Faffage in Five Acts
Poetry is the enemy of plays,
And has no place upon the stage –
Its narratives are not well told,
Pentameters do not engage.
They think their verse is true and bold,
Yet tends towards the bloated beige.
Dialogue is the standard of gold,
Not monologues spouted for page-on-page –
We need nuts-and-bolts for the tale to unfold,
While wisecrack-a-tat is the wit of our age.
Poetry is the enemy of plays,
It sound so trite, verbose, and old.
Counting Forwards
Imagine, if we like,
To the Earth when it was younger –
Let’s go back in our minds
As Rodinia accretes and binds.
Imagine all the life,
With its breeding and its hunger,
Is all within the ocean wide,
While all the land is dead and dried.
Go on back a billion years
To when the Tonian began,
And the first alga brave appears
In the inter-tidal span.
And let’s call this Year Thousand in our plan.
Now imagine, if you like,
A thousand million later –
To Britain, as it will become,
Through evolution’s endless sum.
Let’s use the past to take a hike,
To be our ad-hoc dater –
With ev’ry year that we explore
That’s adding-on a million more.
Ready ? Well then, come with me !
To Year One Thousand, long before,
When Vinland Vikings rule the sea
And early green specs dot the shore –
And let’s see history expand once more.
1000-1280
The Tonian is a long old stretch,
From Ethelred to Longshanks.
We’re not sure when things happened quite,
So none of these are strong ranks,
But sponges would appear to appear
Around the Fourth Crusade,
Just as we leave the Dark Age,
As the Boring Billion fade.
1280-1365
The Cryogenian grows cold,
As the mediaeval warmth recedes –
The plague upsets the status quo,
As animals succeed.
The monks and fossils leave their records,
(Fewer than we’d wish),
As peasants rise-up, and the jellies –
Both the combs and fish.
1365-1460
The Ediacaran, through the Hundred Years War,
Is a pregnant time.
The Agincourt slaughter sees new forms of life
Are on the climb.
We’ve so little idea what,
Though likely all the phyla we know
Are going their separate ways back then,
As the trade and prosperity grow.
1460-1515
Bang ! The War of the Cambrian Roses
And Henry Tudor the Trilobite.
Bosworth Field is awash with early fish,
As eyes first see the light.
Predators prey, so the shell evolves,
And the codpiece probes the way to dress –
And we know so much of those olden times
Because of the Burgess printing press.
1515-1555
The Ordovician sweeps the monks away
And ends in the great divorce –
The Little Ice Age causes mass extinction,
Though with a patchy force.
Most of the phyla shrug it off,
As do the merchants of the day,
While plants colonise a whole new world of land,
Down Mexico way.
1555-1580
The Elizabethan Silurian
Sees vascular plants grow bodice and ruff,
While armoured fish develop jaws
As Catholics have it tough.
The millipedes creep onto shore
While Mary Queen of Scots must flee,
And Francis Drake sails round the world,
While scorpions swarm the sea.
1580-1640
Awaiting the tetrapod armada in Plymouth,
Comes the Devonian span –
Sharks and ammonites emerge
In the Tempest of Caliban.
King James writes his Bible
On the wood of the early trees,
Till the Civil War extinction
Brings the shallows to their knees.
1640-1700
With the Carboniferous Restoration,
Amphibeans arrive.
There’s giant dragonflies in the endless forests,
Where spiders thrive.
They lay-down future coal, of course,
As London is aflame –
Till the Glorious Revolution,
When the reptiles change the game.
1700-1750
The Permian now joins Pangaea
With the Hannoverian line –
Dimetrodon and future-mammals
Have their chance to shine.
But from the North, a Great Dying
Sweeps them from their heights –
The lava traps of Siberia,
And the pikes of the Jacobites.
1750-1800
The Triassic sees a trident of firsts –
Pterasaurs, crocomorphs, dinosaurs.
The sea’s full of plessies and ichthies and turtles,
An empire stretching to distant shores.
But American lizards break away
From rule they call draconian,
And a great extinction’s coming-in
That’s all thanks to Napoleon.
1800-1855
The Regency brings us the Jurassic,
Victoria sees placentas get birthed,
While the Chartists challenge the old big beasts,
As the sauropods shake the earth.
The allosaurs fight stegosaurs,
While archaeopteryx soar above
Of the Valley of Death as India splits,
On their way to becoming a dove.
1855-1935
The Cretaceous next, but where to start ?
Pangea well-and-truly splits,
While flowers bloom for Victoria’s weeds,
And spinosaurs are Edwardian hits.
Veloceraptors perish in the Depression,
But T-Rex jazzes the town
With Triceratops to the very end,
When the asteroid comes crashing down.
1935-2000+
Into the Cenozoic we go,
As the atom bomb sees things get hot.
Mammals and birds diversify,
As hippy grasses grab their shot.
Hominids climb down from the trees
As Tony Blair brings-down the freeze –
Then Christmas Day in ’99
Sees farmers plant communities.
Imagine, if we like,
Where our journey goes from here –
What might the next long thousand bring
To life that’s ever-quickening ?
And when extinctions strike,
Then new forms suddenly appear.
History shows progress all the while,
Though fashions change the style.
But here, for now, our trek is done,
We’ve counted up the years we hold,
From an Anglo-Saxon simple son
To multi-cultured forms so bold.
They tell the greatest story ever told.
Happy birthday ! Yes, it’s true, Rhyming Couplets is turning six, so here’s a special treat for anyone who’s still out there.
Similar to my championing of the Holocene Calendar, I hate counting backwards, and can’t wrap my head around the numbers. Therefore I propose the Paleontology Calendar, which can either begin at 0 (equal to 2,000 MYA) when the Great Oxydation Event was coming to an end, or at 1,000 MYA when the first algae was colonising the land. The latter is more useful, as it results in three-digit numbers rather than four, as we don’t have much evidence for what happened prior to the Ediacaran fauna emerging (they’re not called the Boring Billion for nothing…) However, I’ve adopted the former here so that the dates can line up with European history to make conceptualiseing the events easier, at least for me. By happy coincidence, 1000 MYA is also when Bicellum first appears, which might just be the earliest evidence we have of animals evolving away from algae…
Note that all dates prior to the Cambrian are tentative and likely to change in the future. Just when the animal phylums diverged is unclear as there are very few fossils, and rely on DNA analysis and molecular clocks. Furthermore, the current estimated dates may be a few years different from their historical counterparts for the sake convenience (for example, some think that algae first poked its head out of the water as early as 1200 MYA). Come on, this is a poem, not a textbook !
Shires Old & New
English counties show a frozen glimpse
Of population,
Of where we lived, a long time since,
At the dawn of our English nation.
Cathedrals too, and the larger abbeys,
Hint at a bustling past –
Wells and Ripon weren’t so drab,
But boom-times couldn’t last.
Huntingdon, you once were free,
With Somerton and Appleby –
But people change, and trade moves on,
To Milton Keynes or Basildon.
Political constituencies
Can’t stand still too long,
Without some boarder-fluencies
To keep their numbers strong.
Postcode districts are a modern score
To count the blur –
If they survive a thousand more,
They’ll show where once we were.
Stevenage, you’re earned your key,
With Swindon and Southend-on-Sea.
But people change, and drift away
To who-knows-where and come-what-may.
Trad.
Strange, the oldest folk tunes have no authors known,
They’ve just been sung like that forever.
I wonder if a single soul created them,
Or many voices altogether.
Maybe over centuries, they’ve slowly grown,
Adding new words to old songs,
From bawdy balladry, through cherished hymn,
To terrace singalongs.
From London Bridge to Scarborough Fair,
Ride a cock horse to the old grey mare,
Lady Greensleeves, mistress mine,
And over the hills for auld lang syne.
We’ll never know, we’re never told –
They are too old and we’re too young –
Yet still their songs are sung.
Strange, the newest pop tunes come with artist names –
We know just who created each.
Yet maybe in a thousand years, a few persist
Whose origins are out of reach.
Carols may be sung to them, or children’s’ games,
Or earworms and lullabyes –
With half the words forgotten, and their meaning missed,
But hanging on in diff’rent guise.
From Ground Control to Billie Jean,
Go Johnny, go, come on Eileen.
All the lonely yesterday –
Sing for tomorrow, we fade to grey.
They’ll never know, the trail is cold –
We are too old and still of tongue –
Yet still our songs are sung.
Treasure Trove
Hoards of coins in shallow graves,
Unlawful death of wealth –
An inquest must be called
To let the gold announce itself.
The coroner shall ascertain
The trove’s identity,
And whether misadventure
Caused its current liberty.
Was it witness to a conflict ?
Was it lost or laid to rest ?
Do we need an autopsy
To open up its chest ?
It seems at odds with all their other tasks,
It must be said –
But it surely makes a pleasant change
From dealing in the dead.
Cold Æsh
An A and an E, glued together,
But why ?
So how are we meant to say it, this guy ?
Best leave it alone for Danish and Latin –
Round here, we don’t need our A’s to fatten.
Save ligatures for when we’re putting a sign up –
Though why do the crossbars never quite line up ?
All-in-all, it feels so confused
And æsthetically ugly – oh, that’s where it’s used !
Castles
The Normans came to Wales,
And smashed their stones upon the ground,
And built them up to battlements,
Projecting might to all around.
Today, we go to Wales
To marvel at these ruined forts –
Each very Welsh and ancient keep
Forgotten Normans brought.
The Spacefolk came to Chile,
Raised their mirrors to the sky,
And perched them on the mountaintops
To see what they could spy.
Tomorrow, future Chile
Will still marvel at each ruined dome –
Each very old, Chilean fort
That looks so much at home.
Hot Air & Cold Fronts
A play in the open air, it was,
A drowsy Summer’s day –
I wished I were not there, because,
The sky was looking grey.
The monologues were droning on,
Soliloquies so slow –
And where the sun no longer shone,
The rain was sure to show.
Some pigeons pecked the grass between
The actors, undisturbed –
The breeze was starting to get keen,
To match the verbiage heard.
With not a cut within the script,
They read out ev’ry line –
But the mercury was not so gripped,
As it sped into decline.
Hold on there, what had I missed ?
Oh, nowt, the same damn speech !
Even the clouds had got the gist,
And looked about to breach.
The fools all capered round the set,
Right back where they began,
When the Heavens wept for Juliet –
Thank god !, I thought, and ran…
Auto-Graffiti
Dali’s watches melt in a dreamscape,
Rene’s pinstripes rain as a crowd,
Giuseppe’s fruit has a definite shape –
But Hans is oddly cowed.
He painted both the ambassadors
In a very sensible room –
Though maybe he found them a pair of bores,
That turned his thoughts to doom.
His heady jape, while showing-off,
Must sacrifice body for fizz.
Too weird to comment, too crude to scoff,
It doesn’t belong where it is.
It ain’t a secret, we’ve seen it for miles,
And why such a funny slant ?
Couldn’t he have worked it into the tiles ?
Or hidden by a potted plant ?
The pedant in me would like to point out the singular for graffiti is graffiti, because we’re speaking English not Italian.
Tartan Tarts
I asked her what was the tartan she wore,
She smiled and told me Smith.
I’d never considered that Clan before,
But fair enough – the Smiths of yore,
The Sassenachs of Aviemore,
The flints in the monolith –
The common Clan for the ev’ryman,
The hammers and tongs of myth.
She asked the tartan in which I deck,
Buchanan, perhaps, or Brodie, or Beck ?
I smiled, and told her Burberry Check.
It seems that the Gaelic word for smith is the origin of the Clan McGowan, but that even before surnames arose in the Highlands, some Scots had Anglisised their profession to ‘smith’.
Rhyming Couplets 