Tag: poem

Poems/

New poem by Harry Man

Harry Man

Earlier this year I was on a Poetry School course in Lambeth and met Harry Man. I really liked his work and I think he and I were two of only four participants who completed the course (out of about 15).

I came across Harry’s name again recently and had a snoop around the internet, discovering all sorts of things that he’s far too modest to shout about, for example he won 3rd prize in this year’s Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Wowza!

Harry’s agreed to be an open mic buddy when I take my first tentative steps onto the London poetry scene next year. Can’t wait! Plus, I asked him for a poem and he very kindly sent me this…enjoy!

 

Hiromi Miyake
Japanese 56kg International Women’s Weightlifting Silver Medalist

The audience at the front; dark white bread in an oven,
each of them had expressions uncompressed as lakes.
Snatch, and nostrils of Mingjuan, trembled, flaring
pleased and quiet like a mirror, a muscle, a whistle string.
Arrow root lifting-powder poltergeisting about the place.
Wang Mingjuan was a slow motion cat leap into red towels –
happy to be here, happy to compete, happening,
Hiromi Miyake, Hiromi Miyake – not City, Red Army,
The just so so beautiful tonight ArcelorMittal Orbit,
“but works in a bank part time to fund her appetite
for lifting weights…”
the bar is seven reds, retinas, clean, high over heads
of state.

Mags & Blogs/

At the Plastic Bag Museum

these are the things
that carried the stuff
that people bought
see those loops
for hands – handles
they’re called

naturally they never
carried boxes
the corners would
poke through
split sides
you can see why

empties got crumpled
thrust into drawers
small thin ones used
to pick up dogs’ turds
the sturdier ones
for kitchen bins

some got buried
with their cousins or
stuck up trees years
later plucked free or
flushed out to sea
to bob in packs

some (not this one)
swallowed whole or
chomped through
by blue whales
wrapped round claws
or tails perhaps

you’ve seen one
you can’t get them
any more but feel
how smooth and thin
logo intact how
perfectly preserved

 

 

(published in Mslexia issue 53, March 2012)

Mags & Blogs/

When my sister is old

I will wait at the door with flowers
if she greets me at all it will be brief
and cold as the Guildford house
where the stairs stayed uncarpeted
and the kitchen unmodernised,
names and numbers taped on walls,
coats and boots crammed under stairs.

Her back will be bent like our mother’s,
she will start in the middle of a sentence
half scolding, half pleased, tired of TV
and itching to get out walking with sticks
she will bring up that time on the Isle of Wight
when my legs gave way and she carried on,
fitter than me and needing to travel.

We will have tea and talk about church
or someone’s baby, there will never be
enough hours for all she must do or has done.
I will tease out family secrets and remind her
of twenty years she thought she’d never have,
if she comments at all it will be brief,
like the moment before sleep.

 

(from Agenda – web supplement to ‘Retrospectives’ issue April 2012)

 

 

Mags & Blogs/

Invasion

It took three rows of barbed wire coiled round stakes,
hammered at angles into sand and shingle. The beach
packed and leaking like keddle nets of cockles in green
buckets, for six summers.

Wading off in gumboots, baitdiggers beyond the rocks
held occasional wakes, observed by boys belly-down
in the dunes with binoculars, swapping quiet jokes
and stale crackers.

Over on the mud flats lugworms blew their coiled casts
as shellfish slept peacefully, and tides took time to warp
the weed-wrapped posts, as crippled as the knees
of sentries denied their leave.

After the war, low-slung homes stood watch: black-eyed,
slammed cold up against marram grass and buckthorn,
demanding their sea defences. Then came Pontins
and the caravans.

 

published in Interpreter’s House, February 2012

 

Mags & Blogs/

River Ouse, Rodmell, 1941

The first she prises out, clenched in bindweed:
reluctance adds to its appeal.

And there: not so large as to burst pockets,
several flints conspire

their surfaces glass-perfect, all the better
to slip in without fuss.

From mud, she frees a stump of the fat chalk Down
walked each day, as worn

as the worsted that parcels up her reedy body
ready for anchoring.

Pebbles lean into her, take us they say, take us,
the floods are coming

but like Noah she must leave some behind,
the unbelievers.

 

(first published in Agenda Vol 46 No. 2, Sept 2011)

Uncategorized/

Three minute poem

On Saturday I was at a writing day at the Poetry Society, led by Ann and Peter Sansom, who put us through our paces in a series of rapid fire exercises. In one, we were asked to imagine an abandoned item, something forgotten or neglected, and write in its voice. Unfortunately I find myself turning to slapstick on these occasions.

Hello?*

I am that knick-knack
you picked up in Spain
You know –
The thing you laughed over
and couldn’t resist, that afternoon
when you were probably
drunk
on the local Sangria
or too much blue sky

Yes, I am the shoe horn
made from bull horn
decked out like a matador
red ribbons and brass buttons
I was just one tinkly gift
on a crowded shelf

You could have hung me in your kitchen
or in the hall, with pride
a perpetual reminder of
one night in Mojacar

Hello?
Don’t you have any shoes?

 

*of course it should have been Ola – as pointed out by Ann

Uncategorized/

I was once the Pope

This is not what I expected.
Red was my colour, or white,
white as a virgin’s skin. Robes
hung from me as delicate
as the smooth charcoal tissue
that floats from the fire.

Each year I am reincarnate.
Children press their fingers
to my frame, glue and paper
swaddling these new bones
of wood and chicken wire.
In six months I am fleshed.

My face grows more grotesque
with the passing years, ears
larger, cheeks greyer. Knock
your knuckle on my body
and hear my hollowness.
But I am not without substance:

I am laced with the stuff of death.
At first, the heat agonised me.
Now I welcome it, I am ready.
Red is my colour – red as earth
scorched through and bloodied
red as a child’s gaudy toy.

And when this shell explodes,
splinters of me will grate the sky,
the crowd will be sated.
You can look for me if you must –
trodden into mud, dusting trees –
go on, stare. I am not there

 

 

* first appeared in Iota 89, Spring 2011