Wireless-less
Left my phone at home – what a pain,
Now I haven’t a thing to read on the train.
I hope that nobody needs to reach me –
My own stupid fault, but I guess this’ll teach me.
And the loss of my music is just as bad –
But I wonder if there’s a poem to be had…?
A rant at the waste of a day I must frown on…
Then again, what will I write it down on ?
Saints of a Lesser Rank
The names we give our churches
Are all bound by strange constraints –
There’s an unwritten convention
To the way we dole-out saints.
So every town must have its Mary,
And its James or Paul, if space,
And all the All Saints crowding altars
Ever since the days of Thrace.
But as for Valentine, whose name
Is just as big as these, or bigger –
On the street, this saint for couples
Cuts an oddly lonely figure.
P’raps to worship him on ev’ry Sunday,
Sending prayers above,
Must seem to stuffy vicars like indulgence,
Gorging weekly love…
Yet how can priests with vows of chastity
Behold this worldy man,
Who teaches us to worship with our bodies ?
Best to scoff, and ban…
And yet, on February nights,
And far from Canterb’ry or Rome,
We pilgrims come together in his name
At makeshift shrines at home.
I have previously discussed a preference for local saints over here.
Hampstead Heartaches
Even the rich deserve to love,
They have it hard enough, we feel –
Having to live with all that guilt,
While all their wealth is jerry-built.
How can they hope to show their stuff,
Unless they give it up for real ?
To work a job and earn a crust
In hope they one day earn our trust.
Even the rich deserve to love,
To prove they’re more than privilege.
We shouldn’t judge the state they’re in,
Or hate them for their perfect skin.
I really hope they care enough
To share their fortune round a smidge –
To favour ev’ry love-struck son,
In hope we all can be the One.
The Price of Sharps
I remember when my father gave me
My first penknife, as a lad,
A ritual passed-on from his dad.
“I see you’re growing up, our Davy”
Like me, it was Sheffield made,
With a penny taped upon the blade.
“We always do that – that’s tradition.
You need to give that back to me,
To pay me for the present, see ?
It’s just a silly superstition,
But it’s how it’s always done –
Best to play along, hey, son.”
So now it’s my turn, as the father,
With my boy departing home
To study Greeks and Ancient Rome.
“You’ll have to learn to cook now, rather
Than depending on your mother.
A world of flavours to discover !”
And I gave him a set of knives
With which to peel and dice and chop,
Without a penny taped on top.
It felt at odds with modern lives –
Instead, let’s pass on tools and shears,
And pay them forward, down the years.
Bob-Bob-Bobbing
The robins are chirping all night long
In the tree by the streetlight over the street.
I wonder what is the point of their song
That they keeping on chirping all night long ?
Perhaps this tree’s just a place to meet
When they fancy a branch for a late-night tweet ?
A nightclub where the music is strong
In the tree by the streetlight over the street.
I thought that robins were territorial,
And yet this tree is a truce-arboreal –
Chatting and chirping in one big throng,
In the tree by the streetlight all night long.
Fourthtides
The Celtic quarter days are out of sync
By six weeks or so, all said.
Not on the English solstice and equinox,
But behind (or ahead).
Now May Day and All Saints are obvious links,
To anchor the year secure –
But Lammas and Candlemas slip their docks
When they don’t mean much anymore.
And so the seasons grow and shrink,
And won’t be tightly bound –
The year won’t fit a nice square box,
When its orbit is a round.
I’ve discussed quarter days before, and their mixed-up child the tax year.
On a bit of a tangent, but I’ve long thought the perfect year would be made up of 6-day weeks – with five per month, or 60 in a year (plus five spare days, interspersed one every three months, plus one extra for New Year’s Day). This would mean that a particular date was always the same day of the week each year, and we could finally ditch Mondays…
Diacritique
English’s attitude to accents is curious –
I don’t mean Geordie and Scouse,
But those sprinkles of furniture that turn pedants furious
When added (or not) to the house.
A déjà vu of coördination
Or über-pretentious clatter ?
A naïve façade in over-citation,
Or a stick to beat the piñata ?
In a language with only a nodding relation
With sensible phonetics as this,
Then it hardly matters if most of the nation
Give this foreign decoration a miss.
With English, their rôle is recherché at best,
For all some writers may covet –
In English, they just make the page look stressed,
And I doubt they’ll ever be belovèd.
Butcherbirds
Magpie-mimics, pseudo-shrikes,
In apron-fronts and axeman-hoods –
They hang their excess kills on spikes
Around their Aussie urban woods.
Lizzies, hoppers, chicks and mice,
On thorns and barbs and obscure ledges –
Bringing their suburban vice
To tuckeroos and privet hedges.
Where creeps the white trifolium,
So fly these cheerful songsters –
Where lays the fresh linoleum,
So roost these hipster monsters.
But most of all at nesting time,
When elder siblings lend a wing –
They form a gang, a clan of crime,
Whose name they proudly sing.
White Enchantress
The scene is London – the Edwardian stage –
A new play opens by George Bernard Shaw –
That finger-wagger of the gilded age,
That rabble-rouser of the better sort –
The Doctor’s Dilemma. Will it be a draw ?
The public shrug as the critics snort –
It isn’t a flop, but it isn’t a hit,
So the world moves on for a better fit.
But lying unnoticed, there was a seed –
One of his characters, posh as the rest,
Was given a name she didn’t need –
She could have been Cathy or Claire or Cass –
But instead, her author had thought it best
To name her after a rustic lass.
And Cornish to boot, though she made no claim –
I guess he simply liked the name.
And so that name was Jennifer –
And she would come to dominate
As just the handle we prefer –
The whole thing now sounds so contrived,
But it took a while to percolate,
And for the play to be revived.
Yet slowly lifting up the blinds,
A pale phantom stalked our minds.
Now the audience in Nineteen-Oh-Six
Had heard of Blondwyn, Fiona, and Neve.
But those were for natives, who barely mix
With these theatre types, who would never think
That a child of theirs should ever receive
Such a name, if they had no family link.
And though Guinevere was hardly forgot,
They found her name no Lancelot !
Now Jenny was known for centuries –
For Jane or Joanna, and paved the way.
And Celtic awareness increasingly pleased,
With a dash of exotic, and of something new.
So when Jennifer Jones hit the screens, I’d say
That the time was ripe for its big breakthrough.
It shot up the rankings, left Anns in its wake
A working-class wide-girl, a name on the make.
But her reign was short, as she paid fame’s price –
She peaked in the Eighties, as big as her hair,
Then drifted from psyches, as parents thought twice.
Forever a signpost to the Post-War age –
For a hundred years after, we’ll find her there,
Before she slips back to the dusty page,
And she and Guinevere are equally dim.
And to think, Bernard Shaw prob’ly chose her on a whim…
I’ve touched on the pre-life of Jennies before.
Historical name data isn’t nearly as detailed as I would wish, and I can only find the top hundred names listed at ten-year intervals on the UK Office for National Statistics website. It shows Jennifer first broke onto the list in 1934 (87th), shot upto 18th in 1944, slipped slightly to 23rd in 1954, down to 45th in 1964, then rallied to 34th in 1974, and rocketted to 11th in 1984, before starting its (final ?) descent in 1994 at 42nd. This page then has a year-by-year breakdown showing 87th in 2004 and 217th in 2014. The most recent dataset for 2022 shows…457th (though remember that all of these are for births – the Jennifers we encounter will face at least a couple of decades’ lag).
Movies for Rods
I’ve never been a fan of black-and-white
In films of the modern day.
It feels all rather hairshirt-pretentious,
To choose to wallow in grey.
I’ve always thought that Raging Bull and Schindler’s List,
Are a wash of look-at-me grim,
And not brought-on by a limited budget –
But don’t you dare give their hues a trim.
For even more, I hate the arrogant yobs
Who can’t leave well-alone
Who colourise and bastardise,
And completely wreck the tone.
We won’t want some future-tech to force 3D
Onto all the films we’ve made –
So leave the classics just as their artists’ wished,
As they shine in light and shade.
But maybe you like them better when brighter.
Maybe there’s room for us both.
Maybe I need to take a few breaths
And not try to stymie growth.
There’s a rainbow of points of view out there,
And the world is never quite as before –
It’s not such a matter of life and death,
And I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Rhyming Couplets 