Haram

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Kris Mu00f8klebust on Pexels.com

Haram

Strange to think The Satanic Verses
Was ever even published at all.
And following from the string of hearses,
Who would dare now have the gall ?
I don’t like it myself, it’s not for me,
But that’s hardly the point –
It’s even more vital we keep speech free
When it puts us out-of-joint.
But the zealots have won, we all self-censor,
And now the Left have caught the bug –
Trading-in Marx for Marks & Spencer
And sweeping their principals under the rug.
The truth is, they admire the power
To shut down speech and cancel voices –
They’ve fatwa-envy, to make us all cower
For daring to stray from their authorised choices.
Well, I’m just gonna come right out and say it –
Islam and Woke are a toxic trigger.
Not all their adherents, let’s not overplay it,
But enough, who pursue the commandments with vigour.
So we really need to come down hard on apologists,
Stop their political victim-blaming,
As they unironic’ly draw-up blacklists,
Shutting-down speech while fanning the flaming.
But now we’re shocked, that someone attacked
The one we attacked with ferocity,
Named and paraded and finally sacked
For the sin of secular blasphemy.
So we clutch our pearls and wring our hands,
At what could drive this murderous spate.
Then we push to get a comedian banned
For saying the Koran is full of hate.

To be clear, the Bible is equally hate-filled – but most Christians have the decency to be embarrassed by theirs. Sometimes this shame is subconscious, but even the most fundamental literalists will inwardly wince if you bring up –

Job 1 (God giving his approval for Satan to kill Job’s ten children for the sake of a bet), or Numbers 25:6-8 (Phinehas murders an inter-racial couple and God is appeased and stops his plague), or Psalms 137:9 (happiness comes from dashing the babies of your enemies against the rocks), and let’s not forget Deuteronomy 20:10-14 (when beseiging a city, offer peace – if they surrender, enslave them, if they resist, slaughter every male (even the male babies), and “take the women and girls for yourselves” – I think we know what that means…)

They may mutter something about context, and ‘appropriate for their own time’, and change the subject to the New Testament – while ignoring Colossians 3:22-24 (slaves, obey your masters !).

Get Up Off Our Knees

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Easter Island by Mike W.

Get Up Off Our Knees

Another atrocity, another round of blame,
With the righties claiming they’re all the same,
And the lefties burying their heads in their guilt,
And our knee-jerk laws that are jerry-built.
Another outrage, another assault,
And we all us know who’s really at fault,
But none of us will say –
Mohammad.  And Jesus.  And Shiva.  And Yahweh.
And the dozens of others, monsters all –
Let’s stop the worship, let them fall.
Just why are we honouring the afterglow
From the morals of how many centuries ago ?
But no, don’t ban them, not a single sect –
Just stop any pretence of honour or respect.
Laugh at their gods, like we did before,
To Zeus and Baal and Ra and Thor.

The Tolpuddle Tree

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

The Tolpuddle Tree

The tallest, broadest sycamore in Dorset
Is a stately tree –
Beloved by Lords and Parliament,
A pillar of society –
He’s tended by The National Trust,
As English as can be,
In a village with a funny name,
And a bloody history.

Yet sycamores are not a native,
Bringing European fruits
To challenge all the local trees
With non-conforming shoots.
These upstarts will not know their place,
Their seeds are new recruits,
And down into the bedrock
They have planted creeping roots.

Yet, for all their canopy may shield,
And union hold fast,
They do not live so long, these trees,
Their shelter cannot last.
And though the status quo may praise,
When safely in the past,
They’ll gladly chop his children down
And root him out at last.

‘Sycamore‘ is a restless word.  It appears to have started life in Hebrew, before the Greeks noticed how much it coincidentally sounded like their words for fig-mulberry.  From there it made its way via Latin and French to English, where it was applied to a newly-introduced species of European maple tree.  Confusingly, the contemporeous authors of the King James Bible used it several times to refer to the original fig tree.  And then the Americans took the word and slapped it on a type of plane tree quite unrelated to either (although in their partial defence, the leaves of the plane do look a very maple-like, as even Carl Linneus noted in his name Acer pseudoplatanus).  The one thing the three trees seem to have in common is their shade-giving spread.

Meanwhile, it is also a surname – apparently deriving from the village of Siglemere near Bramford in Suffolk, from *sīcel ‘small stream’ + mere ‘pool’.  So in seems that my eight-year old self was quite wrong to insist that they were called sycamores because their seed-cases were shaped like sickles…

Vermification

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

Vermification

Things keep turning into worms, it would seem,
And not just invertebrates
Exhibiting a certain trait
For straightness in the beam
And legless in the gait.

Things keep sausage-ing to worms, we observe –
The eel and caecilian
Are bound by their criterion
To maximise the curve,
Like the tongue of the chameleon.

Things keep slithering to worms, to and fro –
As through the soil they swim,
The burrowers who drop a limb.
The slowworm may be slow,
But he’s wonderfully slim.

Things keep developing newer way to squirm –
From the lowly and unsung
To the feared and cursed who creep among –
For snakes are just a worm
With a backbone and a tongue.

Incarcination

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by rompalli harish on Pexels.com

Incarcination

Things just won’t stop turning into crabs,
From claw to carapace –
They look as if they’re engineered in labs
Or zapped from outer space.
Except…the fishes show no cancric tug,
Nor do the worms or squids –
It seems it’s just crustaceans have the bug
To spawn such crabby kids.
Not counting woodlice, shrimps, or barnacles,
Nor the copepods –
But still, a fair few join the carnival,
In their squat new bods.
And as for them, the more derived they get,
The more the format grabs –
Converging on a winning set,
And walking sideways into crabs.

This meme relies on a fairly liberal definition of ‘crab’ – it seems to come down to three things – claws, an oval fused carapace, and an absent abdomen/tail (it’s actually tucked underneath).  So hermit-crabs, for instance, certainly have the claws, but lack the other two (though when in a shell, they give the impression of them).

So, yes it happens, to the extent that the squat-lobster seems to be half-way through the process.  But it’s also helped along by our wishful-thinking.  Or, as I put is recently, plants won’t stop turning into trees.

Tellingly, other aquatic arthropods like dragonfly larvas and water spiders show no inclination to crab-up.

There Shall the Falcons also be Gathered, Each One with her Mate

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Coming in to Land by Tom Lee

There Shall the Falcons also be Gathered, Each One with her Mate

Always it’s the peregrines that nest upon cathedrals,
Like wanderers and pilgrims, or like animated gargoyles.
The buzzards and the owls are a heathen flock, it seems,
And the pigeons are unwelcome when they perch upon the beams,
And the crows about the graveyard are Satanic in their dress –
But the peregrines are cherished by the bishop and the press.

Strange, but back in the Middle Ages,
They were never seen about the towers –
Till they left the cliffs for the factories
And the belfries, once those ceased to toll the hours.

Yet falcons are not very turn-the-other-cheek,
They’re far more Old Testament when preying on the weak,
They’re thoroughly un-kosher, yet fitting for an earl,
And un-patriarchal, where the stronger is the girl.
They’re sharp and unrepentant, defiantly un-bowed,
As they kill the dove of peace to the cheering of the crowd.

Perhaps they’re waiting for the day when the Lord
Says “Fowls in the midst of Heaven, arise !
Come gather yourselves for my supper on the flesh
Of the sinners in my temple, and peck out their eyes !”

According to this page on the Natural History Museum website, the first recorded instance of a peregrine falcon ‘using a building (for its nest ?) was at Salisbury Cathedral in 1864.

The title comes from the KJV, except it says ‘vultures’ instead. Many other translations say ‘falcons’, but there’s quite a spread – ‘buzzards’ in the New Living, ‘hawks’ in the NASB, ‘kites’ in the Douay-Rheims…and bizarrely, the Brenton Septuagint has ‘deer’ !

First Fruits

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Acorn by Bob

First Fruits

Only July, and the first acorns down,
Here and there on the lawn.
Windfalls, surely, they don’t look mature –
Hard to imagine an oak will spawn
From these early-birds I found.
They look too lean, too small and green
To be a mighty giant’s dawn.
Only July, and the first acorns down,
The tree advances a pawn.

Though now I look around, I see
An oak with its first grey hairs –
Of little concern, but a leaf on the turn,
Like unattended Summer repairs
On an old and lazy tree.
And there on the lawn, the start of a yawn,
A warning from up-the-stairs –
Only July, but the prep-work is the key,
To order its affairs.

A Fingerful of Fool’s Gold

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Bianca Mergillano on Pexels.com

A Fingerful of Fool’s Gold

They can’t tell, and I don’t tell ’em,
But my wedding ring is stainless steel.
Recycled from an old tin can –
It may be fake, but it’s just as real.
You see this diamond ?  That ain’t no diamond,
That’s a cubic or I’m a liar –
She does the job in her own sweet way,
What she lacks in sparkle, she makes in fire.

She’ll last twenty, might last thirty,
Before she’s looking as cloudy as me.
They say she has no resale value,
But which of us has, once we’ve lost the key ?
On-sale and off-brand – he knows me well,
As a contra-flow goat among the sheep –
To win some brides will cost you the Earth,
But I came so gloriously cheap.

Fit as a Fiddle

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Zeyneb Alishova on Pexels.com

Fit as a Fiddle

Violins are slim and light
To perch upon the shoulder so –
They mustn’t pile on extra wood,
Or lose their cinched-in waist for good.
For no-one wants to see the sight
Of a bloated bridge beneath the bow –
Don’t let the fretboard become baggy,
Stop the strings from slouching saggy.
Play less heavy, play more bright,
And never let the tension go –
Work those quavers through their paces,
Else they’ll end up double-basses.

Deckle Edge

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

Deckle Edge

My shelves are full of books for lending,
Books I love, and need to share –
Their spines are useless when not bending,
Spreading words to ev’rywhere.
I long to be what lib’ries were for me,
A haven and a runway –
Take these beauties down and set them free,
And bring them back, well, some day.
Pay them forward, share the thrill,
And validate my soul, my love…
And yet…I know you never will –
You need to want, I can’t just shove.
Ah well, there’s no sense my pretending –
Who am I to hook and sway ?
My shelves are full of books for lending –
There they sit, and there they’ll stay.