0205 Front porch days
London, six o'clock in June, two-o-o-five:
These streets were built in nineteen-five or thereabouts
in unimaginative grid, on London clay and previous watercress beds
by builders and those, quote, 'developers',
whose sudden stroke of luck was that the Tube line was diverted
and foreshortened, now to pass this way all overground;
it took a century, and climate change, to prove
that cracked-out summer clay and winter watercourse,
and building onto earth, are not the best foundation...
but these terraces of modest houses
(alternate houses gabled, bayed, to suggest they're twice the size)
have stood the test of time, when, often, underpinned;
intended for the aspirational working-class,
they've now become, these last few years,
'first homes' for the equally aspirational middle-class;
tonight the streets are nose-to-tail with silent, gleaming
four-wheelers looking down their grilles
at nifty runabouts - some, I regret to say,
parked where suburban front-gardens once declared respectability
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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0256 What are those kids up to?
It’s in a quiet corner to itself
away from the grandiose creations of the
Italian Renaissance gallery, so
you can stand undisturbed to wonder
just what’s going on?
A small painting: in a peaceful
green and hilly summer countryside,
not a soul in sight except
these three – children? - their faces under
their hoodies seem known to each other
but shadowed, small, not asking to be
known to us; absorbed, maybe learning, and
they’re enacting, in this remote spot,
the Crucifixion
Jesus hanging patiently up there, a bit like
a kid trying it out for himself to see
what it feels like (and there was a case, a kid
a few years back, on Hampstead Heath,
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Metaphors, Similes and stuff - Pooh Bear Explains
Christopher Robin and Pooh walked slowly down the path in the woods, treading on the occasional crackly twig.
'CR...' said Pooh, 'What's a Poeh Tree? Is it the same as a Poem, or a hum? '
'Well, Pooh, the very very best Poeh Tree in the world is your own:
'Isn't it funny
how bears like hunny?
It's what I call rum-ti-tum-itry. Everyone likes rum-ti-tum-itry. Even grown-ups. Rum-ti-tum-itry is friendly. Rum-ti-tum-itry is like two friends walking together. Like you and me, Pooh. Which makes you the very best rum-ti-tum-iter in the world...'
'That's tum as in...? ' asked the Very Stout Bear, cautiously.
'As in a Hum' said Christopher Robin. 'But then there's other things in Poetry such as Truth, and Other People Reading It And Nodding. And Similes. And Metaphors. There's a lot in Poetry.'
'What's a Simile, CR? ' asked Pooh. It sounded like what bees said just before they landed on something, like a hunny jar, or Pooh's nose.
'It's when you say something is like something else, to help people imagine it.' said CR.
Pooh had a Think. A Pondery sort of Think.
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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0293 Black, white, gray, color
Black and white are the magic of the drama
in the world of film;
gray, the poetry –
silver-gray of Paris; sunshine gray;
dark tragic gray of lovers’ partings
on the symbolic bridge, while the Seine
flows inexorably, darkly past like life and love;
who needs Casablanca in full color?
But there’s another gray –
the gray of exhaustion.
In 1945, a trip to London was a trip
to another race, of gray to unhealthy white
exhausted survivors, of the bombs
and doodlebugs and rockets,
of dead husbands, wives, sons or daughters,
broken marriages; bomb-shelter life drained of all emotion,
and almost too tired to welcome peace;
gray as the soot-encrusted buildings,
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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D e a t h
Well we don’t know do we?
You asked me to write something
about it and I said,
I have nothing to say…
maybe that’s a better place to start.
So should we keep a curtained silence
about it? Stuff cottonwool in that wound
that never quite heals, once made?
Or run down the street, knocking bang bang at all the doors,
shouting tell me about death… and
before that stranger knocks at your own door
and the face is strangely familiar, as if
you’ve been expecting someone, but
weren’t sure what they’d look like…
One thing is certain, in its breezy way:
you’ll be the one who knows least about it
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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that damn Cupid
...who or which is the main topic of this site
in any season, let alone this one in the Northern hemisphere,
as the hormones stir a young man's fancy
and an old man's mind...
It's difficult I find, being a poet, and a scientist by training -
you want finality in the experimental results
but you love the constant mystery and beauty of the world,
never quite reached, never quite expressed.
Take this Cupid. Not the actual one,
but the head of Eros, Venus' very active young assistant
obviously under general orders
but with a very free remit under his blindfold -
or so it seems to us who don't get to see
the universal script if such there be.
He's one of the few 'archaic' treasures of Greek art
neatly plundered for the British Museum
in circumstances not to be enquired into -
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Love and Poetry; Poetry and Love
and right now, I’m spending most of my time
on the two matters of which I seem to know the least –
love; and poetry.
maybe it’s good I feel like this; after all,
they’re two pretty big things in their way;
and if it’s frustrating that
I don’t seem to get anywhere,
or understand any more,
maybe that’s good too since
it keeps me at it
and out of harm’s way
as they say
let’s take poetry first – that’s
relatively straightforward:
one day I love the freedom
of the current situation – there’s no rules
except, the lines are short –
but even that, you can break
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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0017 Sandy Claws, Avenger from the Ocean of Goodwill
The tale I have to tell, children,
is not a pretty one – so,
PARENTAL SUPERVISION IS ADVISED;
though on the other hand,
as moral tales should, it has
a happy Dickensian ending,
where, as moral tales should tell,
the last state is infinitely better than the first;
and perhaps, who knows, your parents
may even benefit from the telling
though, naturally, without mentioning the fact.
’Twas Christmas Eve. The Smugg family
were sitting around their fine dining table
made from wood from sustainable forests
in their photographable and photographed
Bahamas beach bungalow in its
gated enclave with 24-hour porterage and security,
about to tuck in to their Christmas Eve locally sourced
corn-fed free range hand-reared organic
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Sandy Claws, Avenger from the Ocean of Goodwill
The tale I have to tell, children,
is not a pretty one – so,
PARENTAL SUPERVISION IS ADVISED;
though on the other hand,
as moral tales should, it has
a happy Dickensian ending,
where, as moral tales should tell,
the last state is infinitely better than the first;
and perhaps, who knows, your parents
may even benefit from the telling
though, naturally, without mentioning the fact.
’Twas Christmas Eve. The Smugg family
were sitting around their fine dining table
made from wood from sustainable forests
in their photographable and photographed
Bahamas beach bungalow in its
gated enclave with 24-hour porterage and security,
about to tuck in to their Christmas Eve locally sourced
corn-fed free range hand-reared organic
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Pooh Bear learns about Enjambment
Pooh liked Autumn. Autumn means walking with a scarf round your neck and sometimes seeing your breath in the air like a silent conversation, and wet leaves underfoot and twigs going crackle or sometimes crack! which can be scary if you aren't holding CR's hand.
So here they are, walking together paw-in-hand down the path in Hundred-Acre Wood, and Pooh is humming a happy hum with words looking for it, rather like inquisitive flies that don't quite land on you, wondering if they should stay or not, and how the other flies feel if two of them land together...
'CR..' said Pooh, 'What's en-jamb-ment? ' It sounded like what happens when a wasp gets stuck in a honey jar, or perhaps a marmalade jar.
'That's a long word, Pooh...' said CR, wondering how to explain to a Bear Of Little Brain Yet Poetically Gifted, in the easiest way, when you're not too sure yourself...
'Well...' said CR at last, 'you don't really need it, Pooh, because your Hums all finish each line with a rhyme - so everyone knows just where they are....but suppose you get to the end of a line, and the line looks around like Eeyore does after a big mouthful of juicy autumn grass, and it can't see another line that wants to pair with it in a friendly rhyme.... then if you let it just go on being by itself - like Eeyore - and it's happy to be that way, if occasionally grumbly about it - that's called 'free verse'.
'So then you can just go on and on without thinking about when to stop... but then if you write it down so that other people can read it without getting out of breath, what 'free verse poets' do is like turning over the page of a book and wondering what's coming - like, is there a scary illustration on the next page, or a Surprise, or only a few lines and THE END - what these poets do, is to treat the lines the same way as pages, so that at the end of each line, you wonder a little bit more than usual, what's coming in the next line... instead of yawning and wondering if it's time for A Little Something...'
'I see..' said Pooh, in the way you do when you're a Very Polite Bear but don't really see, not yet anyway...
Then he remembered that poem by Rupert Somebody that CR had told him was an Extended Metaphor, which had that memorable line which the Poetic Bear could have written himself: '...and is there hunny still for tea? ...' though of course Pooh was always careful, himself, to have a line of hunnypots up there where you could see that the future was golden and hunny-coloured...
'CR...' said Pooh in that happy feeling when the brain seems to sorting things out for you, '...so if you wrote carefully in a book, '... and is there hunny still for tea? ...' you could write it with the first line
...and is there...
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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