RAIN TATTOOS

A revised poem to start this post.
Thanks must go to Juncture 25 for helping me to make sense of what I had written. I knew that something in the poem wasn't right but could not put my finger on it.

In his head it is always summer,

he refuses autumn permission

to taint even a single leaf.

Across impossibly green lawns,

in high ceilinged rooms,

where fans churn stale words,

he replays his life:

driving that new red car;

dancing at his wedding;

pausing in the departure hall

surrounded by all those people.

Where are they now?

Outside his head rain tattoos the tin roof.

Summer has gone missing,

spring is eighteen months late

and freak weather has reduced his world.

All across the English Archipelago

survivors fear their neighbours,

eat up seed stocks,

worry about the sea level,

or that the water will rise in a moving wall

and sweep them away, once and for all.

There was that night some discussion as to whether you can have a two stanza poem or if it needs three stanzas to work. Not bound to the Hegelian Dialectic I am happy with two.

 A little poem that I've been working on for some time.

LIBRARY QUIZ

An improvised library lesson.

Old books, a random collection,

grown over more time than my life.

Yellow postcard, typed questions,

the e lower then the other letters.

All the facts we were told are in this room.

I couldn't find the answer I was looking for,

it was the books that were dumb,

I knew what it was as soon as I saw the question.

I walked up to Mr. Farr, all tweed and fag ash,

pointed in the direction of the nature books

and told him a bee dies when it stings.

I gambled on his laziness,

but not him stopping the class,

and announcing no one had ever found

that fact in these books before.

It was fair, he said, to give credit

where credit was due.

This was the start of my career as a liar.

It happened like it is written back when I was 11. Though I cannot remember why I wanted to answer the question in the first place.
Here's Anne Briggs and Bert Jansch with Blackwaterside.