These poems were written at various times between 2009 and 2017. All were posted on Places of Poetry in 2019. The links provide explanation where it’s needed.
‘Invitation to The Tins path, Cambridge’ was written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell’s splendid volume 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. This was prompt number 4, for a poem that’s an invitation.
Invitation to The Tins path, Cambridge
If you know John Adams’ Harmonium,
and ride a pushbike, let’s recall the drum-
roll throbbing in the quiet that will grow
riding a stretch from death to the full throw
of movement 3, ‘Wild nights’. Let’s do the bike
version along this path, small flat bridge like
the drums, and power in the riding rise
for that crescendo of sonorities.
The bridge won’t rumble now as once, I fear,
under one bike, so let us all draw near,
a pedal-strengthened Adams multitude
in mind of that orchestral interlude.
Chester Road
Via Devana – Chester Road – the name
spurious, eighteenth-century invention
(rhymed, I suppose, retainer not Tirana) –
I rode northwest that turmoiling weekend,
a 90s time of names and letters reversed,
seeing how nothing could be for the best;
we ride southeast over the clunky stones,
a bouncing practice for our next bike tour,
and spend an afternoon admiring beasts.
Perhaps some day we’ll take the invitation
in the road’s name – bogus but true enough –
and ride northwest to Chester, the whole way.
‘A three-year cycle’ is my first, and so far only, attempt to write in the form of a pantoum. This was for a 2010 competition organised within Birkbeck College.
A three-year cycle
But things move on if it’s a cycle –
grey as old photos, January, bruises,
with piled-up consequences happened already.
See the sky rhymed with the street
grey as old photos, January, bruises.
Where does the three-year cycle start?
See the sky rhymed with the street
turn red-blue as daring.
Where does the three-year cycle start?
Where put the defining moment’s
turn red-blue as daring?
They cycled from Cambridge to Reach.
Where put the defining moments?
They cycled from Cambridge to Over.
They cycled from Cambridge to Reach.
Green-gold as July, O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands,
they cycled from Cambridge to Over,
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture –
green-gold as July, O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands,
they ran into Psalm 102: a bruised forgetting to eat bread.
We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture –
with piled-up consequences happened already,
they ran into Psalm 102: a bruised forgetting to eat bread.
But things move on if it’s a cycle.
‘1860s lite’ and ‘Shades of 1860s lite’ were written after an excursion in September 2014. For the excursion behind it, the one made by antiquarians in 1868, see ‘Haddiscoe, September 16th, 1868’ in ‘General meetings and excursions’, Quarterly journal of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, January 1869, pp. 13–16. Available online at http://bit.ly/1AGPUqB [accessed 17 July 2023]
1860s lite
We aim to follow, not to recreate,
that learned tour in 1868
on horse-drawn omnibuses from the station
Haddiscoe had then (not today’s location).
We cannot make the antiquarian
jaunt’s mid-September mid-Victorian
quality of light. That we don’t know.
Cooler planet. Steam trains at Haddiscoe.
At Oulton, night, earlier then, unlit,
made the last visit rush and shortened it.
‘Postscript 1868’ ends Possession
with a century-buried uncompletion.
Shades of 1860s lite
We biked after the 1868ers,
tweeting their churches till the juice was low.
September, both day trips, theirs not so late as
ours, and their station nearer Haddiscoe.
Their Reverend John Gunn, at Flixton Ruin,
should have written a paper, but had not.
His ad-lib burns the page – what not to do in
that case, shot down. I hope he soon forgot.
Had we found Flixton, by day’s end? The map’s
“Church (rems of)”, this track, these beehives, this clump.
Glimpsed stonework under leaves. It was perhaps
church-shaped enough to be the ruin’s stump.
Overgrown hulk, church shadow, where what should
have been done and was not has almost cooled.
