Aurora Australis
Way down South, where looking up
Is looking upside down –
The Man in the Moon is wrongside-right,
And the Plough ain’t even in town.
The Dog Star sails above the Pup,
Throughout the Summer sky,
With Betelgeuse kept low at night
And Rigel kicking high.
To Northern eyes, where looking up
Is looking strange and stark –
The Milky Way us far too bright,
The pole is far too dark.
Eye-Ee-Shah
Aisha Asher always thinks her name
Has too few letters in it –
It takes a whole three syllables to say,
But not to write.
She likes the sound, but oh, that spelling !
How she longs to discipline it –
Make those letters toe the line,
And keep their phonemes tight.
Whenever a teacher or a stranger
Tries, and fails, to call her,
They’re guaranteed to get it wrong
If reading it as penned.
Ay-sha, they would call her, like the Geisha from Croatia,
It appals her,
But…she cannot really blame them in the end.
Her A is really said like I,
Her I is really said like E,
But who would know to see it written down ?
She toys with splitting them apart with Y,
To keep her diphthongs free,
Or adding dots above the E,
Despite her mother’s frown.
But nobody respects her favoured spellings, anyway –
(It doesn’t help that they are apt to change).
It looks like she is stuck
With a name no-one can say,
Eternally surprising in her strange.
There’s no ‘We’ in Corpus Christi
There once was a priest
Who thought he was a priest,
But who wasn’t in the Lord’s own eyes.
For, to be a priest
You must at very least
Have already been fully baptised.
And I am that priest,
Who thought his path was greased
Right into the body of the Church.
But my own parish priest
Who performed on me the piece
Messed up, and left me in the lurch.
For old Father East
Was a jovial priest
Who knew that my parents were stressing –
So to put them at their ease,
He thought it quite a wheeze
To fully loop them into the blessing –
“To the Lord God who frees us
And in the name of Jesus
We all here christen you, our cute little guy.”
But God had closed his ears
To the heartfelt font-side cheers –
For the priest had said that ‘We’ instead of ‘I’.
So when the truth was teased,
How the Church was less-than-pleased !
For I wasn’t then a priest to begin…
Each wedding vow ceased
To be valid in the least
As the couples fornicated in sin.
Ev’ry moral I policed,
Ev’ry absolution leased
Was a sham in its promise and its hope.
Their souls had been fleeced
And sold off to the Beast –
For this priest has gone on to be Pope.
Blue Chip, Brown Bread
Somebody I’ve never met has died,
And you’ve never met him either –
Yet we’re required to shut up and abide,
And know our place.
We’re in for a long and boring ride,
And woe betide the unbeliever –
From Kensington to the banks of the Clyde,
The nation shuts its face.
Clear the TV schedules, quick,
They need to fawn over a nobody –
All these tributes, creepy and slick,
For fear of facing anarchy !
So after years of giving him stick
They’re truth-to-power turns limp and shoddy –
But then, these days they’re all in thick,
And even the Guardian bends the knee.
The media barons and ermine peers
Will lead the mourning, doffed and bowed,
And pray for another fifty years
In their suffocating drone.
As they wring out the mandatory tears
And tug their forelocks proud,
The Establishment betrays its fears
As it buries one of its own.
Chance Encounter
Has it been so long ?
Has it really been so many years
Since last we greeted one another ?
Since we said goodbye in tears
After it had all gone wrong…?
Yeah, I guess it has been after all.
Are we about to rediscover
Why we never tried to call ?
I can’t believe it either…
I guess they don’t make years like they used to,
Back when we were foolish-young –
Of course, I never thought I’d lose you…
Never thought I’d win you, neither,
Yet, back then, I guess I did,
Until experience had stung,
Reminding me I’m just a kid.
We had some fun, though, didn’t we…?
It’s coming back – the better times,
The silly, noisy better times,
When life was there for living.
We had a good run, you and me,
Before the arguments and guilt,
Before the milk was spilt,
Before each second-guessed misgiving.
Has it been so long ?
Has it been a lifetime since we spoke ?
It all seemed so important,
And so ruined once it broke.
I guess we came out strong,
We both have landed on all-fours.
It’s good to see you, even sporting still
That wayward smile of yours.
Unfinished
Must not lie back on the poems I’ve written,
Those sonnets and couplets are all in the past –
Thoughts from a week ago, month ago, years,
Thoughts of their moment, but never my last.
Haven’t I changed since, even a little bit ?
Diff’rently conscious, evolving, hard-won.
Got to keep writing, keep feeling, keep living,
For what good’s a poet who thinks their work done ?
Biblio Tech
Every gentleman fills up his library:
Every manor and palace and hall
Has a room full of shelving that’s crammed full of bindings,
All equally mannered and equally tall.
And nowhere is half a row empty,
And nowhere are bookstacks for want of a board.
Do gentlemen skim for as long as they’ve shelving,
Then quit once their volumes are suitably stored ?
April the 6th
First, stick with a calendar
That clearly isn’t fit for purpose –
Stick with it because, old son,
That’s just the way we’ve always done.
Tradition is a glut of yesterdays,
Where silence runs a surplus –
Until the change has grown too great
(Yet still two hundred years too late).
Then hack eleven days off all at once –
A week-and-a-half, just done away –
And then a twelfth is added, see,
For the non-leaping century.
(But next time round – it isn’t,
Cos it isn’t, cos that’s what they say.)
And that is why our pounds and pence
Outweigh our bloody common sense !
The Price of Knowledge
Once I was a student,
And a dreamy kid who wanted to know more.
I went to find out what it meant,
To study art and life and metaphor.
And though I had a cocky gob,
I’m not sure I was quite the nation’s cream.
It didn’t lead me to a job –
But oh, it surely taught me how to dream.
I was pretty broke back then,
But I received a grant to help me through –
And when I passed, and stowed my pen,
I looked upon the world as somewhere new.
I found some work, I found some mates,
And neither needed much of what I’d learned –
But still it opened up the gates,
And gave me confidence that I had earned.
So now I gladly pay my taxes,
Pay my way, and never ride for free –
So when I hear of fiscal axes,
Spare a thought for who we used to be –
For loans and debt will only scare
The very ones you think superfluous –
So tax me more ! It’s only fair,
To help out all the dreamy kids like us.
Cruci-Fiction
“And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.”
-Mark 15:33
An eclipse, right ? It sounds so fine,
Especially when we learn of one,
A total seen in ’29.
Alas, we now can calculate
Down to the nearest minute
And the nearest mile its fate –
And this one was November,
And only nine-tenths partial there –
The dark was still a glowing ember.
The near-miss of ’29 –
The sky was dim, the air was chill,
But the Sun could still outshine.
An hour or so to noon,
And lasting just a hour or two,
So it was over far too soon.
And anyway, it just won’t do –
For Passover was always held
When the Moon was full, not new.
But what about a Lunar one ?
There’s one in April ’33,
At sunset too – job done !
Except…it’s partial, still quite bright,
And it didn’t last an hour in all,
And the only darkness comes with night.
Some suggest volcanic ash instead –
Though that would last for days, and stretch
Throughout the Eastern Med.
Maybe just a heavy storm ?
The legend doesn’t mention rain,
But thunderheads might fit the form.
And yet…is that the best that God
Can rustle up ? A gloomy afternoon ?
His climax barely gets a nod.
We’re better off with desert dust –
When heavy in the atmosphere
It tints the Moon with rust.
But as the moon sails higher,
So the dust is less through which we peer –
So this one’s not a flyer.
And anyway, how come
There was no-one else wrote down the fact
Of what should strike them dumb ?
Three full hours of dark,
Before the sun had even set ?
Now that should leave its mark !
In our hearts, we know the score –
The sky did not go dark that day.
The world still turned, just as before.
