Category: Places

Beaver Geezers

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Jorge Bilbao on Pexels.com

Beaver Geezers

Beavers are thievers,
By stealing the gravity
Out of the water –
Such utter depravity !
Beavers are stemming our streams
With their half-inched beams,
And leaving them pooling around.
And now I hear beavers
Are back in this manor,
Those peevers and planners
Are channelling London Town.
I see their toothmarks
Graffiti the tree barks
Up to their old larks,
Of gumming the plumbing –
Their home is a slum
Full of mildew and scum,
And whenever they come
They leave the bath running.

Beavers are weavers,
When heaving their timbers,
When lugging their tinder for cleaving together.
You just won’t believe
All the leaves they retrieve
For their bodge for a lodge
And their damnable dam.
These immigrant skeevers
Are tree-rustling reavers –
Who knocked-up a hodgepodge
Wherever they swam.
We end up with either
The swamp in a fever,
Or banks in a stodge
And the brook in a jam.
But now that they’re Cockneys,
And vegan beefeaters –
These beavers won’t shock me a smidge.
So change-up the meter, and take to the bridge –

They’re teeming in the borough, good and thorough,
Down the Central Line,
Grinning with their teeth on Hampstead Heath,
And in the Serpentine.
It won’t be very long
And they’ll be seven thousand strong,
With their ev’ry one a carrier
Of oak and London plain.
They’ll get their sapling shredding done
From Wapping up to Teddington,
By blocking Woolwich Barrier
And flooding Pudding Lane.

Beavers are thievers,
And duckers and divers,
And cunning deceivers,
And wetback survivors –
They’re just like the rest of us,
London domesticus,
Hard-working strivers,
And over-achievers.
And soon they’ll fit right in, I’m sure,
In the melting pot of the pond next door.

The real question, of course, is how do beavers colonise new rivers well away from the old ones ?  Some say they can travel over land for many miles, but we all know the truth – they’re carried there by red kites !

Shires Old & New

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

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.

The Cherry, Then

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Pai Pai on Pexels.com

The Cherry, Then

Sweet cherry, bird cherry,
British since the glacier –
White of flower, red of berry,
Showing Spring is on the merry
With their blossoms looking very
Much the lacier.

And yet our folklore shrugs and mocks
Our modern-day delight.
Did Stonehenge mark the equinox
As cherry petals blew in flocks ?
Did Boudicca manoeuvre and out-fox
From woods of white ?

Did Patrick banish Irish snakes
From out of trees so halcyon ?
Did Alfred burn the cherry cakes,
Or Sherwood sport such dancing flakes,
Or Shakespeare pine on ruddy aches,
Throughout old Albion ?

The Japanese have celebrated long
The bloom before the leaf,
But Europe only saw a throng
Of messy trees not worth a song.
Was Easter’s shadow just too strong,
Or blossoming too brief ?

There is also talk of a local tradition in the Chilterns of using cherry blossom braches to decorate churches at Easter, though I can’t find any Pre-Victorian sources to indicate how old this is.

So the only legitimate references I can find to cherry blossom (as opposed to the fruit) in British culture is in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale: “As whit as is the blosme vpon the rys.”  ‘Rys’ is a Middle-English word for ‘branch’, so no individual tree is specified – and neither is a particular season in the Tale, not that it would really matter for the metaphor anyway.  But the very first line of the General Prologue mentions April, so the Miller and his audience would have been on their pilgrimage at the perfect time to appreciate any roadside displays.  And what other native British tree has flowers worth a poet’s attention beside the cherry and it’s close relatives like blackthorn or apple ?

Cemetery Flowers

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

Cemetery Flowers

Besides from the bunches laid with care,
There’s plenty of blooms around –
Peacefully scenting reverent air
And rising out of the ground.
And looking as though they have always grown there,
Spreading from grave to grave, unbound.

Lilies creep around the edges,
Speedwell bids the souls farewell,
And lichen colours urns and ledges,
Where the lady’s bedstraws dwell
Wrought-iron railings form the hedges,
Butterflies enchant their spell.

Yews, of course, have long been prized,
With folklore running deep,
And cypresses are well-advised
For the greenery they keep,
And Trees of Heaven, naturalised,
Like some who lie asleep.

Wych-hazel makes herself at home,
But cherries are out of place –
Confetti is such a frivolous foam
That doesn’t leave a trace.
Forget-me-nots, meantime, will roam,
Wherever they find a space.

The dead, of course, don’t care what’s living up there,
They’ve other concerns,
But graveyards are gardens we all must share,
Be we friends or weeds or worms.
And ev’ry flower we all can spare
Will help us to come to terms.

I deliberately tried to shake up the rhythm a bit between verses, to see if it could still flow. As for the location, I have visited before here and here (and, more pertinent to the season at hand, over here).

Wonderlust

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

Klepto by Stuart Dunkel

Wonderlust

When does a walk become a hike ?
When does a saunter start to stride ?
Upon how many trails must I strike
Before I get to the other side ?
When does a trek become a wander ?
When does a road not lead to Rome ?
Upon how many paths must I ponder
Before I get to go back home ?

Here Be Dragons

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Death Loves Me by Todd Lockwood

Here Be Dragons

Nothing excites like a fragment of coastline,
A ribbon of mountains, an island arc,
A river’s meander, an outpost upon it,
A highway to cross it, and leave its mark.

Fantasy maps have gotten much better these days,
With histories drawn in tectonics –
With rain-shadowed deserts and cyclonic trade-winds,
And conlangic place-names correct in their phonics.

Readers demand that their continents drift,
On a globe that is spinning through space –
Our increase in knowledge has moved-on our world,
And our make-believe realms must keep pace.

Adventurers trek across accurate kingdoms,
The blanks are uncovered, the borders expand,
And fossils are dug-up of earlier monsters –
The dragons evolve now, and so does the land.

Russian Rush

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Peasant Girl in Kokoshnik by anonski

Russian Rush

Is it just my ears,
Or are all these Slavic women baritones ?
Does the need to wrap their tongues
Round angular Cyrillics
Thus somehow feed into their very bones ?
Is it from the years
Of calling for Ivanovic, not Jones,
That ups capacity in lungs
Into those sexy and idyllic moans
They use to answer telephones ?
They always speak their English with a purr,
In a lower register.

Perhaps it’s their careers
As nurses or baristas, or tennis pros,
Or spies in paperbacks,
That slows their speech and drops it down a semitone or two ?
Or maybe it’s my ears,
And not some deep and cunning pose
To sigh like honeytraps ?
Of course, it’s just my vodka fantasy,
And even if it’s true –
The way they talk, their chosen key,
Is not in any way for me –
But nonetheless, I love the way they sound the way they do.

I have always thought that printed Cyrillic looks like it is written in all-caps even when lower case letters are used – perhaps it is the reduced use of risers and descenders, giving them less-indented coastlines.

I had originally called this poem as Deep Throat.  It almost worked, but ultimately the leaker in All The President’s Men was very male and very American.

What do you mean, there’s another film which uses that title…

Musical AI version generated by Suno.com – find more of them over here.

Last Man In

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

Last Man In

From Derek Niven’s Hollywood 11,
To New York ghetto parks,
Or taking over baseball diamonds
For some old-school larks –
Cricket can be found under the covers,
Hanging out in nets,
With scuffed-up balls and tied-up bats
Amid ex-pats and vets.
And even hosting amateur T20s,
Though you’d barely know –
The sixes fly into a void,
The runs clock up so slow.
As Argentina take on Norway
By the overpass,
With both teams full of Singhs and Khans
Upon synthetic grass.

Kithdred

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
New Kids in the Neighbourhood by Norman Rockwell

Kithdred

We look out for our own,
But our own can be more than our genes.
Our neighbours are fam’ly of a diff’rent bone,
While strangers and enemies and inbetweens
Are no less important a-cornerstone
As noisy, teeming teens.
To make it a good home takes all of you,
For blood is thinner than glue.

Like the Wriggle of an Eel

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Sindre Fs on Pexels.com

Like the Wriggle of an Eel

Rivers are boring when they’re straight,
We’ve got the canals for that.
But rivers will race and rivers will wait,
As they twist through their habitat.
They’re in no hurry to terminate,
They meander around, and ambulate,
Through oxbows of a future-date,
Until they’re old and fat.
I used to marvel how they’d know
Which way to go to flow through ev’ry town.
But gravity cares none for to or fro,
For fast or slow,
As long as they flow down.
Rivers are boring when they’re straight,
But once they’ve earned the name of ‘great’,
They carve their many strands through delta sands,
While the hungry sea must wait.