The Hawk ( 28th January 2011)

My eyes see a million miles
to ditch and stream and dyke
through styles
and hedgerows
and there - a house
half-darkened in the dawn
and there - a mouse
from far aloft I swoop
a feathered stuka
hurtling down to scoop
the 'timerous beastie'
in talon's sharp it's held
so still, two souls now one
and I up I soar
into a crystal blue
towards a rising sun
a shape; a speck
and then I am no more

The New Poetry

 I was reading today John Wain's intoduction to the Oxford Dictionary of Great English Poetry and something he concluded with strucj a real and refreshing cord with me:-"The last forty years has seen the growth of a kind of processed, mass-market 'modern' poetry, very much the same in every country, easy enough to translate, to handle, to package, to ship across frontiers. This poetry is always in free verse, usually no more than a matter of witing it as prose and printing it to look like verse; it departs entirely from the tradtition and the forms that grew up naturally in that particular culture. The individual poems are like flowers that are cut and put in a vase of water; they have no roots and no soil clinging to them."

And as Auden puts it "Poetry is like a valley cheese; local but prized elsewhere"

This pushed me to write the following as a protest poem (of a sorts)

To 'The New Poetry'
All form and rules are
laughed upon
and rhyming rhymes
are damned as one

the way of poets
now betrayed
embrace The New
free verse parade

when rhyme and metre
fade away
no longer needed
in this day

then we have lost
something so deep
Hot poets strut
and cold ones weep

As heritage and time
dear bought
are fast replaced
by shallow thought

Belfast 1972

The reek of sulphur

swirls in bilowing clouds

about the masses

as yet devoid of shrouds

 

They stop, fall back

with each bombs roaring blast

the shattered glass

the Dead are siffening fast

 

A rifle barks

Another soldier falls

The sirens scream

echoed on prison walls

 

That's how it is

thats how its meant to be

we're far away

It's naught to you and me

 

Two tribes at war

as they have always been

Choose Orange lily

or a sham of Green