Wednesday 27 February 2013

Jigsaw Puzzle in Winter


On melting snow
Before a door
One jigsaw corner
Turned too soft
And faded grey.
It was hard to say
What it was once;
Maybe a piece
of sunny sky. And
There I left it
Where it lay. One
Lost puzzle piece
Outside a door
Of a church bazaar.
And somewhere else
In a rattle box
A picture incomplete.


Sunday 24 February 2013

Pope resigns after winning lottery!


THE LORD MOVES IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS

Yes, it's true. The pope's winning lottery numbers were:

1, 3, 10, 12, 23, 28 + bonus number 6   

On checking his lottery numbers on Sunday 10th February 2013 the pope decides:

"Holy straw sack. I will quit tomorrow!"

Katharina Greve's uncanny cartoon prediction, made over a year ago, is in the 2013 edition of the page-a-day calendar KARICARTOON (published by Espresso-Verlag) and it is, amazingly, on the page for 10th February 2013. The calendar features 365 cartoons by 80 artists. 

The pope duly announced his resignation, on the exact date predicted in Greve's KARICARTOON, Monday 11th February 2013.

The full story and the cartoon can be found via the Spiegel Online link at bottom right of this Poet-in-Residence blog.

The Lord moves in mysterious ways.


Saturday 23 February 2013

What the hell are EU eating?


On this European continent of deceptive labels it turns out that several major supermarket concerns are selling horse meat under the guise of beef or pork. A map in today's paper shows the following countries affected: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Corsica, Sardinia, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Austria, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Greece. More European countries will doubtless join the list in the coming days. 

Food scandals here in Austria have also involved eggs and dairy products. A supplier was recently sentenced to three years for claiming that his eggs were fresh eggs from Austria whereas they were out-of-date eggs from Slovakia. Another supplier is under investigation as a result of horse meat being found in his beef sausages. According to one newspaper report the sausage horse meat was stored in a warehouse with Canadian horse meat intended for feeding animals in an Austrian zoo. 

A few years ago a major supermarket concern sent out-of-date dairy products, including yoghurt, to Hungary for re-dating. The European-wide list of food scandals must be almost endless.

But it is not just these kinds scandals that make me angry, it's mainly the conditions that many of the animals which end up in the supermarket chillers have to endure en route

An accident the other day on a German autobahn between Munich and Salzburg involved a truck carrying 700 Ferkel (young pigs) which overturned. Some of the pigs spilled out onto the road and died instantly. All the others, including those uninjured, were ordered to be destroyed, and were destroyed on the spot, as following the accident "their adrenalin levels were too high for them to be considered fit to be eaten". 

I have to ask: Wouldn't the adrenalin levels of the young pigs already be too high prior to the accident? This diesel truck crammed full of living swine had already travelled the full length of Germany from north to south! If that's not stress enough to send their adrenalin levels through the roof I don't know what is.

So the question remains, what the hell are we eating?

Friday 22 February 2013

Sonnet to a Theorem


Camouflaged and still
beside old coats
the shape of squares invisible,
though seen today was dim
as nails within a dusty box,
the shade of wood and sand;
behind some planks
the delta winged
upon the yellow paint
stain on the wall; a thought
concealed amongst long handles,
angled in the corner of
the builder's hut; outside
the silent snow still falls.


Wednesday 20 February 2013

. . . . . . A Moth . . . . . .

for Erna D - may you go lightly   


waits

still as death

on a rock

for the darkness

to fall

as inevitably

it will



so still

it waits

it is a moth

eager

to flit

to the light

in the darkness



Tuesday 19 February 2013

Thoughts of Rome haiku







a moth

unlike a mitre

still on a rock






A word about wordplay:

*The handsome moth I photographed is not a Mitre Pretiosa which is a small and dark moth.

  Also worth knowing is that aus (the initial letters of the lines) is the German word for out. The rest of it speaks for itself. The ex-pope will remain on the rock, the mitre will move into new hands, the moth will carry on regardless. Above this post is another post about moths. It is for an old person I know. It is a song of hope.

Monday 18 February 2013

THE BIG WELSH CHALLENGE


HARLECH CASTLE built by EDWARD I

OUTSIDE IT WAS persistently raining, or to use a Welsh expression it was 'pissing it down' as the poet Dylan Thomas would doubtless have mentioned in a loud hollow voice in passing on more than one occasion around the time of last orders in the comfort of the lounge bar of the Brown's Hotel in Laugharne (pronounced Larne) in South Wales when he lived and worked down there. 

For lack of something better to do, and having no desire to venture outside and get drowned, I took the BBC's THE BIG WELSH CHALLENGE and failed miserably.

The lesson I looked at was in Entry Level Unit 1 and it was Greetings / Scene 3: Karate Class.

Perhaps you think I was aiming too high? Myself, being a North Walian, I think I was probably aiming too low.

It went something like this, so far as it went (my 'tongue in check' contributions shown in parenthesis):



The Big Welsh Challenge


Thank you very much . . . Goodbye.

Good evening.

The Karate Course, please.

Who are you?

I'm Edward. (Solid Welsh name I don't think. Is the Beeb extracting the pee?)

Edward. (And again, just rubbing it in?)

Who are you again? Edward what? (Yet again?)

Edward Morgan (ah, Morgan, that's better.)

Edward Morgan, Karate Course, Monday night. No problem. Room three.

Thank you.

Goodbye.
_______________

(I had no idea Karate was so popular in Wales. I expect we'll need it if we ever have a Fukushima style melt-through in Anglesey. One HRH in a helicopter won't be enough.)

______________________________________________________________________
Note: Edward 1, known as Longshanks, was the English monarch who conquered North Wales and built Caernarfon Castle, Harlech Castle and a chain of other castles in order to keep the roguish Welsh subdued. Now imagine ZDF, or some other major German TV station, broadcasting a beginners German language course called The Big German Challenge with one of the principal characters being a certain Adolf signing up for a self-defence class . . .

Fukushima latest: 44% of Fukushima children have thyroid abnornalities.


Blaze a Vanishing and The Tall Skies by Alan Morrison



 Alan Morrison's latest offering, published by Waterloo Press (Hove, UK), is Blaze a Vanishing and The Tall Skies (De Höga Himlarna). The publication is supported by the Arts Council of England.

The title poem Blaze a Vanishing (A Trail of Small Fires) is a poem of eighteen cantos, and it is dedicated to the memory of art brut poet Howard Mingham (1952-84) whose collected works  can be found under the title Waters of the Night - a publication currently available from Morrison's own Caparison Press at the Recusant website.

Blaze a Vanishing (A Trail of Small Fires) opens with Paper Pharaohs.

 Pharaohs - pile your papers up in slopes to compass pyramids:
 Publish forth, blaze your lives, bind the leaves; transport them
 Like pallbearers into anticipated tombs of posthumous
 Obscurities . . .

The song goes on to describe the poet as a kind of producer of poetic papyrus destined to be placed in a bottle and tossed into the ocean of oblivion for some bardic beachcomber or researcher to perhaps chance upon at some future date, but of course as with everyday messages abandoned in bottles most will end their days stuck deep in the sands of time waiting to be swallowed and forgotten. Or as Alan Morrison puts it :

 Paths of broken links and cloudy-pooled connections
 Muddied by movement beneath; fogs imbibed by bottom-
 Feeders, lounging stargazers with upward-facing mouths,
 Or keenly recycling cucumbers. But most are lost
 At sea, tossed across ever-collapsing stratifications of waves.

The task, it appears to me, is not to burden the dusty shelves of unsold poetry books with ever more books without a good reason for doing so, as for example with the ghost of Howard Mingham whom Morrison courageously hauled into his own bardic lifeboat. See the Recusant website.

Slums and Jerusalems, Verse WivesGhosts and Heroes, The Casual Angels are four of the eighteen small fires illuminating the way.

From The Casual Angels:

 Now in the autumn of our welfare state, razed to rubble
 By this Tory torch, at the last chewed-up fag-end
 Of the Grasping Age, a decade of austerity stretches
 Its talons to claw at scuttling mice; cheat a generation
 Of beginners from the chance to prove themselves on the page

 . . .

 Is there hope beyond computer search engines? Who has heard
 Of Richard Free? Arthur Lynch? Joseph Leftwich? Martha Watt?
 Patricia Lynch? Leonora Thomas? Maggie Hewitt? Bill Foot?
 Charles Poulson? William Robert Halls? J.A Elliott?
 William Dorrell? Bernie Steer? Sue Shrapnel? Tony Gilbert?
 Rebbeca O'Rourke? Howard Mingham? Nicholas Lafitte?

As one of those children spoon fed on Enid Blyton with lashings of what Morrison calls her Englishness that never actually existed (all fifty greys of it) I often wonder how I made it through. For the record, according to Alan Morrison, we are now in the time of Harry Potter and the Cultural Myth


Back to reality then.

Verse Wives begins:

 What of the women of war? The homekeepers, the candle-
 Holders, the lantern-bearers, the shock-anticipators?
 Those iron-nerved girls knitting socks for ghosts, pained war
 Widows and ear-trumpeted spinsters? Those millions
 Of industrious hands moisturised in gun grease . . .

. . .

 Would any of their names sink into prised callipers with
 The inky teeth of printing presses; achieve sleeved afterlives?


All the relevant and irreverent facts and anecdotes that we require to pursue our own study of a neglected aspect of the world of poetry, should we feel moved to do so, are there for us to work through. It's a great bonus. 

The inclusion of The Tall Skies (De Höga Himlarna) completes this important collection from the author of Captive Dragons/ The Shadow Thorns (Waterloo Press).

Blaze a Vanishing crackles with all the enthusiasm and excitement of a trail blazing journey into the unknown bardic outback.




Sunday 17 February 2013

Untitled





The builder of warships 

takes over the bank. The man 

at the top announces: I quit.


The cross on the roof 

is attacked. Lightning,

 some say from high heaven. 


Mothers warm horsemeat lasagne  

for children to bolt.

It's labelled:  'Real Beef   100%' 




Thursday 14 February 2013

Not a shaggy-dog poem




in virginal snow 

near to the school

there are faeces 

concealed


by nightly dog walkers


 (faces in darkness) 



one clearing snow


from the school path


uncovered a clue



Tuesday 12 February 2013

Predestination


Lightning strikes Vatican after Benedict XVI resigns his post 


Predestination 

Don't ask me who the next Pope will be. Ask God. He already knows. 
- Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn 



To ask? Is it pointless? 


Why the deadly mosquito took 

one 

and not the other

as a mother might ask

or why the zip 

on someone's jacket 

jammed stuck 

just when the snow hit the town 

and the temperature dropped 

far below

zero

and he slipped on the ice

outside his back door

by way of examples

in everyday 

life . . . 




Monday 11 February 2013

Working Party


Danse Macabre by Albin Egger-Lienz (1868-1926)


Danse Macabre - detail


Working Party


To the front

with your spade

and orders

to dig


  a trench

a grave

  and a latrine


. . .


there is the way . . .


. . .  to the War  Machine


______________________________________________________________________

The Austrian artist Albin Egger-Lienz was delegated to capture the so-called heroic action scenes of the Austria-Italy conflict in the Alps during World War I. The paintings he produced were not what the establishment or the people of his home town expected. He was subsequently made unwelcome in Austria. He spent his later years in the town of Bolzano in the  Italian Dolomites.

I have written three other poems concerning this artist. They are: "War Artist", "Ants, Austria 1914" and "The Nameless". You can find them by entering "Albin Egger-Lienz" in the blog search box.


The chicken champions?




Could a burger chain advertisement in support of the Austrian skiing effort at the World Cup 2013 in Austria to blame for the unusually poor performance of  the Austrian team?

This high flying skiing nation has, after the first week of competition, only one medal to crow about. A bronze for Niki Hosp in the 'Ladies Combined' event.

In the medals table the team is languishing in 8th place. Words like "humiliation" and "tragedy" are now appearing in the sports pages of the national press.

The advertising slogan alongside the national flag emblem on large billboard hoardings throughout the land refers to the Austrian team as "chicken champions".

Dear Austrians, these are not words of encouragement!

The word "chicken" used in this way means "cowardly" or "without courage" or "afraid". Any native English speaker above the age of 5 or 6 will be able to confirm this fact.

Austrian downhill skiers have always shown plenty of pluck. They have never behaved like chicken-hearted fowl.

Perhaps the fast food concern should be asked to remove the offending word from its billboardsleaving simply the word "champions".

The Austrian ski team might then fly high!


Update: Great news just in from the slopes. A bronze for the Austrian men.
Update 2: And now a gold in the team event!
Update 3: A bronze in the women's giant slalom!


Saturday 9 February 2013

Signs of Spring


   
Now they arrive

the early signs

of Spring in Austria:

the Primrose smiling

wanly, the Snowdrop

shivering her Bell.

*

From the North

less Crows. From the East

less Cold.  From the

West more Snow. From the

South more Sun.

From all Directions

more VIPs

for the Vienna State Opera Ball.


Friday 8 February 2013

On tram lines


I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please, and as I damn please . . .  - William Carlos Williams


the usual people
on the morning tram
are reading
the usual newspapers
are reading
the usual emails
from the usual people
are thumbing
through the usual internet apps
and
as usual
it's true to say
not one in fifty is reading a book
and not one in a thousand is reading a poetry book
 this number might even be one in ten thousand
 maybe one in a million 

  observing all this
as usual
someone now writes a poem
about it

 this is most unusual


Thursday 7 February 2013

Note from an haikuholic





joining the dead drunk poets 

society 

was not my brightest idea! 




Whatever it is you're looking for you won't find it here - Raymond Pettibon 



Monday 4 February 2013

Next thing, I reflect



   -  - - -  a mosquito (or something) IS

AT LARGE 

in the room 



how IT sings in my ear

in passing

zeeee- -- eeee ---yee!  yippie aye o!

and

re-passing

between long silences


And yet how strange 

and devious

the false castrato song 



for it is the bearer of the next disease 

and other ill tidings



- - - now only ONE in the room! 

(a far as I know)

If so it's enough
  

One hot kiss on the tip of my nose 



Too Late

I waft no tangible air 




her waltz goes on 
 my elbow
my toe
 my brow 

for now I know -
 it is a she 

the male drinks not of my life blood


at last I can stand her no more 
I crawl from the bed 
 drag her heat   
to the bathroom 
 where I stare in the glass 

at one point

now inflamed
glowing red on the wall 


haiku




valleys and peaks

 wave upon wave 

the mountainous sea