tea for the pale-faced soldiers on board the ship and learned to smile at all times with my white teeth. The journey gave me practice in hearing and mouthing their language - hard and soft at the same time, crispy metal in my ears.

The captain often shrugged and called us animals, though his eyes were kind.

England was a shore of ice and shouting, chains for our feet and whips cracking around our heads. I bowed before them and was taken to a new Mr Bond, his eyes bluer than his brother’s. My home was a muddy place called Haselbech. Mr Richard Bond told me he was the largest landowner in Haselbech and his wife, Mrs Dorcas, told me she had wanted a little black boy because I reminded her of Jamaica and her first husband, Robert Fotherby, who had left her everything except his body. She told me he had had it opened for science and the benefit of mankind. She told me that she loved Mr Bond more fondly despite his love of money.

I was baptised Charles Bacchus on 18th October 1754. I was eight years old and opened my mouth wide to say the first of my given names, before clipping my lips and snapping my teeth to shout out the second. I only did this on my own as Mrs Dorcas told me never to speak. I was given the care of Rebecca and Sarah when the nurse was sick, as she often was, her breath reeking like death. Mrs Dorcas said there were no good servants to be got in Northamptonshire.

When guests came, I stood by the door with my chest out and my white teeth smiling and took their hats with my white gloved hands.

And sometimes the men patted my head, making the women laugh. from Culworth was a regular guest and was called on to give his opinion on all matters. This was due to his situation and age, rather than his taste or wit.

Rebecca and I traced the lines on our palms and she looked at me with her blue eyes and cried all night when her mother died. Little 41

Miss Sarah was too young to miss her, but I found Miss Rebecca in the early mornings lying on the cold floor at her mother’s door.

When we moved to Culworth to Mr Bond’s dry new house, Sarah soon smiled, but Rebecca shut her mouth tight and never spoke for over a year to any soul but me. Mr Bond asked me to speak for her and so all those words I had whispered or thought over the silent years came dancing out and flowered into sentences and Rebecca’s feelings shuddered awake. I called her Coco which is what my mother called me. Mr Bond understood how sad his daughter was and asked me to make her laugh as he had work to do to fix the business in Jamaica.

Mr Bond told me that one never knew whether things would go right in Jamaica. And I remember my mother telling me about the great quake that had set her great-grandmother free when it destroyed Port Royal and sucked all the buildings into the sand. Rebecca listened to the songs I sang in the old language about the great sadness of those who had known the motherland. My mother told me that my greatgrandmother was beaten to death after she was recaptured and left a son, my grandfather, who, in turn, left his soul and fourteen children at Mona.

Mr Bond went to London after Christmas in 1762 and said that I was a man now. Emma Downe, who walked so straight, would have made me a good wife, he said, but that, alas, it would never be. He brought me a new livery, gold and red, and I stood, tall and proud, at his door to welcome guests of great consequence. The cold, dry air made their boots ring and click like clocks.

I had suffered some sickness on arriving in England, but the cough that I tried to swallow a week later knocked me out. I was ashamed and Mr Bond said he was disappointed. I had to stay alone in the stable to protect the family. I knew Miss Rebecca would need me, so my body swelled and seemed to mend itself within a fortnight. But the sickness burrowed itself into my heart and as we knelt to pray on the fifth Sunday in Lent, I asked the Lord for forgiveness of my sins 42

and to offer comfort for Miss Rebecca, for I knew I was close to death. Mr Bond asked me if I had any brothers and sisters and when I told him my four brothers were dead, Vicar John Hutchins came close and told me to rejoice for I would be joining them soon.

Sir Michael Danvers himself came to see me and Mr Bond told him he wouldn’t have another African, even though he had no idea where he was going to find a good servant to replace me. Sir Michael Danvers said Mr Bond should be very grateful to have been served so well, as his experience with Africans had been unexceptionally bad.

Mr Bond said he knew as such and no man should think him ungrateful.

I didn’t send Miss Rebecca away when she kissed me goodbye, even though I knew I should have.

Natasha Walker

43

A sequence in Ottava Rima I. On Clearing the Loft The treasure’s down. The loft is empty now and boxes occupy the lounge and hall.

I rifle through the books and marvel how these mildewed pulpy fortresses were small and ineffective in defence. I know the reasons why I kept them, kept them all, but none of them has seen the light of day in years. It’s time to send them on their way.

But still there has to be a treasure box: home-made soft toys leak stuffing from their guts; the thirty-year-old darkened paradox of love and distance, child and adult, cuts to the quick. And then the medals. And the shock of seeing again the trace of sea-salt rust.

The documents. A man I never knew is real again; these should be kept on view.

II. Going out to see the world “Too old for that,” though only ten. I tried To find the words to counter. Nothing came.

And so my first LPs dispersed, denied to me, their crackly songs and dusty games now somehow sadder. Yet I never cried.

Disinterested cousins made their claims by proxy, justified by youth, and these my plastic sanctuaries were shelved, deceased.

44

One relic still remains. A BBC collection: 70s TV themes and songs.

The final item’s ruined cruelly “We’re going out to see the world” belongs to the past alone, grooves scratched in fury, unplayable and lost. And though I longed to heed the call to set off and explore, I couldn’t do it, but bought more and more.

III. Selling the treasure The van unpacked at six, we watch the sky, as grey as all the gathering undead who come to buy some junk for nothing. Dry old men in flat caps shuffle through the spread of books, find nothing, then amble away as silent as the drizzle. Underfed and overfed alike blurt numbers out, no haggles. Final offers. All throughout, the urge to kindle all-consuming flame, to torch the memories that are on sale, the music that I’ll never hear again, is something I resist. And as I deal out bargains by the handful, all the shame of loss is here on show for quick resale.

At midday we reload what's left unsold to give away to charities untold.

45

IV. Peg The books are going to do some good, for sure, delivered to the hospice shop. My aunt, who was actually a cousin, died there at the age of ninety. Old, frail and tired, she’d had enough. I visited to share some pointless news, her customary rants of garden Halal slaughter now replaced by a serenity of sorts. Her finger traced the outlines of the flowers I’d snapped and then brought out for us to talk about, the first few times. And later on, the oxygen would bubble as she slept. I’d leave the nurse a note to give to her, and hope that when I came again she’d be awake. But just that peaceful sleep remained; she died with such great dignity. The hospice did so much to keep her comfortable, and all that’s left for me to do, while shedding all this stuff I thought protected me from death, this stuff I couldn’t part with, all the fluff of life picked from its navel, is a deep breath (of what? Of recognition that enough of life has passed in self-distraction now?).

I sign the Gift Aid forms, unload, and go.

Stuart Estell

46

A Table of Delights ‘Whenever he saw dons in their black MA gowns at a formal dinner, his friend Matt’s description of them came immediately to mind.

Minus their colourful crimson robes and hoods, they looked like a flock of crows which had struck lucky in the park and having alighted by chance at an enormous oak picnic table, were engaged in pecking at the food before the guests arrived to shoo them away.’ Sir Geoffrey Faber The Oxford Apostles.

The HWF is rather like a picnic table, with all sorts of delights to savour and explore, and to which we are invited to add our contributions for others to sample, when we have the time and the inclination to so. We have ‘struck lucky’ to find it, but no-one ever shoos us away - quite the opposite. The best thing about it is how much encouragement we are all given to stay and add to the riches on offer - that and the enjoyment in reading the many fine contributions from the student members, whose enthusiasm and commitment I saw for myself at one of Lucy and Peter’s workshops Jamie Whelan

47

Shapeshifter One second you’re staring straight demanding I look back - see the history of your glance: the chief who sold you, the ship that brought you to Cains; to generations of abuse, survival, struggle still ongoing demanding my response.

You look away switch your form: you’re the man next door, seen in the daily commute to office, factory, shop, school anyone of my fellow travellers on life’s road or even a celebrity.

Whatever shape you chose you intrigue.

Carolyn O’Connell

48

The Boring Limerick Challenge Those limericks had us all snoring.

They were so indescribably boring that the tedium rose up the back of my nose and worked my brain loose from its mooring.

They bored us with tales of a bin and the shades of grey wore very thin; then the woman from Slough…

That’s enough, though, for now.

Will someone please bring me the gin?

Rose Anderson

49

Part Two

Pieces written previously

51

The Robin Redbreast’s Song - a Duet for Soprano and Bass Soprano: How bright and clear the robin redbreast’s song Bass: Keep out. I’m bigger than I look.

And very strong.

Soprano: That our dreary lives doth gently sweeten Bass: This my patch. If you want a fight, That’s fine by me But you’ll get beaten.

Soprano: And lifts our hearts with its life-enhancing trill Bass: I warn you: I don’t mess about I fight to kill.

Soprano: I would that it sang on and on and on Bass: Well, that looks to be enough for now: The coward’s gone.

Justin Gosling

53

Munni Mann: or, A Vision in a Dream A Fragment (consider revising) (Interrupted by a personal computer from Bluescreen) I had just put the finishing touches to my ‘The Unrime of the Old Salt’, * which I’d been persuaded by certain parties to expand up to as much as three verses, when I was awakened by a persistent knocking.

Flinging up the window, I could see at once that my Bluescreen order must have arrived. “Lob it over”, I said to the deliverer as he waved his mobile touchscreen towards me. “No can do, Squire”, he replied.

“You have to sign it with the pointer.”

After this it’s a bit hazy. I must have signed somehow because when I next woke up, the man from Bluescreen had disappeared and the boxes were still there. (At this point I must confess to having helped myself to a fairly generous slug of Naughty Boy’s Friend so it’s possible I did take a short nap before going out and retrieving the boxes.)

Next thing I knew I was unpacking the boxes and arranging everything on my trusty old work table. I was getting rid of (finally) my ancient Doors 3.78 machine and replacing it with this fully featured Doors 15.1, including the very latest touchy-feely knobs and knockers and fantastic multi-wobble bell tones. What’s more, everything talked to everything else wirelessly, so I had nothing more to do than plug it all in and sit back and wait. Plugged it in, napped, switched it on. Absolutely nothing. Hours on the phone to Bluescreen, worse than useless.

Finally, I accepted defeat, pushed it all to the end of the table and put back in place my old Doors 3 machine. Almost at once, I found myself typing something in. The words appeared before my eyes as if someone else were writing them. I was like someone possessed. I felt a terrible surge of sobriety. All the phoning and trying out had kept a glass from my hand. My clear headedness was going to my 54

head. I knew I would suffer for it later but I couldn’t stop. The ideas just kept coming, however fast I got them down.

Four stanzas (and not just four-liners) scrolled themselves down the screen. And then all at once there was this horrible cacophony. The stuff at the back of the table started vibrating. The screen lit up and began flashing. The Bluescreen logo was disappearing and reappearing in ever more lurid colours and an incessant ringing and knocking drowned out all thought of thought. I tried to grapple with the controls, finally gave up on it, yanked out the plug and downed a severe dose of Naughty Boy’s. I think I may then even have dozed off.

The next thing I remember, everything was normal. The four stanzas stared back at me and all I could think was: “Where the policeman did that come from?” There wasn’t an original thought in my head as I reached for a fresh bottle of...

In Albion did Munni Mann A sleazy treasure house decree: Where Thames, the tainted river, ran Past bank vaults numberless to man Down to a fished-out sea.

So twice five miles of cut and thrust Housed wharves and towers built fit to bust; And there were rooftops bright with swimming pools, Where blossomed many a money-laden spree; And here were mores ancient as town walls, Including scandal, fraud, chicanery.

But oh! that deep financial spasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a hedge fund cover!

A savage place! unholy and affronted As e’er upon a haven isle were hunted Tax dodgers wailing for their own dear mother!

And from this spasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, 55

As if the men in braces red were heavy breathing, A money-laundry momently was cast: Amid whose swift half-intermitted blast Transactions fizzed like bats from hell Or deal on deal beneath the addict’s spell: And mid these dancing flights at once and ever It flung up momently the tainted river.

Five miles meandering with a hazy notion ’Twixt poor and rich the tainted river ran, Then reached the bank vaults numberless to man, And sank in tumult to a plastic ocean; And ’mid this tumult Munni heard from far The same old voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the house of treasure Floated midway on the waves Where were heard the gasps of pleasure From the launderers, money slaves; It was a miracle of rare device A money treasure house with heart of ice!

A gentle with no love for war In a vision I recall: It was an Internationalist And with his speech he raised his fist Calling for fair shares for all.

Could I revive within me The tenor of his thrust, To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with others true and just I would pluck that house from air, That sleazy house! those hearts to break!

56

And all who heard and all who cheered, Now all should cry, Feel weird! Be afeared!

His red-rimmed eyes, his crazy beard!

On your knees, despair and quake Tighten your belt, get used to bread, For he on all the cake hath fed, And drunk too much to stay awake. * Unfortunately, no traces of this have ever been found.

(Apologies to SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE) David Braund

57

Vale A sky, white burning blue or blue burning white, beat out copper lines and strung them behind the hedge.

The birds follow the shock line and trip glide on the mud rust that has clung to the copper.

See a red kite buffet air over dry stumps, smoothing taller, darker, river pitted bark.

The birds carve up the wires, blunting light, and wrenching glide sight.

Cazzie Winterton

58

The Case of Otto Schwarzkopf Your case Otto Schwarzkopf has reached Jerusalem.

In the leather A.L.L.1 branded black and Otto Schwarzkopf a Prague address.

On the back a hotel sticker mountains of the Tyrol prayer-shawl draped with snow pine pierced blue skies a lake you swam in?

You went up into the mountain alone or was it a family outing?

The case gapes wide a soundless cry they pause to gaze at it at you Otto.

Where now your content?

Under-wear towel toothbrush shirt socks the works of Heinrich Heine.

Family snaps.

59

In the winter of forty-four the German order just take what you need twenty kilos apiece one suitcase each you’re off to the east no fuss leave everything else to us.

Now it’s here on show the handle your palm warmed Otto cold iron clasps rust covered.

Reference your trip A.L.L.1 Theresienstadt to Auschwitz transportation trucks as per specification 7 cows or 30 pigs or 120 Jews.

Your case Otto Schwarzkopf has made its way without you to Jerusalem.

Translated by Neville Teller from the Hebrew, “Otto Schwarzkopf’s Suitcase” by Shmuel Hupper.

60

Reclamation Something serious has gone amiss: don’t ask me what it is.

The usual ‘lost’ is sought and found.

My loss is different: it’s the ground that comes, then leaves my mind.

I stand on it, but cannot find.

You shower affection tell me our connection; you bring back my past, but I hardly know you.

Your tales of our past yield little clue.

I sweat with shame guessing your name.

Don’t quiz me please, something’s gone wrong: your name, my name, and where we belong.

I lost our relationship somewhere, somewhere I can’t repair.

Your face is so familiar, so dear, but who are you?

Too shy to admit if I ever knew you.

When you come in, I ask, ‘Who brought you here?’

But where is ‘here’?

What used to be one is now so many.

The name leaves the face and the usual place; their threads part company -

61

When I call them as one, I actually call none; they take their time to become someone.

My memory goes off and on; a stranger becomes a friend, but the known’s unknown: so the ‘stranger’ I saw was my son-in-law, but I called a walker on the street my brother.

The words we have known, the ties that have grown all lost in the growing haze. your help I need to search the maze.

You may be known, or unknown.

Just hold my hand until I stand to find what went amiss.

As others’ ‘losts’ are also found, I shall regain some firmer ground.

Mohammad Talib

62

Impedimenta The gallery was small and simple: entrances at either end, and on each undoored wall a single work in oils.

One was light and love and tenderness it glowed with hope, was bright with loyalty and joy; opposite it hung a drab and lifeless scene that told of songs unsung and optimism crushed.

Between them, strung across the room, its ends somehow extruded from the paint, a thin blue plastic line looped shallowly above a leatherette banquette.

From it dangled freshly washed yet curiously grimy underthings, and shirts and sheets and socks and yellow cotton dusters, dishcloths, nappies, plates and mugs, stained steel utensils, and the body of a woman whose contorted features nonetheless conveyed release.

Peter King

63

The Gibbon First swinging back and forth as lazy as a metronome, then hand by hand along the branch, a moment lost then found again, a shadow in the trees, as quick, as light, he swings, he flips, he flings himself across pure empty space, conspicuous to him alone the aim, the branch at hand now passed turns in a moment, turns without a pause, tracing a path that only he can see, or can’t ahead of time, can only trace a moment at a time - he flips, he sits.

Perfectly still, as if to contemplate the greater apes, aloof from such displays, grounded in their greater substance, greater strength, and lesser flexibility, not noticing the space that bridges branches, or seeing but unwilling to let go.

He sits. He wails - a piercing, rising cry.

The clear and rising cries at first sustained, suddenly fractured, broken into chirrups.

He screams at nothing. Then his bride joins in and now they cry together, faithful, loud.

Jared Campbell

64

Trier, the Moselle cranes

I take my rest on a rock on the south bank of the Moselle, Beside me two giants wave their cracked and knotty-brown mossencrusted arms, Out over the lazily lapping backwash at the restless river’s edge as if to say, Hey, wait for us; we would like to come too.

We are tired of standing here; our work is long done, please take us with you, Years ago we listened attentively as the men who used us spoke of your wanderings, Men with grimy faces tanned by the Eifel sun, brown as the leather aprons they wore, their hands coarse as sandpaper, We heard them tell of your serpentine course whose path you scooped out for yourself and with little help given, How you hastened eastwards to join your more celebrated sister, Weighed down with the burdens created by men as they placed their fortunes in your hands.

How you wove past vertiginous castles, 65

Towering generals precariously balanced on crumbling outcrops, Inspecting the straight-backed green lines, row upon row, their perfect dressing covering the slopes down to the impatient water.

If only we could have stood with them, a fitting place for us, For we too are giants, we too could have surveyed the land, And smiled down upon the slate-topped villages beneath, As their crooked chimneys sent their blackened must swirling up to greet us.

We would have mounted sentry, secure in our footing, shading our eyes, As we peered into the setting sun, scanning the horizon for the invader.

We could have guarded the bridges, marshalled the defence, repulsed the foe, led the counter-attack.

Then, later, when darkness first stalked the land, strutting and posturing and propagating its perversions, From our lofty Hunsrück eyrie we would have cried out across valley, hill and stream, Summoning the light to insolate raven-black night… …Instead we found ourselves here, marooned, lying at anchor, Observing life’s undertow from our station, encamped next to the river, For we cannot see out beyond our more limited horizons, To the west, a little way upstream, the footings of the bridge that was already there when man made us, impede our view.

Alas we never did see it crossed by the proud warriors of the empire who created it, their short swords flashing in the midday-sun.

To the east that bridge brought to life by a later empire, destroyed likewise by its own presumption, limits our field of vision.

No, our gaze is straight ahead, we observe the expanse before us as we have always done, worn out and long ago sated, And yet, and yet… …Sometimes in the twilight, when the tiny iridescent kingfisher, Which nests on the islet under the lee of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Brücke, 66

Plunges into the fast foaming torrent and emerges, wriggling stickleback in beak, triumphant, We giants nod in approbation, and watch as it darts along the riverbank, glistening above the sun-starred waters, Then perches on the white-flaked roof of the derelict landing stage, And warmed by the dying embers of the hot summer’s day, spreads its gleaming wing feathers out to dry.

Jamie Whelan

67

Shakespeare Goes to a Poetry Workshop or “Be, Not Be?” Feeling self conscious, Will takes from his case his final draft - a scrawled much-altered screed apologises for its lack of grace, puts on his glasses and begins to read: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red, than her lips red: If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound: I grant I never saw a goddess go, My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare, As any she belied with false compare.

A silence falls and lengthens; undeterred he starts to scan the room for any signs of approbation - then a voice is heard: “I wonder, do you need the last two lines?”

Peter King

68

My Soul is a String My soul is a string that runs down my middle From the base of my throat to the plane of my coccyx And widens itself into an infinite regression And is tightened by my love It does not meet my neck, and it does not reach my bowels, And it loosens when I relax my legs in bed When I think that I can only sleep in the dark and not the light I feel my soul in my navel and roll over And think that I love my girl so much- she is very small, and she is okay, And I travel to her a hallway and staircase away Then I eat on the things that she lays in her bed And end all her poems with anger and death, and with my thrashing and my striking I kill my girl with words I know how to use.

My girl has me pick her up sometimes and stretch my soul out over my own back And she feels her back crack by her shoulder blades and loves me And my soul is a string like a blade of glass that will never itself snap Then I must love my girl, I love her and screw myself up into a ball And pinch the strings beneath my throat and smile and swallow all by myself And bend my eyes up and stretch out my back like an animal on tarmac I feel my soul when I sigh and become lines on a rack Or a depth of black water, My soul is a string that restricts my own breath I am choked for words sometimes, But I find them again from nowhere when my skin becomes one thing Stretched round and round me into my armpits, 69

it flashes beneath my neck into the shooting pains of life Then my limbs become limbs away from my soul, outside and thickened My girl lives in her bed only these days She sleeps but a hallway and staircase away I eat chips and popcorn and cooked fish in her bed And all our bad writing is ending in death.

Alexander Bridge

70

A fig for Tony Harrison Apollo’s laurel traditionally wreathes The poets who lasting marble seek By writing in Latin or in Greek, But not the champion of demotic Leeds.

This tree’s root sups at the Muses’ cascade, But its leaves, connoting biblical prude, Don’t suit a poet who’d rather go nude, And fruit, not leaf, is the right accolade.

Though kumquat’s good for ambiguation, Fruitility’s lust for all that’s pleasureable, Sexual, sensual, intellectual, Needs fleshier signs of gratification.

A ripe unroyal orb’s meet for one who Never συκοφαντηζ had the guts To show the fig to canary butts.

Unlaurelled poet, I give a fig for you.

Sting in the tale The fig is not a fruit in essence, its flower’s inside its infructescence.

It’s made in symbiotic play: Sweet flower and wasp agaonidae.

Sandie Byrne

71

Haikus The blackbird gorging on fat summer berries fears no-one but the moon Hot July afternoon the first dry leaves of autumn fall to the grass I lift the dead moth and place it on my palm no distance between us November chill a single red poppy lies face up on the pavement Low December sun flitting across drawn curtains the shadows of birds Rose Anderson

72

A Poem Is A poem is as fleet as a two-edged cow As slow as an orchid in June As distracting as radishes back to back As droll as an open balloon.

A poem’s not nothing but something as well O poem, you are and you’re not A poem is speechless but bursts into song A poem’s an unfinished knot A poem is gasping for breath on the shore You may land it or drown it at sea A simile bent like a spent metaphor An aching desire to be Its rhythms have driven it way way away Its rhymes or its reasons restrain it Picking its way through words it won’t say It seeks freedom but seeks to constrain it It’s the African sun locked in the Arctic The nearness of nuclear frost The strength of a thin living envelope The making of what must be lost The atoms are fractious, the quarks all awink The molecules teasing and sly The darkness has woken and started to blink consciousness rains from the sky

73

A poem’s as slow as a two-edged cow As fleet as an orchid in June As distracting as radishes back to back As droll as an open balloon.

David Braund

74

The biographer’s lament The human truth For Lucy Newlyn I’m emptying the boxes in which I stored the exhumed bits of you, touching again the things you touched, a broken wind harp, a shard of hand-blown bottle crusted with brown sediment, some lines you crossed through with a scratchy quill that spattered ink.

I’ve filed my notes cross-referenced for those who ask how I worked on you, with you; my book is closed.

For the first time in a decade I dine alone When I saw you as a boy skipping stones on lovely Otter, a young man crashing down Helvellyn in the dark scattering shale trying not to spill a trout, a grown man screaming when a surgeon picked hard turds out of you with a scalpel, an old man pillow wet with tears for a son you’d knelt to bless one night of icicles, I thought to write your life, hoping to be worthy.

You refused to be tethered.

I tracked your balloon across so many fields and woods and cities learning to weigh the wind, and when winds failed, to make predictions with sextant, compass and known maps of your next landfall, to create 75

a plausible fiction of your meanders.

To those who ask, but is it true?

I reply that in my love for you I was true to the human truth of you.

I’ve written enough poetry to know what it’s like to be blown-away in Grasmere by a gale, and write no more for what’s the point, it’s all been said, our hopes for poetry fulfilled, but still it coaxes us and so, shame-faced, we tender little things, not best, but best that we can do, grateful for any brief resuscitation.

When I slept and waked with you I wondered who breathed life in who.

I shall miss the questions we never answered and no longer ask, miss not so much the seer or the seen as the seeing, not the speaker nor the spoken but the speaking.

I hope these boxes some other guest will entertain but never will I hear a voice like yours again, your ceaseless, probing, gleaming, urgent peroration: I shall miss the conversation.

Tony Brignull

76

Muse If I knew your name I’d whisper it to the trees. If I could see your face I’d touch it with my hands.

If I could hear your voice I’d catch it with my tongue. If I could smell your body I’d keep it close to mine. If I had by heart the words of your most lovely melody, I’d make sure that they were sung.

If I knew your mind, if I only knew your mind, I’d hold it like a captive bird, or like a bell that goes on quivering long after it has rung. And if I could foresee the way you’d come to me, I’d score it in salt forever on the silken sands.

Lucy Newlyn

77

Wensleydale in Winter Pen Hill in Winter the hushes and levels black cuneiform on snow.

Bird on the white bank relaying the hill’s story in black miniscule Sandie Byrne

78

Metrical Experiments I. Alcaic

The Geiger counter clicks every now and then.

Atomic changes happen from time to time.

A thousand million chance events draw Pictures impressive and stark, but not “sane”.

Endangered logic struggles to grasp the new Result of scientific research and thought.

We peer by light of day with blind eyes, Quantum mechanics the guide we must trust.

One unsound cat, the Schrödinger kind, that is Dead and alive, until one explores its state, Cat-form of Hegel’s dialectic, Raises the question: is this the “real” world?

The Geiger counter registers one more click.

Plane polarisers filter the gentle light, But we, who can’t make sense of such things, Stumble through shadows of night, all star-struck.

79

II. Sapphic Sappho, Sappho! No one can hear you calling wayward lovers, lost to you now forever.

We are lately seventeen turning eighteen; mere lads and lasses.

Lesbos, Lesbos! Gone is your former glory, island haven, scene of a migrant crisis.

Fled are Gaia, Cybele, Aphrodite.

Everything passes.

Gerard Lally

80

Listening to Grace Jones Walking down the street, listening to Grace Jones.

If her voice is in my head right now, if it’s in rhythm, with my own walk, then am I Grace Jones? Do I have grace?

Am I Grace Jones? Or what?

The leaves are dying as it is now that time of year when they die quietly and attractively, dark red and curling up. They do this slowly, no rhythm.

They don’t know who they are.

Maybe they don’t want to.

Good for them. But I can’t be so complicit. That’s the trouble. I can’t conspire against myself like the leaves.

So I keep walking, no rain, just a breeze, listening to Hurricane, feeling famous even though it’s fake, making a big fuss about walking, like an amateurwalker. Not trying to be clever, trying to make a lot out of nothing.

Absolute nothing. It’s full of good stuff, full of bright burning leaves, full of moods breaking 81

apart and out of their shells, their tiny heads.

The roads are full of tiny heads. I think maybe I’ve seen a face or two before.

This is a clean season, autumn, full of the smell of burning.

Do I have any Grace at all?

Alex Matraxia

82

Lady Spens at the window It’s black and bitter cold, and the wind’s up. The child won’t sleep.

I’ve had her in my arms for hours, singing, piecing together old songs of cats and kittens, rolling down hills and the like. No songs of love and passion. They catch in my throat.

He’s been gone two weeks three days, not that I’m counting. The new moon is holding the old faded ball of last month’s. I’ve put the child down. The singing has stopped her crying at least.

I stare past the lantern on the windowsill, mute now. My hair is in knots from winding it round my fingers again and again and again. *** His shoes have washed ashore.

Stuart Estell

83

Found Poem Pontefract and Castleford Express 15th November 1902 FATALLY INJURED AT SNYDALE COLLIERY Touching the death of Isaac , a coalminer.

An inquest was conducted by Major Arundel, coroner, at the Jubilee Hotel.

On Monday deceased went to work at 1.15 p.m. and was brought home in the ambulance at 4.30 p.m.

Wife of deceased identified the body and said deceased was 58 years of age.

Dr Finch attended deceased but gave no hope from the first.

Witness was deceased’s “mate”.

He was working about nine or ten yards from deceased, heard a fall of roof.

He shouted “Isaac, are you all right?” but got no reply.

Witness ran to the spot and found deceased covered with coal and stone.

Deceased said “Oh Sam, do come here.”

Witness had tested the roof and considered it sound, and that it was a safe working place.

It was well timbered.

There were three props under the place that fell.

Two were standing, and one had been knocked out.

Deceased was a careful, experienced workman.

A verdict of “Accidental death” was returned.

Tony Hufton

84

Apocalypse I, jonny longmane, of no fixed abode, sleeper of a thousand doorways, pisser of derelict stairwells, diner on leftover lattes and throwaway fries, have seen through the eyes of god, pressed my grizzled visage into the mask of divinity and stared through portholes of omnipotence, onlooker at the end of days.

From flattened boxes and sodden mattresses, I have seen the screens at Piccadilly show footage of nerve-gassed children, newly orphaned, their eyes glassy with horror, as the suited crowds pressed on automaton, stroking their smartphones, and the tourists posed for selfies against a panoramic backdrop of smouldering cities.

I have seen my favourite benches grow spikes like medieval torture instruments, seen greed metastasise, spreading its tumours on hands and lips, fossilising the heart; I have counted it in the shrinking pile of coins in my upturned hat from year to year, as pounds gave way to pennies, cigarette butts, chewing gum, used condoms.

From the alleyway beside the cinema, I have felt the explosions shaking my sleeping bag, heard screams and gunfire amplifying my nightmares, but when I wake, shuddering, the crowd spills out laughing and taxis home from the apocalypse, mocking the homeless with brazen revelry, propping their lives on the tightrope of credit.

I have seen the children turning to smack for sanity, seen contrasts astronomical, incomputable: infants living on landfills while dogs ride in plush limousines; I have seen warzones viewed as fail compilations, journalists tweeting calls for genocide, and mass death commodified: ‘everything you need for your slaughterhouse’.

When I ran into the street, prophesying with the urgency of rain, they locked me up as a drunk. In the interludes of starvation, I am almost glad that I have nothing and am not complicit, not profiting from 85

such abomination. The angels of innocence, with the cleanest hands, lie dying in the gutters. The seals are open, the time is now.

Tom Clucas

86

The Enemy My youth was just a dark tempestuous storm, Crossed here and there with bolts of brilliant Sun; Thunder and rain have taken such a toll That in my garden no ripe fruit remains.

See how I’ve reached the autumn of ideas, And now I have to scratch with spade and rake, To gather up afresh the flooded earth, Where water washes holes as large as graves.

And who knows if the new flowers that I dream Will find in this soil washed out like the shore The magic element to make them strong?

Oh Pain! Oh Pain! Time eats away at life, And the dark Enemy gnawing at our hearts Grows and strengthens from the Blood we lose.

Charles Baudelaire (translated by Brian Smith)

87

L’Ennemi Ma jeunesse ne fut qu’un ténébreux orage, Traversé ça et là par de brillants soleils; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage Qu’il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.

Voilà que j’ai touché l’automne des idées, Et qu’il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées, Où l’eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.

Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur?

- Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie, Et l’obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le cœur Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!

Charles Baudelaire

88

The Mirror How had she come here?

That answer was easy.

She had looked in the mirror.

Then she had walked into the mirror at which moment she walked into herself.

Or not herself, but herself in mirror world. Where she was still herself.

She was still Alice.

Alice was a fixed point in time.

She was safe only in who she thought she was while everything around her was changing so fast, faster than breakfast down to dinner and sleep and the next day on its crazy round of meals and conversations.

Time was backwards but she was still going forwards when the White Queen tried to grab her escaping shawl, flinched at her own blood and finally pricked her skin as Alice helped her fasten the cloth around her shoulders.

Alice tried her best to help the Queen. but Alice hadn’t understood that it was Alice who was wrong.

‘I’m talking to myself again,’ she noticed.

She was still a child, 89

and her confusion was that of a child’s.

These adults, even if they were chess pieces ran past her complaining and crying until the knight caught her in his arms and lifted her high in the air.

She didn’t want to be a prisoner.

She needed to cross the brook and become Queen Alice but the White Knight was too strong, holding her upside down, trapped inside her own logic.

Jude Cowan Montague

90

Re-hash Forum members were invited to take a very famous poem and re-hash it in a different form; this is a selection of Tony Hufton’s many entries to the challenge.

1.

The tide’s going out.

Everything’s dark and iffy.

Give us a cuddle.

2.

I’ve lost confidence growing old. Just one e.g.: peaches freak me out.

3.

What? He’s got a son!

Me, zilch. I ate a crap pie.

Life stinks, then you die.

4.

When they come to turn off the light, don’t accept it: kick up a fuss; fight.

5.

No more clubbing, love.

It was fun, but now basta.

Ciao babe, I’m wasted.

Tony Hufton

91

Ave atque Vale Arriving just in time for morning break, His beige face fades into the magnolia wall.

He hopes to catch a colleague for a chat.

The HR woman offers him some tea.

Irrelevant, ingratiating, dull, His conversation turns around himself In pressing re­invention of the past.

“I remember when we first took girls.”

Workstations ring the room where he held court ­ The chair he sat in cleared away as junk.

His memories are a trap for busy folk Who ‘must get on’, and naturally he is No longer helpful as a referee, His expertise as Head of Classics now As useful as a VHS cassette.

She turns. “Do you take sugar? I forget.”

Brian Smith

92

I’ve news for you I’ve news for you and little of it cheers you’ll feel as someone drop-kicked in the scrotum there’s someone out there thinking your ideas.

It’s the spectral dread that every writer fears, his thoughts purloined before the chance to wrote ’em.

If it’s news to you then little of it cheers.

Your aperçus, your insights, your mind’s dears already coined by others ere you float ’em.

There’s someone out there using your ideas.

The world rates you then derivative, and jeers at your titles, themes, and words ad infinotum bad news for you, so little of it cheers.

The grinning face in the penumbra leers; pre-doppelgangers stalk - oh god rot’em!

Those people out there swiping your ideas.

For those who feel unique, it’s what brings tears, the thought of others dancing round your totem.

It’s news for you and nothing of it cheers: there’s someone there gazumping your ideas.

Mike Spilberg

93

Boy playing the cello For Stefano The chair he sits on is two hundred years old; It modulates like the voice of his grandfather Welcoming him to sit on his lap.

He straightens his back holding the cello As if they’re old friends. The two are about the same size.

This tree was chosen to make a different kind of music From that of rain and wind that fell on its leaves, Or from the dry wood-pecker knock, the scratching Claws of squirrels up and down its bark, branches and twigs, The song of cardinals, robins and blue jays darting back and forth.

The boy holds the cello in his arms. His eyes are full of music, Dreamy with notes about to happen, and the bow lies near Like a promise of a journey. When he begins to play, I think the heart of the tree gladdens in the dry, Sunny house, giving into memories that long for summer Thunderstorms, dawn choruses, in a low, echoing sound.

The wood, transformed, returns to its essence, As the boy brings the marvelous into the house.

Carmen Bugan

94

Romance sans Paroles When those who scarcely knew him thought him hard They wronged him. If a numb heart were to dance, A life completely empty of romance Could never heal a soul so battle­scarred.

Untrusting, stubborn, always on his guard, Reading aggression in the slightest glance, Yet pleading silently for just a chance To show a secret inner self un­marred.

A flight of fancy in a leotard Freeing imagination in a trance.

A song, a touch of magic, to enhance His dreary path along the boulevard.

Light­hearted, liberated, see him prance No longer caring that they look askance.

Brian Smith

95

Troublemaker We demonstrated to resist The old white men of state.

“He’s just a bloody terrorist,” Said dad, “He kills, he maims. He’d hate To leave his five-star gaol Or see the loath’d colonialists fail: It’d rob him of his cause.

A terrorist stays out of power And leaves those dull political chores To those who work. Now, every hour They come in droves to Joburg’s squat Or southern farms, their homes forgot.

The money’s good; if life’s so bad They’d work in Mozambique or Chad.

There’s no one forcing them to stay They could just up and go away.”

And so my dad summed up this traitor, Comparing him to one who later Lent his face to Occupy; A fine redemption for the Guy. And so, with Robert, Charles and co., Nelson could have led to more Repression, hatred, death, but no; Released, he stepped onto the shore Across from Robben Island’s wall And looked around and called on all Who raged, yet loved this frightened land To close their ranks and hand in hand Not merge, but share their beating colours And curve up high in one broad arch

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Of pride and curiosity and valour A multicoloured choir to march Upon the future world And see a dream unfold.

Mandela free at last in glory: A happy-ever-after-story.

It seemed to be a prince’s tale A proof that honour will prevail.

He could’ve simply sat aloft His throne and murmured wisdom, truth An academic sceptre-holder, soft On enemies and mightily aloof From the mire and filth of the change That gripped a nation in rifle-range Of fifty thousand pale-faced boys Ignoring all the stench and noise That filled the townships, villas, farms And biting dogs, drumbeats, alarms That punctured life and barged ahead And made my father shake his head.

You could’ve just stopped, Mandela.

You’d earned your freedom, Mandela.

And yet you shared it out with those who gnarled and pushed and rose to charge And channelled all their panicked pain in dreams of tolerance and calm Not dreams aloft, but even staged upon the rugby field’s crushed grass The world was witness to the change and witness to your sovereign balm And started to believe in you and all the hope the world at large Reserves for wonders, swept towards the Cape whose name began to pass 97

Its truth across the land which rose in song and dance and bountiful mirth And fanned the feeling, strong and warm. Your wisdom touched the slow red earth And urged mankind to build the homes for equal souls and bridge the cleft That murderous picks had struck, creating races crude and poorly traced Upon our sense of right and wrong and black and white, with nothing left To give us any reason to rethink on what our lives are based.

And I am sure that secretly, we never thought that death could strike You down. Our future: Eden? Hell? Our fate now left for us to make.

Natasha Walker

98

The Bodrum Carol Away from his mother, just stones for his bed The three­year­old Aylan lies on a beach, dead.

The stars in the bright sky look down where he lies A drowned refugee boy attracting the flies.

A camera is waiting, the media awake: This poor little Syrian no percentage will take.

A scoop for the papers, more drama for Sky ­ They’ll stay by his side till the deadline is nigh.

Remember his family. I ask you to keep Their pain in your memory whenever you weep.

Bless all these dear children in our tender care And bring them to Europe to live with us here.

(Tune: Kirkpatrick) Brian Smith

99

From Deciduous to Evergreen Writing started in November’s sad darkness with words falling with the leaves that match lost thoughts never written but cast away unloved, unspoken but upon this page they surge and rise for others read and take them in new leaves of literature waiting to flower and friendship formed sketching life’s changes in the word.

No subject’s barred, or sorrow slated only gentle suggestion and courtesy, fear not to post and read others and a journey will be opened where the thought will form be written and posted and hang forever evergreen.

Carolyn O’Connell

100

Part Three

Editors’ Choices

101

Oxford Times Sunday morning, 5 am.

The pasty morning sun was coming up over Magdalen Bridge. Great Tom was just finishing its chime, awakening a dozen more distant sluggards. Oxford’s own dawn chorus was vainly attempting to rouse the sleeping city. A tall, fair-haired young man in his early twenties leant forward over the stone parapet and stared down at the river below. An unseasonably stiff breeze, all that remained of the night’s storms, ruffled the grey-black surface, sending gently pulsating concentric circles of water from the middle of the shallow channel to the banks of the Cherwell and away out of sight under the central span of the bridge.

He stood immobile, fixed in thought, the collar of his long black overcoat turned up to ward off the morning chill, his black-tie dangling loose in the wind, beneath his crumpled dress-shirt. A twothirds empty champagne bottle teetered precariously on the mossy stone next to him.

‘Bugger, bugger, bugger…’ He shivered, less to dispel the effects of the cold than in an attempt to cast off some unwelcome memory.

His arm suddenly shot out at right-angles, sending the bottle spinning down into the river, spewing out the frothing remains of the previous night’s revelry, a dying comet, which fizzled out as it collided with the chilled waters.

An oddly ancient-looking white and orange milk-float whirred past on its way back to its base on the eastern outskirts of the city, its day already ended, before that of the good citizens of Oxford had even begun. Its contents were now distributed in twos and threes around the centre of the city, cold, white, glass sentinels, dripping with condensation, standing stiffly guard outside porter’s lodges and in the doorways of the small shops eking out their cautiously optimistic existence along the High, lined up too on the steps of the drab 103

student houses in Long Wall and of their prettier and better attired cousins in Holywell Street.

He had left the college ball early, after the fight with Charly. The extended set with John and Mark had gone really well; they had finished playing at half-past midnight. The audience had been small but appreciative; people from his own college had turned up to support them, some out of curiosity and others because they were mates. Both groups had come across at the end to give over-excited praise in that loud and uninhibited manner only possible after the consumption of excessive amounts of alcohol. He had been simultaneously flattered and embarrassed by their excesses. John and Mark had withdrawn into the background as usual, to agonise over the minor imperfections of their performance, a duff note here, a slightly mistimed entrance there. Charly had come in with ‘the bitch’, Jennifer double-barrelled- pain-in-the-arse. They had both been drinking.

‘Where the fuck were you this morning? You promised me that you’d help get the food for the picnic tomorrow. I was waiting for you for half-an hour in Cornmarket. I tried ringing you - I texted twice - I suppose you were sleeping off the hangover from last night.’

The accusatory tone had become increasingly familiar of late and he had become resigned to its manner of delivery; with Charly’s professed outrage at his behaviour supported by the head-shaking and disgusted expression of pain-in-the-backside, looking as if she were about to projectile-vomit in his direction. Why was it that they always seemed to come at you in pairs when they wanted to eviscerate you - why couldn’t these two just stick to watching over each other’s handbags in the loo, instead of unloading twin barrels point-blank between the eyes, at every perceived slight or imagined offence to their dignity.

‘Sorry, the alarm didn’t go off and I’d forgotten to charge the phone’, he mumbled, excuses which had seemed more than adequately feeble 104

to him, even before they had left his lips. Later in the evening they had had a real stand-up row following these opening skirmishes. The stupid thing, though, was that he couldn’t be arsed. Not-being-arsed had become a state of being of late - he couldn’t put a date on when this had started, it had crept up on him slowly and stealthily. The excitement and the novelty of the first year at university, the desire to immerse himself in this new-life, to establish himself, to seize every outlet for his undoubted talents, to dazzle all before him with charm and brilliance, had imperceptibly given way to a feeling of insecurity, of self-doubt. Outwardly he had seemed the same; he still collected the key to the practice room in college, playing for two hours a day on the Steinway. Although his improvisational technique sounded better and better to all those who heard him play, behind the sparkle of the technique lay an increasing dissatisfaction, a sense that he was going through the motions, that his real self was dislocated, hovering over him and shaking its head in disapproval at the fraud he was perpetrating. On the positive side, it would be fair to say that he still got a buzz from the reaction to his performances with the jazz trio and from the audience for the various termly college and university drama productions, into and out of which he slid effortlessly and chameleon-like.

It was the same with Charly. She was the latest in a succession of bright, attractive girls, butterflies, who alighted in front of him without any apparent move on his part to attract them, and who flew off again, as soon as the mask of his easy charm had worn thin enough to expose the indifference beneath. Once, naively, he had looked forward to meeting the one, the soul-mate, who would validate his existence.

The heady exhilaration of his early relationships had given way to dull resignation in the face of the apparent inevitability of a cycle of brief happiness followed by infinitely longer-lasting pain. This was where the alcohol came in.

As he turned away from the bridge towards the High, an oldfashioned, tall dark maroon double-decker bus approached him, the high-pitched whine of its epicyclic gear-box all but drowning out the 105

slow rattle of its diesel engine as it accelerated away from the lights in the High. He was struck by its quaint triangular motif on the slatted vertical grille and the black and white ‘FC’ number-plate. He glanced up at the driver, expecting to see a middle-aged man in flat cap and oversized woolly jumper at the wheel, on his way to some rally in the Midlands. This driver was a much younger man, however, wearing a grey uniform with a red circular disc hanging from the breast pocket.

There was also another man dressed in a conductor’s uniform standing on the open rear platform. The latter touched his cap in greeting as the bus passed. Apart from him the lower-deck was empty, and the route indicator blind gave the unhelpful destination ‘Depot Only’. Head pounding, he ambled unsteadily on a hundred yards or so up the High and turned right into a narrow lane leading to his college.

St Stephen’s Hall was not one of the richer colleges but it was by general reputation one of the most welcoming; a down-to-earth sort of place, far removed from the febrile atmosphere of some of its richer and more academically competitive neighbours. The low constricted entrance led past the porter’s lodge into a small quadrangle, which looked like a third-scale model, left behind, after its founder had had a sudden change of mind and decided to construct the real college elsewhere. An ivy-covered sundial hung proudly from the wall to his left, whilst at the centre of the quad in the middle of the lawn, lay a well, which for decades had suffered unspeakable iniquities after many a cuppers dinner, for, if St Stephen’s was not in the very top flight academically, it took great pride in its achievements in the Iffley Road and the Parks. Indeed the illustrious sporting traditions of the college had long since been embraced by its female members, whose performances now often equalled or even outshone those of the men. It was also gaining a reputation for encouraging the creative and dramatic talents of its undergraduates. A new and dynamic master, a respected and able Oxford scientist was attempting to move the college forward, using entrepreneurial skills honed by ten years in America, by encouraging 106

alumni and others alike in an heroic but probably doomed attempt to invest in the future.

‘Mr Worthy, haven’t you forgotten your key, sir?’ The porter stuck his head out of the window of the lodge.

Luke Worthy turned and stared. Puzzled, his head was still fuzzy but he vaguely remembered he didn’t need a key - he got into his room using the hotel pattern credit card he always kept in his pocket.

‘Here you are sir,’ said the porter, handing him a Yale key. ‘Had a good night, sir? Did the concert go well?’

Luke tried to place the overly polite porter who was apparently on such familiar terms with him, but failed to do so. Since when had a porter called him ‘sir’? ‘Bloody head!’ he said to himself as he unsteadily crossed the quad. Still a few hours sleep and a cup of strong black coffee would soon sort him out.

As he crossed the empty quad, a Labrador shot out of one of the staircases opposite. A lanky patrician figure in a deerstalker jacket and green corduroys emerged from the shadows, a chain with a light brown pierced leather grip wrapped tightly around his right hand.

‘Come back here, you daft bugger’, he boomed.

The young dog took no notice at first, bounding up to the well and sniffing at its base, before the inevitable took place. The tall man used this momentary pause to catch up with the dog and clip the lead to its collar. He then turned towards Luke and fixing him with a hawk-like gaze, wished him good morning. Luke looked up and slurred a response.

‘The Dean must have some even odder people than usual staying with him’, he muttered to himself.

107

He emerged from the archway on the other side of the quad. Just ahead of him were the twin modern tower-blocks, now about thirty years old, with a large dining hall beneath the nearer of the two. He turned right into the staircase and trudged up the four flights of stairs to his room on the top floor. He was immediately struck by the overpowering smell of the green dimpled rubber flooring on the steps and in the dimly-lit corridor outside his room.

‘What the…’ He had just arrived at his door but there was something wrong. The security lock was gone and in its place was a brass circular Yale pattern device.

‘Someone’s playing a stupid joke,’ he muttered.

He then remembered the key the porter had given him when he had entered the college. Putting it in the lock, it turned and he entered his room. The thick curtains were still drawn but they let in just enough light for him to see the peg to hang up his coat and jacket. Throwing the rest of his clothes on the floor, he collapsed onto the bed and instantaneously fell asleep.

Jamie Whelan

108

Banksy Oh Banksy oh Banksy where have they all gone?

Day glo graffiti, Where are your pictures, my talented son?

And the wind blows dry.

On the wall of a clinic he painted a nude, Day glo graffiti, Some blokes from the council considered it rude, And the wind blows dry.

He painted Slave Labour on a store in Wood Green, Day glo graffiti, Then the picture was taken and cannot be seen, And the wind blows dry.

Now his murals are auctioned and put up for sale, Day glo graffiti, But Banksy gets threatened with Cambridge Road gaol, And the wind blows dry.

So I sat on a pavement with crayons and chalk, Day glo graffiti, And left a strange footprint where people might walk, And the wind blows dry.

Then I went to the ocean and drew on the shore, Day glo graffiti, But a storm set in fierce and the work was no more, And the wind blows dry.

109

And I dreamt of a secret in ancient Iraq, Day glo graffiti, It was there on a wall but I can’t bring it back, And the wind blows dry.

Gerard Lally

110

RA-MI-SI-SU’s riposte to P.B.S. So, your facile sonnet seeks to sneer, to deconstruct my pride as vain, contrasting my tumbled statue lying broken here, with its cracked boasts of power, which wasn’t lasting.

You think these desert sands should prove me humbled, yet I outlive the paltry life you led.

All you enlightened wimps, who never rumbled how and why the world goes round, are dead.

In this waste I fed my people; at my command for generations, alive, replete, secure, fertility was preserved on watered land and through such deeds and strength my name endures.

But you - who are you? With your meretricious lines, purveying self-righteous outrage till you drowned, with trite satire and floppy-shirted whines a mere scribbler the world largely disowned.

You ruled not even you, did harm, broke hearts; I advanced my state with all my power.

A man so much less than the sum of all his parts you failed; yet I still enjoy my glorious hour, for though mostly unread, ironically your one poem that is, commemorates me!

Mike Spilberg

111

A Villanelle I do not know the name Of it, the thing that sits and sings, The tune always the same.

I know it won’t be tamed But plucks on nerves like red-raw strings, I do not know the name, Only the way it came, With sound of bells that ring and ring, The tune always the same.

If there’s someone to blame, Who grasps the heart and wrings and wrings, I do not know the name, Only that sharp shard of flame, The freezing burning that it brings, The tune always the same.

So perhaps it has no aim And all these wounds are random things.

I do not know the name, Or the tune, always the same.

Tabitha Hayward

112

Paradise Road The winds of change were blowing hard the day that I left home, I drove down to the old stone pier and watched a rough sea foam.

I loved to jump right off that pier and swim the river mouth, a barefoot boy in khaki shorts in Africa’s deep south.

Old folks ate ice cream in their cars parked by the beach café, like them I thought those stormy skies would one day blow away.

A man held out a fish to me beside the public phone, but I was driving out of there into the great unknown.

I turned up the radio, the music overflowed, I had started yearning, I had started burning for Paradise Road.

I drove right through the backveld where I had been born, I lived a while in cities feeling lost and torn.

113

I met so many drifters, dreamers old and young, all trying to make an Africa where they could belong.

Some talked of power, and some of sacrifice, they were also crying for, they were also dying for the road to Paradise.

I lived a while in suburbs, then took a shack-land track, I met a wandering prophet, a green cross on his back.

He said he’d seen the rainbow across a burning lake, he could have been Isaiah or even William Blake.

He beat a goat-skin drum and sang to ease his load, he was also yearning, he was also burning for Paradise Road.

I’m right back where I started in small town Africa, a troubadour still on the road a song-poem in a car.

I’ve heard the dove of heaven inside a pepper tree, I’ve seen the holy fish swim a troubled sea.

114

I know in every heart there’s a dream to be expressed, I know a bright-haired angel can dance in every breast.

I’ve watched Mandela fade, so many hopes explode, Thulani nonke, Ningamlibel’ Madiba.* but who’s not still yearning but who’s not still burning for Paradise Road. *Be quiet everyone, Don’t forget Madiba.

‘Madiba’ was Mandela’s clan-name.

Chris Mann

115

The Governess I saw him there through window thin and other times on towers high, I saw her where the reeds draw in, black her clothes and white her skin stood stark against the dappled sky.

I saw him there through window thin, he stood without and I within that melancholy house at Bly. I saw her where the reeds draw in, reflected there my want to sin my need for love, my want to lie.

I saw him there through window thin, his face against the glass, his chin, his forehead, mouth, his nose, each eye.

I saw her where the reeds draw in, the screw begins to turn, to spin I mustn’t let the children die.

He saw me there through window thin, she saw from where the reeds draw in.

Amelia Gabaldoni

116

The Golden Goose I’ve had dreams of myself from the future standing in a suit by the old church, telling me to keep my head down.

“Just keep your head down. It gets tough out here, and if you’ve got something good, just stick with it. Don’t worry about fame, or the next person.”

And I thought about whether he meant “Don’t believe you can do any better”, or if he meant “Appreciate what you have.”

I own a goose that lays golden eggs. She doesn’t speak English and doesn’t like to dance, but I’m worried that if I cut her open or sell her on the open market they will turn me into an animal too.

And the boy with the long hair in the long suit besides the crumbled pillar knows the truth, and for a moment before I wake up I think I can see it beneath his forehead- there’s something in the eyes, you see.

I believe that someone texted him some information, or gave him a phone call, and he tried to share that information in magazine interviews, but that by the time he reached the studio it didn’t seem important anymore.

That night, in the dream, he turned to the people, the gathering crowds: “look at all my golden eggs!”, he says. “Look at all these half-formed sentences! This natural ability!” They cheer and raise their hands with questions.

“Who taught you well?” “When will you rest?” feathers in your hair?” “What next, what next?”

“What of the

I woke up feeling dark and ill and checked my phone. I texted the vet and coaxed information out of her, sentence by sentence.

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I think about birds sometimes, and try to draw them sitting on branches, or, with words, show apples that hang and fall, or paint a flask’s still life. I let the goose sleep, and I try not to think about her seeking sideways-eyes, or my fingers round her neck.

Instead, my grand stories will swell and be the features of national museums, like fifteen thousand ships in recent cultural memory, with a collection of characters that, together, best embody the virtues of a committed people.

My poems will be a minimum of fourteen lines long, and the ducks that skirt the inspirational fountain below the statue’s cold stare will be my primary natural flare.

The boy in the dream goes home and takes off his gown, his cap, his shoes, picks up a pen and lets the paper drink, thinks about that time he used to wake up scared, and, smiling, signs the paper, lets it drift into a personal drawer below. Huge goose bones line his garden, tall as lakes.

Anonymous Critic

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Part Four

Dialogues

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Parliament of Fouls, or The Foulest of Parliaments Brian Smith suggested to members of the Forum that they collaborate to produce a canto of stanzas in “ottava rima after Byron” on the subject of the then forthcoming 2015 General Election.

The Prologue: A writer looking at the coming Poll Might feel despair. But we (Byronically Inspired) associates of St Edmund Hall Have made a Canto, a bionically Collaborative affair, sick in our soul, Expressing our disgust laconically.

With candidates becoming so moronic No wonder that our comments are sardonic.

The Byronic Verses The Chorus: Again it’s nigh - the cycle draws around, And tricksters’ faces flicker in the half-light.

Again the fairground’s rolling into town All starry eyed with promises and foresight; And whitewashed cheeks adorn a leering clown And palms and silver cross by shade of midnight.

And later in the empty light of morning A samey view across the landscape’s dawning.

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The sick and disabled: The UK needs a leader: that is clear.

Last time it was Condemned to take a Blue one, But that mistake has cost the country dear; And now the time has come to find a new one Who can heal the Tories’ savage cuts, and steer A juster course. Another way, a true one Quickly found, for it would be a Pity To leave the people governed by the City.

The working man: We don’t still want leaders, that’s evident, Like the ones we have now, who smarm and lie, And we don’t want false smiles dipped in Steradent.

What we do want is sensible policy: From sharing our riches (hoarded, un-spent) To accountable actions, transparency; And time in jail for the powerful, the rich When they do things that make the rest of us retch.

The disillusioned student: The Liberals are a goner; that’s a fact Clegg’s treachery was just for personal gain.

“Sic transit gloria mundi” when he’s sacked Will be the students’ jubilant refrain As betrayal and the cruelties he backed Come home to haunt, along with all the pain.

Instead of being moderate and mellow He was content to stay himself: just yellow.

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Swift: He once set fire to cacti for a laugh A young man’s misdemeanour, if you like Destroying life at twenty? Reading Plath Was more my thing. Death to plants, nice big hike In taxes, Clegg! The students: shroud their path From here to there in ashes, burn the tyke No trust fund can support. Cremate the meek, The poor, disabled, disenfranchised, weak.

The shop steward: Labour have no Balls; they’ve lost their way.

Afraid to rock the City they have missed it Despite the hopes that it would be their Day. If there were any Justice they’d have pissed it Against the likes of Cameron’s foul play and IDS and Gove. As Gideon hissed it: “Miliband’s too terrified to make a stir Castrated by the ghost of Tory Blur”.

Keir Hardie: Two centuries of socialism down the drain, Forgot in the blare of city excess; And Tories, like tyrants entrenched in their reign, Still with us, still touting the joys of success For the favoured few on their gravy train But not for the ones left to clear up their mess.

And the axis of evil of Blair and of Brown Replaced with a ’malgam of malice and clown.

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Byron returned to ‘Albion’s isle’: Where are the voices now that once would boom With moral strength - Foot, Benn, or Glenda Jackson, Their eyes ablaze, their tongues like crack of doom?

Justice is gone: a light we turned our backs on.

The days are dark with inspissated gloom.

Hell opes her gates, and shrill Time whines her claxon.

Don’t trust a weasel-word the leaders say: It’s venal trash and sound-bites, all the way.

The working woman: Last night we met The Ukips on TV, And now I’m tired. I shouted myself hoarse, Despairing at the ignorance, and glee With which the ignorance is flaunted. Worse, The thought this shower could be our destiny, A plague, a slow and painful death, our curse.

There’s smiling faces on their battle bus; We can’t keep quiet, or else they’ll come for us.

The gay serviceman: The conference has started with a cock And bull farrago; BRITAIN FIRST are here, Intelligence discarded, CAPS ON LOCK And knackered “ARMORED LAND ROVER’S” which steer Towards the queers, or anyone of stock THATS NOT FROM BRITIAN (sic) SHOULD NOT BE HEAR. While Nigel sits and sups his pint, the scamp, His militia kill an Eastern-looking tramp.

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The social historian: This pamphlet’s full of madness of the type Not seen since dark old Bedlam closed for good.

“The gays recruit young blood” - what hateful tripe, But Ukips lap it up. For them it’s food For - what, for thought? - my arse I’ll gladly wipe On this. Of course, they’d say I’ve misconstrued.

This is no time for “I’ll not vote” and “fuck it” Unless you want your own head in a bucket.

The armchair hippy: I relish all things green: Chartreuse, an English field, My mistress’ eyes, and once I even ate a salad.

The Greens too are - what? Nice. Middle class-appealing, almost holy - well, holier than thou, my lad.

Their promise: elect us and our planet’s healed.

But, dammit, is it costed? Sadly not, Milud: This manifesto’s mere wishful thinking - bin it, Crying out - not Natalie - but Gordon Bennett!

The incumbent politician: The citizens deserve a living wage, Our energy should be renewable.

But in interviews we’re not exactly sage Our words a mess, entirely skewable.

We’re green with envy; in this media age The unpolished can’t win - it’s not doable!

(If housing prices have an upward creep, We’ll build them out of plywood on the cheap.)

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The Spin Doctor: Now we’ve Nationalists from half creation Standing. (Yes! They too want a finger in The pie). Voters, struck with some vague notion, Drawn to their cant and “old bag” lingering Ideals. They talk “Democracy and Nation” Poor fools like that. A little tinkering Will quickly fix it. A simple thing to do To’ensure there is no triumph of the New. The political commentator: The candidates line up for the election: Weirdos; nonentities; no rarity Of takers or demanders for selection.

For some the thrill of power’s (oh spare it me) A turn-on tantamount to an erection.

Others, thinking only of posterity Stand nobly “to rid Politics of Vice”, And in expenses hide their avarice.

The moral philosopher: They offer scandal, war, and cash-for-honours, They conjure prejudice and debtor laws, Building up Babylon to crash upon us While smoothly talking of a better cause They sell this mad, careerist dash for goners That drains our pens of spleen and metaphors, And when we vote we’re aiding and abetting, Voting for years spent bitterly regretting.

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The party leader: Do vote for us; we’ll promise you the earth!

The heavens too - just vote for us! We’ll steer You safely through these choppy seas; your berth Awaits both safe and sound; the channel’s clear Our pilot’s steady/ready/able, worth Your trust. Ignore the siren calls - don’t hear The Jeremiahs! The past? - Best not to dwell.

The slate is clean - our hands of course as well.

The MP with something to hide: O halt th’enquiry! But halt th’enquiry! We are feculent In fact, but details must be hid away ’Till jobs are safe for five more years. Repent Our sins we will, the sins of Savile’s day And our day too; the miscreants will be sent Away, but not just yet. Oh, nay, twice nay, Betray the children? Never. No retreats From justice. But we’d like to keep our seats.

The aristocratic parliamentarian: “Voting doesn’t matter, it’s dispensable But counting does; the system’s skewed awry.

What if the Greens (quite indefensible!)

Start taking seats; even worse - the Reds!! Why What if people hope for something sensible And end th’ entitlement of those on High?

Change and decay in all around I see.

So what! - as long as votes still count for me.”

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The conspiracy theorist: Now’s the time for flap and filibuster, And polished manifestos; it’s all play To make us sick and tired of all their bluster, So we’ll retire and let them have their way.

It’s just as well the police force doesn’t trust her Or else a coup’d be staged by Witchy May. The nasty party could get nastier still, Vampiric Duncan Smith is out to kill.

Edgar Allan Poe: He rises from his crypt at evening-fall, Coughing as he dons his silken cape That trails among the wiggly things that crawl Around him, and the boots of steel that scrape The ground and grind the poor to dust withal.

The bedroom tax was such a jolly jape: “O leeches, come! we’ve blood to let! You hounds, Come, rip apart their sofas! Find their pounds!”

The Private Eye journalist: Christ! Boris! Barrel of lard and weird albino, Liar, champ of the art of bloviation (Bullshitting) and of shagging el supremo, They tell me now your plan’s to fuck the nation.

God give me strength (and, boy, another pinot!).

Reader, forgive the “fuck” - it’s sheer frustration When politics becomes pure egomania The time has come to migrate - to Australia.

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His colleague: And who’s our voice of protest? Russell Brand!

That booky-wooky, womanizing lout, Who hopes the dumbocratic fuss’ll land Plumb in his corner (or his bank account) If he can loose his moron-muzzle, stand Posturing in front of RBS and shout.

Is he the best who steps forward as a leader, That fake-ass-cockney clueless bottom-feeder?

Anon: It’s time, now, for an epic simile Something witty, long-drawn out, digressive, Arch and self-knowing, neither crass nor silly In which we liken this drab, un-impressive Line-up of wankers to a useless filly Or some other rhyme-word, more aggressive: “We’re nought but flotsam, tossed on a rambling thread By sightless captains, steered by the un-dead…”

Milton: Measureless and toxic as the oil that seeps Darkly, wastefully, and out of sight From a cracked vessel, and then creeps From shore to shore, a devastating blight On all that stirs within the bounteous deeps Still onward, still hushed up, all through the night Spills the insidious abuse of power By smooth careerists till the final hour.

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The cynical voter: Opinion polls give comfort to the dim Their names a joke upon the ballot paper.

Polls designed by cunning stunts upon a whim Of friendly sponsors. What a jolly caper!

And yet their chances really are as slim, As that of crap left on a carpet scraper Or should be if the voters knew the truth Before they set foot in the polling booth.

Everyman: I couldn’t care less. I don’t give a fuck Who wins, so long as Lucre drives our cars From bank to wank, from lottery to luck.

The ballot paper’s boxes are a farce.

With such a choice, between such shit and muck, I dare not grace their parchment with my arse.

Go mark your man! Go pick your petty faction!

For me, this turd Election’s just distraction.

The abstentionist: Voters desert the polls. They know their luck’s Right out. Whichever party wins, it’s clear The country will be ruled by selfish fucks And crass commercialism. We will pay dear Their lack of vision. So moral eunuchs Triumph. Is it surprising that when mere Clowns and crooks demand to be elected The population is so disaffected?

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The first-time voters: The older generations press their views, But first-time voters don’t know who to trust.

They’re told each day by pundits on the news That vote they really should, and vote they must. ’Twixt bad and worse, how are they meant to choose?

The system needs an overall adjust.

On polling day the youths will be befuddled Seeking ideals, not policies all muddled.

Forum poet: I set out to write in Ottava Rima, But realised I was only a dreamer.

My mistake: that blue, red, orange, or green Could ever deliver strawberries and cream.

Someone once said “pick the one who will win Remember the government always gets in”.

Nothing will change, we’re all at a loss.

(I wake up recalling I don’t give a toss.)

The voice of reason: The time draws near to make your final call.

We’d not presume to tell you what to do.

Whoever wins the writing’s on the wall!

At least be heard! - so other folk like you will use their common sense. Ignore Whitehall, whose bromides pall, like every other hue.

Consider well, lest later you repent a rash decision made with good intent.

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The Chorus: Again it’s nigh - the cycle draws around And tricksters’ faces flicker in the half-light.

Again the fairground’s rolling into town All starry eyed with promises and foresight; And whitewashed cheeks adorn a leering clown And palms and silver cross by shade of midnight.

And later in the empty light of morning A samey view across the landscape’s dawning.

Collaboratively written by the Hall Writers’ Forum Postscript So Clegg, Farage, and Miliband resigned The losers are the people who believed The weasel lies of those who rob us blind.

Cameron-complicit media deceived With threats and smears. Portfolios in mind The forces of reaction are relieved.

The Tory beast's unleashed to do its worst.

Sick? Poor? Disabled? Foreign? You are cursed.

Brian Smith The posh boys have now obtained their way; Conmen and wide boys will rule the roost.

Murdoch will have his unfettered sway; Snooping and spying will receive a boost.

Corporates, not people, will have the last say, Opposing voices crassly traduced.

The planet, the nation, the human condition Will continue their lurch towards perdition.

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A Short Rant Against Those With Power Who Hate Democracy The small miracle of Jeremy Corbyn Jesus Christ and Tom and Jerry All the nick names dredged up from heady schooldays Throw them all at him Words won’t do it it will have to be sticks and stones bombs and guns like the terrorists you so understand the British Spring in autumn will have to be stopped like the Arab Spring the lurch towards democracy so dangerous you will fight to make unpopular Middle England doesn’t want it you will say you will keep telling them this is the way to chaos and despair to self destruction the annihilation of all held dear but your desperate fear that a groundswell will spread that the people will put bread before circuses will drive you to more drastic ways than words however spun woven twisted Then the people will see and feel the slings and arrows alert behind your suited respectability Violence alone can stand between the people and democracy equality and justice.

David Braund 133

World’s Most Boring Limerick This exchange of limericks, originally posted in the “World’s Most Boring Limerick” challenge, was composed as a collaborative effort by Darrell Barnes, Matthew Carter and Lucy Newlyn.

Matthew I once owned a flickering desk light, Whose bulb fitting wasn’t screwed tight, I gave it a spin, And it wedged in its rim, And now the lamp’s moderately bright.

Darrell I read Matthew’s verse with alarm, ‘cos dodgy electrics get warm: a loose-fitting wire can cause a small fire.

I do hope he’ll not come to harm.

Matthew Last night a hand stifled my scream, As I was kidnapped by an armoured SWAT team, I was chucked in a car, And driven quite far, But woke up - it was all just a dream.

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And Darrell don’t worry I survived, I was lucky the ambulance arrived.

I am not a bright spark, And was plunged in the dark, But the man made sure I was revived.

Serves me right for not seeing that wire, I might easily have started a fire, But next time I know, When the filament’s aglow, That to touch it might be quite dire!

Darrell Brown’s the live wire (so it’s been for quite a while now) - as is seen from this sketch; of the two that remain, one is blue (the neutral). Earth’s yellow and green.

Matthew Thanks for this wonderful advice, Both informative and yet also concise, Now I know which is which, I’ll simply turn off the switch, And the same accident won’t happen twice!

Darrell If the brown and blue wires should touch there’ll be a big bang, and not much of your house will remain.

These instructions are plain, couched in English, and not double Dutch.

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Darrell (a bit later) Let the smoke and the flames disappear before you go anywhere near the main fuse box which sports a bloody great switch which has tripped. It hasn’t? Oh dear!

Lucy - The Kind Warning There was a kind writer, concerned To make sure his young friend wasn’t burned.

He made post after post, But all efforts were lost: The prodigy got what he earned.

Darrell Tell your insurers today!

Demand that they instantly pay and defray all the cost of what you have lost.

I trust that your cover’s OK? Lucy - Epitaph for Matthew Carter There was a young student, so bright, So poetic, so clever, so right For the course he was steering But then came the searing: The sudden quick death in the night.

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Darrell His mistakes and omissions appal!

How anyone taught at the Hall could make such a cock-up beats me. He’d best stock up, for it seems he has nought left at all.

Lucy - The elegiac voice deepens Oh woe and oh woe, and thrice woe!

Alas, is it thus - even so?

Was it fair, was it right That this student, so bright, Met his end in a dazzling glow?

Darrell On reflection, it seems almost criminal that a scholar, who seemed to be firm in all his studies, should rue the day when the blue was connected to the brown terminal.

Matthew (after a long while) - Fear even more the heat o’ the lamp Hi guys, don’t worry - I’m not dead!

Though I am in a hospital bed…

I forgot your advice, Now I’m paying the price, I should have heeded all that you said.

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One day my next essay I was writing, (On Derrida and Foucault - how exciting!)

My progress was strong, (Is Barthes right or wrong?)

When I noticed my lamp was igniting.

Remembering what you said in my mind, I was confident of an issue of this kind, The brown wire I cut, Then the light bulb went PHUT And now in a ward I’m confined.

Much of what happened is hazy, I keep muttering - my nurse thinks I’m crazy!

Suddenly everything went black, I was thrown on my back, And now I’m in bed being lazy.

Everything else is confusing, All I’m left with is rather bad bruising, Your concern says it all We’re a family at this Hall, Maybe you’ll help with my fusing…?

Thank you for all your kind verse, It’s been soothing as my pain’s getting worse.

I’ll just knock back a pill As I’m feeling quite ill, And hopefully my pain will disperse…

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Darrell I rejoice! It’s abundantly clear that Matthew did not disappear.

The wiring corrected, he’s been resurrected (Easter’s come early this year).

Lucy I rejoice that young Matthew’s not dead And hope he’ll be back, on this thread.

If he doesn’t appear There’s nothing to fear: He’s just writing his essays, in bed.

Darrell I wouldn’t presume to suppose that Matthew continues to doze: his knowledge he builds through his City & Guilds before another fuse blows.

Lucy You’re right: it’s too soon to assume!

His brain could be damaged by fumes!

He could now be lying Quite ill, even dying Alone in a Teddy Hall room!

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Who’ll check out this student’s okay?

I’m his tutor, but too far away.

Is he having bad nights?

Does he need the last rites?

Does he have something urgent to say?

Darrell There’s a school of thought in two camps: should you unplug all your lamps if they’re not being used?

Some maintain, if they’re fused, you’ll not suffer a surfeit of amps.

To avoid the risk of a fire, I advise, before you retire with your cocoa-filled mug: switch off every plug or you’ll join the heavenly choir.

Lucy - La Mort de l’Auteur or: the dangers of too much reading I’ve just heard that Matthew is dead.

How shocking. They found him in bed With books all around him And ideas inside him.

There isn’t much more to be said.

His ending should teach us to dread All that foreignness on which he fed.

It wasn’t loose wiring That caused his expiring: It was Theory that went to his head.*

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Lucy - Hurrah! The Second Resurrection or: the tutor gladly recognises her mistake Matthew Carter’s not dead after all, So all is not lost at the Hall!

It was Hirsch* saved the day And showed him the way To get up from his bed, and stand tall. * “In Defence of the Author.” Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967. 1-23.

[This limerick was written collaboratively by Will Austin, Tabby Hayward and Lucy Newlyn at the end of a Wednesday Workshop.]

A message of thanks Matthew! Sadly you weren’t there to nurse The sick with your bright jaunty verse*.

But please do not worry; I made sure your story Saved readers from Theory - and worse.

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Who wears the trousers?

I. System If you really want to meet him you won’t find him at the bar in the theatre or the playground, at a movie, in a car…

System has no time for leisure when not working, he’s at war.

System tuts and wags his finger, splitting the whole world in two subject/object, slave and master male and female, me and you.

He is tall and very tight-lipped, white, and knows a thing or two.

When first born, he wasn’t naked wore a suit, had socks and shoes.

(His mother fled, she couldn’t bear to see the way that she’d been used.)

Now he carries rule and compass instruments he mustn’t lose.

System loves to make decisions on what’s good and what is bad.

Nothing thwarts his use of logic, nothing makes him lost or sad.

There’s no sea that he can’t measure Newton should have been his dad.

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Mathematics, Law and Physics these are fields he understands.

He knows rules and regulations like the back of his right hand.

(Don’t expect imagination, that’s a flame that can’t be fanned.)

System has a blindfold on him, cannot see outside his head thinks of all things in compartments black and white or blue and red.

He loves walls and tall skyscrapers, keeps a gun inside his bed.

If there were a way to build it System would devise a wall strong enough to keep out strangers no, we don’t want them at all.

In our nations as our houses, let’s be mean, and let’s be small.

System’s always been much better than competitors at Trade.

And you’ll find he’s always Tory that’s the way the world is made.

If that scares you, then you’d better ask what makes you so afraid.

Invariably good at money, he backs the winner, funds the wars, underwrites fraud and oppression, evades the taxes, writes the laws.

Nothing shocks him, nothing moves him, gives him pleasure, gives him pause.

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If you want to beat the System you won’t find him at the bar in the theatre or the playground but inside all things that are.

He is Male, and he is Always whether working, or at war.

Lucy Newlyn II. Divide and Conquer ‘Divide and conquer’ is the motto Every ruler has to know; When the ruled combat each other There can be no overthrow.

A crow is black, without a doubt, but Each black thing is not a crow.

Gerard Lally III. Who is winning?

Adam delved. Eve did the spinning, bore the children, cooked the food.

In this system, who is winning?

Is the System fair, and good?

What has changed since the beginning if we’re all still spilling blood?

History is with us always Patriarchy has shaped Man Ever since the story started.

(That’s when gender wars began.)

Language is a gendered system.

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System is a gendered plan.

Empire, Rule, Colonisation, Disequity of every kind All are Manifestations Of the drive that makes Man blind.

Change is very slow in coming: See it, blowing in the wind.

First you must perceive the System.

If you can’t, then others can.

Take your blindfold off and face it: Mrs Thatcher was a Man. See the world and see it clearly When you’re ready, form your plan.

Lucy Newlyn IV. Rewritten history The feminists have really hit the fan.

As part of their rewritten history They claim that Mrs. Thatcher was a man.

My foaming mouth can’t force these lines to scan, But bloodshot bulging eyeballs yet can see The feminists have really hit the fan.

Rather than quit and place a general ban On bashing harmless males for gallantry, They claim that Mrs. Thatcher was a man.

Thatcher bore children! Only women can!

Where is my text of Gray’s Anatomy?

The feminists have really hit the fan.

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To emphasise the distaff was her plan, But since she also wanted markets free, They claim that Mrs. Thatcher was a man.

Women should rule, that’s how the story ran, And clout with handbag men that disagree.

The feminists have really hit the fan.

They claim that Mrs. Thatcher was a man!

Gerard Lally V. A telepathic communication Hélène Cixous made telepathic contact with me during the night and dictated to me the following poem, which I give to you as nearly verbatim as I can. It's inevitable that I will have missed some of the nuances of her villanelle in my translation - French is an even more gendered language than our own, and she makes great play of this. I believe the title of her poem alludes to a sentence in Sorties. (‘Le futur’ is, of course, masculine.)

The Masculine Future That Thatcher was a Man’s beyond dispute: History repeats himself, I always say.

Gender’s not an essence but an attribute.

She mansplained like a man, and wore a suit And did things in a mannish sort of way: That Thatcher was a Man’s beyond dispute.

She found a method to redistribute Her properties, so they could see another day.

(Gender’s not an essence, but an attribute).

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Her cronies were men, she has a man’s repute.

We see the same again in Mrs May: Like Thatcher she’s a Man, beyond dispute, The Iron Lady’s living substitute – Perpetuating her despotic sway.

Gender’s not an essence but an attribute.

She has the same old wish to persecute, For patriarchy’s here, and here to stay.

That Thatcher was a Man’s beyond dispute; Gender’s not an essence, but an attribute.

Lucy Newlyn VI. À la Rochester The revolution’s with us, there’s nothing to be fear’d, Since Karl Marx was a Woman, with a great thick beard, And Lenin was a Woman, with a smooth bald pate, And Trotsky was a Lesbian, or Queer at any rate.

Or is it that Das Kapital was written by a Man, And for that very reason we can drop it from the plan?

And Thatcher was a Woman, whose economic brains Exposed the silly weaknesses of John Maynard Keynes?

It’s not a minor matter, the thing won’t go away, For that’s the economic world we’re living in today, And that’s what people take as truth, and what they see as right; Go check it out with Killery, who has reclaimed the night.

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Go check it out with Merkel, ask her if she’s a bloke!

The look upon her face will make you sorry that you spoke.

Gender is an attribute, it’s not a social class, And anyone who claims it is, is talking like an ass.

Gerard Lally VII. The Fall of Man Long long ago in Paradise the class system began When God decided that he’d build a woman for the man.

He made her take the blame for eating apples on a tree Then he shut Man out of Eden, charged a monumental fee.

Those were the days, those were the days, when Man knew Liberty.

No man but Adam working and no idle Bourgeoisie Eve bore the children, cooked the food and did the cleaning too.

She could have run away but that is not what women do.

With men and women locked in hierarchical embrace, Try telling Eve she’s Adam’s equal: watch the look upon her face!

Now fast-forward to our own times, re-consider what you’ve said.

Things may have changed a little, but the class-system’s not dead.

Go check out women in the poorest countries round the world; Try telling them they’re free, that the System has unfurled.

Sure, gender is an attribute, but anyone’s an ass Who claims that women everywhere are not an underclass.

Lucy Newlyn

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VIII. A Nocturnal Transmission, from Mary Wollstonecraft Yes, Thatcher was an honorary man Not every female leader is, that’s not the plan.

My own case for instance Surely proves the existence Of one who threw the System down the pan?

It’s not a question of which women have success In a realm which is a pool of stinking cess, But of the values they uphold As they try to shape a world Where men have ruled so long, and made a mess.

I don’t claim that every woman is a man Who fails to execute a perfect plan But that socialism goes (As everybody knows) With feminist ideals - at least, it can.

Lucy Newlyn IX. Brother and System The best fruits will go to your brother, you can take the rotting ones, the best beef and the best food.

You must have the rotten stew.

The best chances will go to your brother, you will get what's left behind.

The top opportunities fall to him while you will crawl in second class.

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The best of everything goes to your brother, he must succeed and head the list, you will have an easier life.

Give the biggest fruit to your brother.

Jude Cowan Montague X. À la Erasmus Darwin There is a cat, quite near my home, who’s rough and tough and bad.

He looks a bit like Warhol - we call him Warhol’s Dad. His manners are not of the best. In fact, he is quite rude, He bullies all the other cats, and often steals their food.

A thug, a mugger, certainly, a cat all wrong and crass, But though there is oppression there, is he a ruling class?

There are clear caste divisions in nests of ant and bee, (But that’s in their biology, from which they can’t be free); Soldiers, workers, wingy drones, which are quite often seen, And interestingly, deep within, a massive ruling queen.

It is a system, and it works. It’s how they have contrived To carry on for aeons strange. It’s how they have survived.

To cut a lengthy story short, for many years now past, Life was mainly plants and animals, and species didn’t last.

The dinosaurs have all died out, though some of these were large, With teeth and nails oppressive, and fearsome bellowing charge.

Can we, though, talk of dinosaurs, in terms of ruling classes?

Did terrible tyrannosaurs exploit the reptile masses?

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To shrink a hundred million years into a simple phrase, Mammals appeared upon the scene, with cute and charming ways Not very different from our own. They liked to fight and mate, Oppress each other merrily, and oftimes glare with hate.

Until, around the Pleistocene, ’mid murder, theft and rape, Arose a form that stood erect, a crafty anthropoid ape.

Now known as Homo habilis, these creatures were no fools; They had cohesive social groups, and fashioned simple tools.

They no doubt fought among themselves, and half of them were male, But ‘Adam dominating Eve’? That story’s rather stale!

What did arise, within their camps, where they would scold and feed, Was on occasion gathering in some food beyond their need.

What to do with the extra nosh? And the surplus tools they made?

By the time of Homo sapiens, we have reached the age of Trade.

This is the point of social class. The labour was divided, But to say the females bore the load is terribly one-sided.

By and large they all worked hard, throughout their wretched lives, Apart, of course - you’ve got it now - from the chieftains and their wives.

Engels wrote a bit on this, but Engels - who was he?

Another Man to be opposed, in the name of liberty?

If you hark back to the Pentateuch, I really must insist That Feminism of that ilk can never co-exist With Socialist economic thought, and the Marxist dialectic.

It tends to harm the comrades, as it makes them apoplectic.

Attacking other people is not a pleasant thing, And we whose words are stinging should be careful where to sting.

To ape the dialectic, and preach conflict to the masses Is wrong beyond the turning sphere of economic classes.

If the aim is human progress, and the dawn of a new day, “Bungling Man has always ruled” quite gives the game away.

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Feminism as a stance may serve professional aims, With a nice indulgent bourgeoisie, unthreatened by its claims, But uncalled-for jeers and insults, from a sense of imagined wrong, Against the sex I happen to be - no, that is much too strong.

You may call my words “mansplaining” or “repeated his-story”.

Expect much more when Feminist rap has a sharp effect on me.

Gerard Lally XI. Only Natural Your brother will be given a gun for his seventh birthday, you a Barbie Doll and a pink plastic house with miniature cooking utensils.

He will shoot your rabbits.

When you cry, you will be told to forgive him.

(He is only fulfilling his basic instincts: without them, humans would not survive.)

You mustn’t grumble, this is Only Natural.

When you are thirteen, you will start to bleed.

Every month the blood will come for five days, and you’ll lose all concentration.

You will be angry with your brother, who plays loud rock music and counts your pimples.

You will starve yourself to stop the bleeding.

The doctor will reprimand you: “Cherish your eggs, for without them your species will not survive.

You mustn’t grumble, this is Only Natural.”

When you are fifteen, your brother’s friend will fuck you and you will be obliged to leave school.

He won’t pay for an abortion.

You will give birth in agonising pain, about which there is a conspiracy of silence.

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You will bring the child up on your own, with your parents tut-tutting in the background.

They will tell you it’s your duty: you must be sure to perpetuate the species.

You mustn’t grumble, this is Only Natural.

Your brother will join the army at eighteen and be shot in a foreign country.

You will weep for a year, and wish you’d known him.

At the funeral, the vicar will commend him for the bravery he has shown since he was a boy, and for sacrificing his life for his country.

You’ll remember the spilled blood of the rabbits in your bed.

You mustn’t grumble, this is Only Natural.

Natural, when your own son is born, that you buy him a shotgun; Natural that your pink plastic house with cooking utensils will be replaced with a new one when your darling daughter has her seventh birthday.

Natural that your son should expect the largest helpings, the coolest toys, and the right to kill his sister's pets.

What is un-natural, my girl, is the sound of your voice complaining. Do not turn on your brother.

The System must be accepted, grumbling is not.

Uphold the System meekly.

All of it, all of it, is Natural.

Lucy Newlyn

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XII. The Book of Nature On the way down to Cornwall this afternoon, I fell asleep and had a dream in which a bearded patriarch appeared at my bedside and spoke these words. I wrote them down immediately on waking, using the pencil and paper which I always carry in the glove compartment of the car, in case of sudden poetic inspiration. I was disappointed that the bearded spirit (who bore a remarkable resemblance to Urizen) didn’t speak in poetry. But you can't have everything.

The Ten Principles of the Book of Nature are as follows: 1. Never forget that the story told in Genesis is to be read allegorically, and is consistent with the story told in Origin of Species.

The System is embodied in both books, and thereby reinforced.

2. Man has evolved, and become extremely sophisticated, but can never surmount his basic instinct, which is to survive.

3. The male half of the species (having more Natural advantages) has developed at a faster rate than the female.

4. It is written in The Book of Nature that women must not forget their fundamental role as child-bearers.

5. Man will only survive as a species if the female’s evolution is strictly circumscribed. All forms of social conditioning must be directed to this end.

6. Society’s primary function is to underwrite the superiority of the male; it will do this using many sophisticated methods. The methods must become more highly developed (and sometimes camouflaged) as the female of the species slowly advances.

7. It is unwise (and morally unacceptable) for a man to harm or exploit another man, except in extreme circumstances; but the 154

subjugation of females and animals is advantageous to the survival of the species, and therefore to be encouraged.

8. It is only permissible for a human to change their sex if childrearing is envisaged (and possible.) Changes in gender are allowable at the discretion of society, but only insofar as they prove to be consistent with the System.

9. It is essential that work undertaken by the female in the home is not similar or equal to work undertaken by the male outside it. The female’s work in the home must remain unpaid, lest she get ideas above her station. If she should work outside the home, then let her be paid at a lower rate than the male.

10. All branches of knowledge must be used to underwrite the fundamental principles of the Book of Nature. Some forms of knowledge will be considered superior to others in this respect, and will be recognized and remunerated accordingly. This should be done in such a way as to ensure the pre-eminence of males.

Lucy Newlyn

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The Poetic Garden Centre The villanelles are looking quite, quite splendid; that anapæst is coming on a treat.

I wonder just how many staff have tended the sonnets with their dainty little feet?

Oh look! Is that a Humorous sestina climbing up that stanza over there?

And what is this? I’m sure it’s Terza rima yes: right first time - its rhyme scheme’s rather spare.

Now, what’s for lunch? I think I'll have a salad that looks rather nice: Home made pantoum (never heard of it). I’ll take the ballad.

We’ll sit beneath the haiku in full bloom.

A glass of ode? A bottle of cæsura?

Enjambement is always rather flat; I’d rather have a sip of something purer, but I’ll settle for a than-bauk, come to that.

Such a lot of interesting flowers a clerihew? Now that is rather rare.

(I can carry on like this for hours and hours, but you’ve clearly had enough. I’ll stop right there).

Darrell Barnes The grumpy Garden Centre shopper I was hoping that I’d find some anaphora to help my patch of pleonasm along but all they have in stock is common zeugma and some weedy looking polysyndeton.

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I’d like to fill my border with synesis to stop the catachresis coming through but all I’ve found is seedlings of synchisis and a wilting tray of praeteritio.

I’ve asked them for advice about aporia but they couldn’t help at all with tackling this; they told me I should try paronamasia which only works with aposiopesis!

They recommend some hysteron-proteron to keep the rampant hypallage at bay but I think I’m better off with asyndeton which comes in a small user-friendly spray.

Those are impressive hendyiadis saplings and I’ve seen no better antistrophes than those but all in all this place is disappointing they seem to be uninterested in prose.

Lucy Newlyn That’s very kind - but now look what you’ve started: what first was just a trip to B&Q has undergone a change and now departed on other tracks (I blame that clerihew).

Lots of plants beyond my comprehension, many Greek - the list goes on and on, and even then some never get a mention and would tax the gardening skills of Monty Don. How many of your purchases are Hardy?

Will that Spenser ode survive a Frost?

Best wrap it in a scarlet-coated cardy, the mantle of which Oscar knew the most.

Herminius var. subsp. Lord Macaulay is suffering from Flecker, loathsome blight!

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Tell me why that Sassoon’s looking poorly, and will that Red, Red Rose survive the night?

Time to stop. An onset of Sea Fever has made my Carpe Diem rather hot.

Before this thread goes on and on for ever I’ll have a glass of Marmion. Thanks a lot!

Darrell Barnes How many of your purchases are Hardy?

This Garden Centre’s useless if you’re looking for hedging plants and annuals, I see but it offers entertainment for the idle and there’s even a select menagerie.

I hoped to find some saplings on the Firbank but only found a Garland on the Greene; I could hear a blackbird Synge a joyous Carroll although a merry Swift could not be seen.

There was room inside my trolley for a Peacock running Wilde he fell and fluttered in a Brooke so I hauled him out and dried his drooping feathers; now he’s nestled in, alongside his friend Hooke.

(There’s a Bunyan on his Foot, and he looks Haggard but not half as bad as did the poor old Pope when that Long fellow got married to the Bishop and he Withered in the Lodge without a hope.)

This Nursery’s not the only place that’s useless for trees and Hardy hedging-plants, you loon; and this fact provides the moral to my story (you guessed that I’d supply at least one soon): while you search inside the churchyard for a Hawthorne 158

the Snow will fall and settle on the Graves and the Sexton will stand chatting with the Goldsmith looking Sterne-ly on all human fools and knaves.

Lucy Newlyn

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Heidelberg - ein Wiedersehen Natasha Walker proposed to Darrell Barnes (and it wasn’t a leap year!) that they might collaborate, both of them holding each other’s poetic skills in high esteem. It was apparent from the start that, apart from Oxford and the Cotswolds, there were not many places that both of them knew in common - apart from Heidelberg, where Natasha currently lives and where Darrell had spent part of two long vacations in an attempt to understand the German language better.

Darrell’s experience was not altogether a happy one: he had a boring - and poorly paid - job guiding visitors around the manufacturing plant of Original Heidelberger Druckmaschinen at Wiesloch, some distance outside Heidelberg itself, whither he and other tour guide staff were driven at a furious rate down the autobahn each morning and whence all returned in the evening as if the hounds of hell were snapping at their heels. One abiding memory is of a tablet affixed to a wall in the Schloss commanding a magnificent view of the river Neckar, which bore a poem written by Marianne von Willemer in 1815 commemorating her last meeting with Goethe in the autumn of that year.

Natasha set out to reframe Darrell’s views of the city from perspectives which may have eluded his younger self: from the famous Philosophenweg, from the viewpoint of Liselotte von der Pfalz, born in Heidelberg’s castle and who became the unfortunate Madame and sister in law to Louis XIV, at whose orders Heidelberg and the surrounding area was destroyed.

Dear Darrell, you knew Heidelberg a while ago. Now drenched in snow, I’d like to know what thrilled you. What concurred to make you smile?

Up on the hill, the Neckar’s mists below?

Ros’ und Lilie morgenthaulich Blüht im Garten meiner Nähe;1 Natasha Walker 1

Dew-drenched rose and lily / bloom in the garden near to me 160

Natasha, friend: a stirring of the senses knowing that you live where once I went summons half a century of pensėes.

The public garden’s roses had no scent where, on a bench with Rousseau in my hand, Le Contrat Social I got to know; on the sandstone terrace I would stand and look upon the Neckar far below.

Auf der Terrasse hoch gewölbtem Bogen war eine Zeit mein Kommen und mein Geh’n.2 Darrell Barnes At Philosophenweg our ramble starts; we glimpse the castle - “Liselotte’s home!” we cry. Begot of German-English hearts, she lived to see her town become a tomb.

Aber schwer in das Tal hing die gigantische, Schicksalskundige Burg nieder bis auf den Grund, Von den Wettern zerrissen;3 Natasha Walker

2 3

On the terrace and its deeply vaulted arch / once upon a time I’d come and go.

But the gigantic fated castle hung / heavily down towards the ground, / wrestled apart by the elements 161

Two long vacations spent with Druckmaschinen4, a dead-end job which barely kept me fed; Wie viele DM mußte ich verdienen?5 Not a happy time, it must be said.

But looking back - and prompted by your pleasure of wondrous wines, the Philosophenweg my young self could not gauge the measure of Heidelberg. So what kept me in check?

Darrell Barnes Youth checks our outward view, thus, self-absorbed, you might have felt quite lonely, poor, ignored?

I’d like to meet you there, back then, to strew some kinder memories then those you knew.

Natasha Walker Then I owned a timid disposition which, as a man, I long ago outgrew; would your town now act as a magician and cast the spell so many others knew?

A Spritze on the terrace in the evening to reminisce would be a time well spent, a lifting of the soul, a kind of leavening.

In time I’d come to know the roses’ scent.

Darrell Barnes

I worked as a tour guide in the factory of Original Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, manufacturers of printing presses.

5 How many Deutschmarks would I have to earn?

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Stadt fröhlicher Gesellen, An Weisheit schwer und Wein,6 Although my mind strays, yearning, to the seas, these fruitful valleys serve to drown my grief in wondrous wines. And gentle friends can tease me back to treasured forests, trees in leaf.

Natasha Walker A meeting, not in body but in mind, Has brought us both together - what delight!

Marianne’s verse serves to remind Zur Gegenwart wird die Vergangenheit.7 Darrell Barnes

6 7

City of happy fellows / heavy with wisdom and wine The past shall become the present.

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The Elgin Marbles The Elgin Marbles and the Brandenburg Gate The Elgin Marbles groaned: “it’s clear we’ve lost our ancient place. We’ve tried to get back home but no one hears. What really hurts the most is what’s occurring now: that man from Rome who heads the European Central Bank hopes QE will generate a boom, but who will buy Greek bonds? Berlin’s to thank for all our woes. It’s not our fault we’ve lived beyond our means. Our debt, our rank, are rated little higher than default, and as for this austerity - enough!”

But Berlin’s Gate replied “let’s call a halt to all this sorry wheedling and such stuff.

The value of the Euro wanes and waxes, and so you want to quit? I’ll call your bluff: it’s clear the bitter truth (let’s face the facts) is most of you have never paid your taxes.”

Darrell Barnes A Provisional Reply from the Parthenon Marbles Oh please sir, wept the sorry broken stones, Just tell us what our unpaid taxes are, and we will pay them. We will make no bones 164

about it. Perhaps we are in debt to the Museum.

Perhaps we owe Lord Elgin for our fare.

If there are bills outstanding, let us see ’em.

Otherwise, we wonder how you dare traduce the damaged beauty of an age when in our kindly shadows men would share the noblest thoughts inscribed on any page, in any book, in all philosophy.

Before you point the finger, clever sage, read history, and even you will see: financial bubbles presuppose a bourgeoisie.

Gerard Lally Last Appeal from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland Marbles! It’s really not too late to kneel before our handsome Tor (Brandenburg’s victorious Gate), failing which, we fear it’s war!

Deutschland, Deutschland über alles singt das deutsche Bürgertum (*).

“We who bailed out feckless Pallas Athene and gave her room to come to an accommodation, learn at last to pay her way (of course, we love Greece as a nation where else to go on holiday?), now we’ve really had enough!

If Syriza leaves the Euro, Greece will find the going tough; Tsipras now may be your hero 165

but Vorsicht! - steps into the dark led by hasty, unproved men, will resurrect the Deutschemark and if that happens - well: what then?” (*) This, translated, you will see is ‘sings the German bourgeoisie’.

Darrell Barnes The Marbles’ Response Perhaps some over-hasty unproved men should try to answer that and up the ante, re-read the major works of Marx and pen a pond’rous epic in the style of Dante, in which a fearless hero braves the dark of rotten bourgeois lies and silly cant. He produced those weighty tomes in German, mark, the language of the sober Bundesrat, but if the truth be told, all clear and stark, preferred the German proletariat.

The money men must take what they will get.

There is no going back and that is that.

And as for Merkel and the monstrous debt: By those who ran it up it should be met.

Gerard Lally

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A More Temperate Appeal from the Brandenburg Gate to the Elgin Marbles My last appeal was not in terza rima, the verse form that I usually employ; I must have lost my marbles - what a dreamer!

Anyway, in Schiller’s Ode to Joy’ “Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder” - so it’s not a very wise or thoughtful ploy to undertake a policy of No: “no, we won’t repay our debts” and “no, it’s time austerity should go”.

Let beggars walk with princes hand in hand and no one will be happier than I; but first, you’ll have to follow what’s been planned.

To all your friends who ask the question “why? these constant cuts will bring us to our knees”, all I can respond is “have a try!’”

Although you handsome creatures grace a frieze, you really cannot do just as you please.

Darrell Barnes

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Cool Reasoning by the Marbles Let’s undertake a policy of Yes, Our culprits will be made to pay in full, but if you grasp the naked CDS you’ll know it is a nasty trick to pull, to sue the losing horse because you stand to lose the cash you gambled, being dull.

And as for that suspicious “what’s been planned”, we saw what happened with the Viet Cong.

No doubt the NATO gunboats have been manned, in order to enforce the Rule of Wrong.

Too true, we don’t imagine we are free, but workers all united can be strong.

We have to relegate to history Chicago economics and Austerity.

Gerard Lally An Apologia from the Brandenburg Gate to the World at Large Do not think this thread is just for fun matters of great moment are addressed: debate on Greece’s future’s just begun, though couched in fable form (which is the best way I can find to spread important news: it makes folk pause and ask, perhaps in jest,

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“does this form serve simply to amuse, or does a deeper moral lie beneath from which we seek in vain to find excuse?”)

The Quadriga adorned with laurel wreath stands atop my Brandenburger Gate, a symbol of my discipline, the teeth of European rectitude. My weight will lead us all to sunlit, upland hills; departure from this path incurs a fate that’s worse than death for those with weaker wills.

In any case, it’s I who pay the bills.

Darrell Barnes A reply from the World at Large Your address to the populace appears to us mere persiflage and folly.

As yet we’ve seen no trace Of rigour in your light ripostes to Lally.

He has the moral high ground you but prevaricate, and dally.

Take a tip from us plebs, on the ground: cut to the chase, keep your eye on the action, quit all the thrashing around.

Your witty parries are a poor distraction from the fine steely sharpness of his indignation.

Anonymous Writer 169

The Brandenburg Gate’s Final Offer It seems to me that Greece is kin to Faust, always seeking pleasure, something new; another pays the bottles he’s caroused.

Mephistopheles now wants his due.

Too bad that Dr Faust gave up his soul: the Todesglocke now has struck on cue, Mephisto now has acted out his role and hurries home to calculate his gain.

“A satisfactory contract, on the whole let’s see who’s next: Ireland? Cyprus? Spain?”

Some rue the lack of philosophic rigour: what comfort’s that when undergoing pain?

I speak of something altogether bigger viz. market sentiment behind the scenes.

If Greece can’t pay her way I’ll pull the trigger.

I’ll give you one last chance, you rash Hellenes: you really cannot live beyond your means.

Darrell Barnes

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The Lost Romantic “But there’s a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have looked upon; Both of them speak of something that is gone.”

I cannot tell perceiver from perceived.

The tree is only seen; it can’t be known.

There is no story that can be believed.

My vision may be faulty, misconceived: I cannot reach the stoniness of stone; I cannot tell perceiver from perceived.

How can I be other than deceived When all I hear’s an echo of my tone?

There is no story that can be believed.

No wonder that I feel so lost, and so bereaved While wandering by the lake so all alone.

I cannot tell perceiver from perceived, Loser from lost, or thief from thieved.

When all the age-old certainties have gone, There is no story that can be believed: The tree itself can never be retrieved; The swallow in her swallow-ness has flown; I cannot tell perceiver from perceived.

And so, when all is given, all received, In this one field which I have looked upon There is no story that can be believed.

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Why do you look so worried, so aggrieved?

It’s not my fault, when all is said and done.

We cannot tell perceiver from perceived: There is no story that can be believed.

Lucy Newlyn STC I wander lonely as a cloud because the cloud is inside me.

It wears me like a wedding-shroud that battens on my very blood.

I’d rather be a sheep, a stone, a tree than miserable lonely STC. Lucy Newlyn for STC To be a cloud is very free afloat in liquid ecstasy.

I am the sky the sky is me an undercoast of bluest sea we’re water changing into rain to wash clean our Romantic pain.

Jude Cowan Montague

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Laudanum The romance of the cloud is gone.

It rains and rains - all wet, all one.

The whole of Borrowdale is sunk under black cloud. I’m sad, I’m drunk, and no-one’s here; I'm all alone.

Think I’ll creep back, under my stone.

Lucy Newlyn Laudanum The stone is keeping me quite dry, I came up here to have a cry but drink has turned my day to sun when mixed with opiates for fun.

No one’s here my plight to see, so there is all the more for me.

Jude Cowan Montague Joy The sun is shining on the lake; it is alive for your sweet sake dear Sara, who makes everything laugh and shout and loudly sing.

The hills are dancing hand in hand around the lake and on the sand.

That little boat is full of glee bouncing about so merrily.

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And all is done with joy, not drink for laudanum just makes me sink into a slough of deep despond, as sheer and dark as Black Moss Pond.

Lucy Newlyn There is one thing I mustn’t take, that’s laudanum upon the lake for then the boat can start to sink when I have had too much to drink.

And then where would my Sara be?

We’d both be lost and so I’ll flee back to the rocks and find that stone and hide until my rain has gone.

Jude Cowan Montague

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Notes on Contributors Rose Anderson is a lifelong poetry junkie living in Chapel Allerton, Leeds.

She is slowly recovering after many years of illness, rediscovering in her forties all the ordinary-extraordinary things she hasn’t done since her twenties, from hanging out the washing to visiting the seaside. Her poetry pamphlet, Falling Upwards Through the Night was first published in 2002 and she is hoping to start putting together a new collection before too long.

Darrell Barnes read Modern Languages at St Edmund Hall and joined Barclays Bank DCO after leaving university. He worked in East Africa, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland and other places beyond Ultima Thule before concluding that the rewards of work were vastly inferior to the those of working in the voluntary sector in various capacities. He lives in Putney where he once rowed - alas, no longer.

Sonja Benskin Mesher lives in Llanelltyd, Wales. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer. A Small Life, her chapbook of poetry and art, was published and distributed by take-it-to-the-street-poetry.

David Braund lives in Burgess Hill, Sussex. He studied Geography at St Edmund Hall, and is now a retired computer software consultant. He has contributed to the Oxford Magazine.

Alexander Bridge is currently reading English at St Edmund Hall. He runs Teddy Hall Writers and is a facilitator on the Hall Writer’s Forum. He edits poetry for the Oxford Review of Books, the Teddy Hall Anthology and The Gallery, and has had a few poems published in Oxford student publications. He has no idea what he’s going to do with the rest of his life, but doesn’t really want to do anything in particular.

Tony Brignull joined an insurance company at the age of seventeen, then did National Service with the RAF in Germany 1956 - 58. After a spell as a trainee teacher in Dalston, he worked in the advertising industry, responsible for successful campaigns such as Parker, Birds Eye and Cinzano. After retirement in 1996 he wrote poetry and stories, winning a couple of national contests and one international competition; and in 2002 he went to St Edmund Hall to read English, followed by an MA at King’s College London, specialising in Life Writing.

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Carmen Bugan was born in Romania and has lived in the US, Ireland, England, and France writing poems about memory and politics. She has a doctorate from Balliol College, Oxford. Her publications include a monograph entitled Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile, two collections of poems, Crossing the Carpathians and The House of Straw, and a memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police.

Sandie Byrne is Associate Professor in English, University of Oxford and Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. She is the author of a number of works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.

Matthew Carter read English at St Edmund Hall and went down in 2017.

Tom Clucas read English at St Edmund Hall and completed his DPhil on Cowper and Wordsworth. He has since worked as a postdoctoral researcher and latterly Deputy Professor of English and American Literature and Culture at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. His first collection of poetry - which is still undergoing protean revision - is due to appear in 2018.

Anonymous Critic (who occasionally masquerades as Anonymous Writer or just Anonymous) matriculated in 19 mumble mumble and read every subject on offer, thus contributing to the wide range of pieces that have been published in the Forum over the years. Mysterious, s/he keeps to him/herself, and makes timely interventions.

Stuart Estell read English at St Edmund Hall in the mid-90s and is a founder member of the Hall Writers' Forum. His novel Verruca Music was published by Eight Cuts Gallery Press in 2011, and he has recently completed a new volume of poetry entitled End of the Season.

Amelia Gabaldoni read English at St Edmund Hall and was also President of the JCR. A Gentleman needs no introduction.

Tony Hufton is a freelance writer living in Norwich. He studied English at St Edmund Hall.

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Justin Gosling taught philosophy for many years at St Edmund Hall before serving as its Principal from 1982-96. He has written numerous

philosophy books, and is the author of The Jackdaw and the Jacaranda, a collection of poems.

Peter J King was active on the London poetry scene in the mid-1970s, running Tapocketa Press, and co-editing words worth magazine with Alaric Sumner. He started studying philosophy in 1980, going on to read for the BPhil at Brasenose in 1983, then a DPhil, and is now lecturer in philosophy at Pembroke College and at St Edmund Hall. He wrote and published poetry for a while in the mid-1980s, and started again in 2012. He translates poetry from modern Greek (with Andrea Christofidou), and has recently started translating German poetry.

Gerard Lally read English at St Edmund Hall (1971-74) and received his MA in 1980. He is currently living in Thessaloniki, Greece where he taught English until his retirement in 2015.

Alex Matraxia is a second year student reading English Literature at St Edmund Hall. He is fiction editor for The ISIS magazine in Oxford, and has contributed poetry and prose to recent issues. He is interested in experimenting with poetic voice, bringing together conversation, gossip and abstraction into a poetic discourse. He is also an editor for St Edmund Hall’s Arts magazine, The Gallery, and is collaborating on various art magazines and zines based in London, including Art Babes and Sirens.

Jude Cowan Montague is a writer and artist from London. She has worked as an archivist on the Reuters and ITN video collections and has published poetry relating to news agency video. She is working on her third collection The Wires, 2012 about international news stories to be published by Dark Windows Press. She is also a musician and composer.

Lucy Newlyn is co-founder of the Hall Writers’ Forum and its host. She taught English at St Edmund Hall for thirty-three years until her retirement in 2017. She has published widely on English Romanticism, and edited a number of poetry anthologies. Her first collection of poems, Ginnel, was published with Carcanet in 2005; and her second, Earth’s Almanac, was published in 2015. Her memoir Diary of a Bipolar Explorer is forthcoming 177

with Signal Books in February 2018. She is Literary Editor of The Oxford Magazine.

Carolyn O’Connell is a poet and lives in Hartford, Cheshire after moving from London. She is a member of Blaze (Mid Cheshire) Stanza & Vale Royal Writers Group. She is listed on Poetrypf.com and has been published in magazines and anthologies. Between Bamboo (2002) is available from Amazon and Timelines (2014) from Indigo Dreams Publishing: http://www.indigodreams.co.uk/carolyn-oconnell/4586178898 Brian Smith read English at SEH in the 60s, and spent thirty years teaching literature and music in Sixth form education in the South West of England.

It was not until his retirement to France that he began to write and translate poetry himself, with the encouragement of the members of the Hall Writers' Forum whose constructive suggestions and close attention to detail helped him to find a voice and overcome a creative block that had lasted over forty years.

Mike Spilberg Born Walthamstow, 1949, Mike spent his formative years in Ibadan, Nigeria interspersed with lengthy holidays in Naples, before going to school in Brentwood. He emerged from three happy years of English at SEH a married man with a degree no better than you would expect, and took to teaching (Surrey and Hampstead) to tide him over until retirement, since when he has returned to writing after years of day-dreaming about it.

He has four adult children and something like nine grandchildren. After living in SW Surrey for many years he lives currently in East Hampshire.

Mohammad Talib taught Sociology at Jamia Millia Islamia University (Delhi), from 1979 to 2001. In 2002, he came to Oxford as the Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz fellow in the Anthropology of Muslim Societies at the Oxford Centre for Islamic studies. He is also Islamic Centre lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.

Neville Teller won a scholarship to read Modern History, coming up to the Hall in 1952. He was on the committee of the OUDS, president of the Experimental Theatre Club, and coxed the 1953 Fourth VIII. He freelanced for the BBC, and in 1956 joined British Cellophane as a junior advertising executive. Thereafter he ran a double career: one in advertising, marketing, publishing, the Civil Service and finally a national cancer charity; 178

the other as a writer for BBC radio and related fields. He was made an MBE in 2006 for services to broadcasting and to drama.

Natasha Walker lives in Germany and works for companies, governments, foundations and change-makers shaping strategy on climate change adaptation, biodiversity, poverty and other global issues. She studied English Literature and Modern Languages (German) at SEH and Göttingen University. She has a grown-up son at Manchester University and a seven year old daughter, loves Mozart and Bartok, Bach and Shostakovich, hiking, Cornwall and her enormous family. She’s constantly writing a novel, but actually manages to finish poems and proverbs.

Jamie Whelan spent over thirty years in teaching, latterly as Head of Languages in a large grammar school with responsibility for its specialist language college for ten years. He enjoys writing, especially narrative fiction and completed a first novel at the beginning of 2017. Now retired, he has more time to visit his two grown-up sons. The elder lives in Berlin and is a professional comedian and singer, performing comedy in German at venues throughout the country. The younger is a history lecturer about to leave a post in Oxford for a permanent lectureship at Liverpool University.

Cazzie Winterton is in her second year reading English at St Edmund Hall.

Having written songs in the past, when she got to University she thought she would try her hand at poetry. She is still at it with the music, spending time practising, writing and performing with her (largely Teddy Hall) band, Stephen Hero.

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