THE LOVING CURVE OF THE GALACTIC SPIRAL

Each week I try to post at least one poem, either a revision or a new work. There are a couple of times when I have repeated myself-usually unknowingly.  That is unavoidable, since the 30.5.2011 I have posted 182 times. That it, struck me only today, is an awful lot of poems.

There is scattered over these pages most of my first and second collections and a selection of poems produced in workshops. I wonder if anyone has read them all.

This week there is a revision of a poem I posted early on. Initially I thought it worked and read it at a number of events. This past year I have been less satisfied with it. I realised last month that the two parts of the poem didn’t connect as well as I wanted them to. I hope this now resolved.

THE TEARS OF YURI GAGARIN

Last night I dreamt of long players,

Slept under shelves of staked albums

On a friends wooden floor,

Lost the labyrinth of the black vinyl,

the welcoming blackness that held such wonder.

The sky clouded as we reach your statue.

You stand held in the loving curve of the galactic spiral.

This is what I think;

we acknowledge you too late,

thirty three and a third years dead today.

Now we hug the earth, bankrupt and dreamless.

We have wasted your chance.

The next couple of short poems are part of an ongoing sequence that may see the light of day in the future, though I think they work alone.

IN THE SPORTS HALL

You end up in those places you never used to go.

Then the preserve of those posh, track suited oafs,

as I remember there was a miasma of male sweat.

Now it has the ambiance of an airport lounge,

but better coffee.

MONDAY MORNING EXPERIMENTS

submarine in its closeness, the heat room

mimics the tropics, a monitored man runs

the treadmill unfolds/swallows the miles

we record data on damp paper

There is a discipline in writing snapshots of events. They can give you an immediacy and if handled well a lasting impression of a moment.

Continuing the Cold War theme I am leaving you this week with an old song from 1982/3 by Liverpool band Lori and the Chameleons. 

hydrogen bonds pulse

An unrelated photograph 

 This week I have been revising some of the poems from my collaboration will Alison Wilson that we will be premiering later in the year. I also ran a workshop for the poetry group I am a member of Juncture 25. The brief I set was to think of:

 A famous person from the past

 A job that people do today-preferably one that you could not imagine the historical person undertaking.

 A recent scientific discovery.

We then read out our ideas to the group and people were free to use any of the material as they wished.

My own contribution was Florence Nightingale, collecting supermarket shopping trollies and research into the hydrogen bond in water. Apparently the bond turns off and on many thousand times a second. Scientists do not know why and are attempting to use quantum mechanics to explain it.  I know my description is pitiful so here is a link to the radio programme I heard it on.

This is the [revised] poem I came up with.

Florence is a stupid name

so she swaps it for Spike,

tatts and a shaved head.

She surveys the supermarket car park

causally curses idle civilians,

too lazy to return their empty trollies.

Still she’s out in the fresh air-that’s good,

even on a day like this.

the rain runs down her face,

the water sings, hydrogen bonds pulse

-off, on, on off.

Metal screams- the bloody wheel's stuck again!

But though it heralds entropy

and the inevitable heat death of the universe,

she don’t need no quantum mechanic,

she can do it for herself with a spanner.

I am not sure it works. I’d be interested in your opinions and in any workshop exercises you have come up.

Here’s another poem about Yuri Gagarin:

GAGARIN JUMPED

From that spinning capsule Gagarin jumped,

it twisted under his feet, tumbled away.

He knew just how far to trust technology,

enough to get him there and nearly back.

There can be no return to some past state of grace,

Gagarin would realise this as he fought the controls,

willing the jet to wing over the town.

too low and too late to eject,

locked on death’s trajectory.

You can read about his life and the triumphs of the Soviet space programme here. Staying with the Russian theme I am looking forward to seeing the Chagall exhibition at the LiverpoolTate this weekend. Have a good week.