A Sea Dirge

by Lewis Carroll

There are certain things – as, a spider, a ghost,

The income-tax, gout, an umbrella for three –

That I hate, but the thing that I hate the most

Is a thing they call the Sea.

Pour some salt water over the floor –

Ugly I’m sure you’ll allow it to be:

Suppose it extended a mile or more,

THAT’S very like the sea.

Beat a dog ’til it howls outright –

Cruel, but all very well for a spree:

Suppose that he did so day and night,

THAT would be like the Sea.

I had a vision of nursery-maids;

Tens of thousands passed by me –

All leading children with wooden spades,

And this was by the Sea.

Who invented those spades of wood?

Who was it cut them out of the wood?

None, I think, but an idiot could –

Or one that loved the Sea.

It is pleasant and dreamy, no doubt to float

With ‘thoughts as boundless, and souls as free’

But suppose you are very unwell in the boat,

How do you like the Sea?

There is an insect that people avoid

(Whence is derived the verb ‘to flee’)

Where have you been by it most annoyed?

In lodgings by the Sea.

If you like your coffee with sand for dregs,

A decided hint of salt in your tea,

And a fishy taste in the very eggs –

By all means choose the Sea.

And if, with these dainties to drink and eat,

You prefer not a vestige of grass or tree,

And a chronic state of wet in your feet,

Then – I recommend the Sea.

For I have friends who dwell by the coast –

Pleasant friends they are to me!

It is when I am with them I wonder the most

That anyone likes the Sea.

They take me a walk, though tired and stiff,

To climb the heights I madly agree;

And, after a tumble or so from the cliff,

They kindly suggest the Sea.

I try the rocks, and I think it cool

That they laugh with such an excess of glee,

As I heavily slip into every pool

That skirts the cold cold Sea.

August

by Boris Pasternak

This was its promise, held to faithfully:

The early morning came in this way

Until the angle of its saffron beam

Between the curtains and the sofa lay.

And with its ochre heat spread across

The village houses, and the nearby wood,

Upon my bed and on my dampened pillow

And to the corner where the bookcase stood.

Then I recalled the reason why my pillow

Had been so dampened by those tears that fell —

I’d dreamt I saw you coming one by one

Across the wood to wish me your farewell.

You came in ones and twos, a straggling crowd;

Then suddenly someone mentioned a word:

It was the sixth of August, by Old Style,

And the Transfiguration of our Lord.

For from Mount Tabor usually this day

There comes light without a flame to shine,

And autumn draws all eyes upon itself

As clear and unmistaken as a sign.

But you came forward through the tiny, stripped

The pauperly and trembling alder grove,

Into the graveyard’s, russet-red,

Which, like stamped gingerbread, lay there and glowed.

And with the silence of those treetops

Was neighbour only the promising sky

And in the echoed crowing of the cock

The distances and distances rang by:

Then in the churchyard underneath the trees,

Like some surveyor from the government

Death gazed on my pale face to estimate

How large a grave would suit my measurement.

All those who stood there could distinctly hear

A quiet voice emerge from where I lay:

The voice was mine, my past, my prophetic words

That sounded now, unsullied by decay:

‘Farewell, wonder of azure and of gold

Surrounding the Transfiguration’s power:

Assuage now with with a woman’s caress

The bitterness of my predestined hour!

‘Farewell timeless expanse of passing years!

Farewell, woman who flung your challenge steeled

Against the abyss of humanitarians:

For it is I who am your battlefield!

‘Farewell, you span of open wings outspread;

The voluntary obstinacy of flight,

O figure of the world revealed in speech,

Creative genius, wonder-working might!

A Welsh Testament

by RS Thomas

All right, I was Welsh.

Does it matter?

I spoke a tongue that was passed on

To me in the place I happened to be,

A place huddled between grey walls

Of cloud for at least half the year.

My word for heaven was not yours.

The word for hell had a sharp edge

Put on it by the hands of the wind

Honing, honing with a shrill sound

Day and night.

Nothing that Glyn Dwr

Knew was armour against the rain’s

Missiles.

What was descent from him?

Even God had a Welsh name:

He spoke to him in the old language;

He was to have a peculiar care

For the Welsh people.

History showed us

He was too big to be nailed to the wall

Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him

Between the boards of a black book.

Yet men sought us despite this.

My high cheek bones, my length of skull

Drew them as to a rare portrait

By a dead master.

I saw them stare

From their long cars, as I passed knee-deep

In ewes and wethers.

I saw them stand

By the thorn hedges, watching me string

The far flocks on a shrill whistle.

And always there was their eyes; strong

Pressure on me; You are Welsh, they said;

Speak to us so; keep your fields free

Of the smell of petrol, the loud roar

Of hot tractors; we must have

Peace and quietness.

Is a museum

Peace? I asked.

Am I the keeper

Of the heart’s relics, blowing the dust

In my own eyes? I am a man;

I never wanted the drab role

Life assigned me, an actor playing

To the past’s audience upon a stage

Of earth and stone; the absurd label

Of birth, of race hanging askew

About my shoulders.

I was in prison

Until you came; your voice was a key

Turning in the enormous lock

Of hopelessness.

Did the door open

To let me out or yourselves in?

My Mother

by Frieda Hughes

They are killing her again.

She said she did it

One year in every ten,

But they do it annually or weekly,

Some even do it daily.

Carrying her death around in their heads

And practising it. She saves them

The trouble of their own;

They can die through her

Without ever making

The decision. My mother

Is up-dug for repeat performances.

Now they want to make a film

For anyone lacking the ability

To imagine the body, head in oven,

Orphaning children. Then

It can be rewound

So they can watch her die

Right from the beginning again.

The peanut eaters, entertained

At my mother’s death, will go home,

Each carrying their memory of her,

Lifeless — a souvenir.

Maybe they’ll buy the video.

Watching someone on TV

Means all they have to do

Is press ‘pause

If they want to boil a kettle,

While my mother holds her breath on screen

To finish dying after tea.

The Common Cold

by Ogden Nash

Go hang yourself, you old M.D.!

You shall not sneer at me.

Pick up your hat and stethoscope,

Go wash your mouth with laundry soap;

I contemplate a joy exquisite

I’m not paying you for your visit.

I did not call you to be told

My malady is a common cold.

By pounding brow and swollen lip;

By fever’s hot and scaly grip;

By those two red redundant eyes

That weep like woeful April skies;

By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;

By handkerchief after handkerchief;

This cold you wave away as naught

Is the damnedest cold man ever caught!

Give ear you scientific fossil!

Here is the genuine Cold Collosal;

The Cold of which researchers dream;

The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.

This honored system humbly holds

The Super-cold to end all colds;

The Cold Crusading for Democracy;

The Führer of the Streptococcracy.

Bacilli swarm within my portals

Such as were never conceived by mortals,

But bred by scientists wise and hoary

In some Olympic laboratory;

Bacteria as large as mice,

With feet of fire and heads of ice

Who never interrupt for slumber

Their stamping elephantine rumba.

A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!

Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;

Don Juan was a budding gallant,

And Shakespeare’s plays show signs of talent;

The Arctic winter is fairly coolish,

And your diagnosis is fairly foolish.

Oh what a derision history holds

For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!

Fun and games at the seaside

I settled into the Rhyl Journal offices quite quickly as the rest of the editorial team were a friendly bunch.

Mind you the working move to Rhyl was very quickly followed by another move – except this was a very short trip.

When NWN bought out the Journal the red-brick building on Russell Road housed not only editorial and advertising staff as well as the newspaper presses but also ran as a jobbing printers running off stationery, fancy invitations and anything else people needed.

The presses were obviously not needed as all printing would be done at Oswestry and these were sold off. The jobbing printing also ceased operation.

This just left editorial and advertising rattling around in a great big Victorian building.

It wasn’t long before we moved 100 yards down Russell Road into bright new ground floor offices. In fact it was my first time in a ground floor office (except my part-time role at the Gazette). Even the Leader office at Mold had been on the first floor.

One of the perks of being a young, single junior reporter was that sometimes you got sent on the less important stories while the seniors were covering crime and politics.

One such job was covering the beauty queen contests at the open air swimming pool.

I often accompanied our photographer, Glyn Roberts, but the job wasn’t always just for a caption on the lines of a page three.

The beauty contest above was for a “Miss Rhyl Festival” and instead of the standard parade of contestants in bathing costumes this was “a thrilling contest for the Junior Miss”.

It was a contest for girls aged 14 to 17 and the dress code was afternoon frock or cocktail dress.

The previous day a “Miss Bikini” contest at the same venue had 12 contestants.

The “Miss Festival” contestants had just enough entrants to ensure all three prize slots were filled.

The story angle was based on the bathing beauties being considered more glamorous than those more fully-clothed.

All three were local girls and the winner, Davilda Corry, had previously won a “Miss Rhyl” contest and a “Miss Scene”.

All this and she was still only 16.

It wasn’t all beauty queens that summer in Rhyl

Fun as it was to spend half an hour or so each week watching all the girls go by there were more serious stories as well as the somewhat mundane ones.

There were also some good nights attending the opening of a new club, or a midnight entertainment show. As it happens both of these were at the same venue – Billy Williams’ Downtown Club.

Billy belonged to one of the main amusement business families in Rhyl and when he was just 27 he opened a brand new club for late night entertainment and dancing in the town.

My first visit was to the opening of the club and, as it was only a walk along the promenade from my home and all refreshments (including drink) were on the house, I felt it would be churlish to claim expenses for night working.

The next time was when it had been open for a few weeks and I did the editorial for an advertising feature about the club.

We always made sure pieces like this were clearly marked “advertising feature” but I never went over the top in the way I wrote the piece.

To be honest in its first year Billy’s club didn’t really need any advertising stunts as it was a top value venue.

The third visit was when Billy launched his midnight cabaret season and the first star was Ken Dodd.

Now I knew of Ken mainly from his Sunday radio show (one of his catch-lines was “where’s me shirt”) and his appearances on Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

Ken Dodd: a favourite family entertainer but more than a little blue once the clock strikes midnight.

His midnight cabaret act was quite an eye-opener. This was no panto-style, slightly risqué act keeping just on the right side of decency.

If I had known what to expect I certainly would not have taken my girlfriend. Even Billy appeared somewhat taken aback at the content. I think there might have been a few members of Rhyl’s social elite who would not have been invited if he had known Doddy’s act.

Even the Diddy Men would have blushed.

This was not the first time any of my comedy heroes turned out to have feet of clay. I caught a well-known comedy duo at another late-night cabaret only a couple of months after this and their act was even worse than Ken.

At least when I stood in the wings of a Morecambe and Wise show five years later I didn’t hear anything that would make even Mary Whitehouse blush.

That summer in Rhyl proved one of the most varied of my life up to then but I didn’t know what lay over the horizon.

Next time: Back to school — down South.

Bridal Ballad

by Edgar Allan Poe

The ring is on my hand,

And the wreath is on my brow,

Satins and jewels grand

Are all at my command,

And I am happy now.

And my lord he loves me well;

But, when first he breathed his vow,

I felt my bosom swell —

For the words rang as a knell,

And the voice seemed his who fell

In the battle down the dell,

And who is happy now.

But he spoke to reassure me,

And he kissed my pallid brow,

While a reverie came o’er me,

And to the church-yard bore me,

And I sighed to him before me,

Thinking him dead D’Elormie,

“Oh I am happy now!”

And thus the words were spoken,

And this the plighted vow,

And, though my heart be broken,

Here is a ring as token

That I am happy now!

Would God I could awaken!

For a dream I know not how!

And my soul is sorely shaken

Lest an evil step be taken, —

Lest the dead who is forsaken

May not be happy now.

Summer

by John Clare

Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,

For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom,

And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest,

And love is burning o in my true lover’s breast;

She sits beneath the whitethorn a-plaiting of her hair,

And I will to my true lover with a fond request repair;

I will look upon her face, I will in her beauty rest,

And lay my aching weariness upon her lovely breast.

The clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May,

The merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day,

And the chaffinch it is brooding on its grey mossy nest

In the whitethorn bush where I will lean upon my lover’s breast;

I’ll lean upon her breast and I’ll whisper in her ear

That I cannot get a wink o’sleep for thinking of my dear;

I hunger at my meat and I daily fade away

Like the hedge rose that is broken in the heat of the day.

Getting back on the right track

Dear friends and readers – sorry that the blog part of this post has been somewhat erratic in recent weeks.

I have been keeping up with the poetry each day because I believe it would be discourteous to leave a void for those who visit daily.

This covid19 has been tragic for so many even though there have been the good news stories where people such as the brilliant author Michael Rosen have teetered on the edge but pulled through.

Some say the government should have acted sooner in getting people to isolate but is it possible they did not realise the danger we all face?

Should we give them the benefit of the doubt?

I remember at the beginning of March there was a lot of talk about avoiding direct contacts outside your home and people did start to panic buy (think of the lack of toilet paper) but the government didn’t appear to show much concern at that stage.

Where we blasé about it because the government seemed blasé or did the government try and play it down in an effort to stop panic-buying?

I had noticed shortages from the very beginning of March. I didn’t go filling my trolley with two or three times the amount I normally bought, but I did buy a few extra bits.

I think my wife Marion recognised the dangers more.

I had been for the normal Friday shop and said maybe I should go out in the morning and get more in case of a lockdown.

Marion said “No.”

When I said better safe than sorry and one more trip to the shops might see us through for a couple of weeks she was even more adamant with her response “NO”.

I will never forget what she said when I asked why not:

“Because I don’t want to die!”

That brought me up with a jolt.

Marion is a very levelheaded person and her concern at the situation made me realise how serious it was getting.

We started our lockdown on Monday 16 March, my 70th birthday. Our son had been working from home for a week by then, directed to do so by his bosses.

It did mean our household was properly shielded as nobody needed to go out.

On the downside we would not see our eldest daughter and our two grandchildren. At least we had Skype.

Our other daughter proved a godsend. As she was still working at the school, where she is assistant head, she was still going out and did a weekly shop for us.

To avoid any contact she would leave it inside the gate and then back off to a safe distance. Then we could at least wave and blow kisses.

A few weeks ago we did manage to get a weekly delivery slot, although it did mean using three different supermarkets depending on who had a delivery slot.

I know many more of you have seen a lot worse and suffered much more than us but the whole thing does prey on the mind.

We are still shielding because we don’t believe it when the PM says everything’s OK again and then the figures shoot up because people believed him and flocked to the beach.

This situation does weigh heavily but I didn’t intend to bother my readers with it. On the other hand it was unfair not to provide a reasonably ordered blog and I thought you deserved an explanation.

The poems will continue and I hope to get my life story back on the road with at least four updates a week.

If I do occasionally fall behind please forgive an old man who wants to keep his readers happy but sometimes finds he can’t concentrate.

Litany in Time of Plague

by Thomas Nashe

Adieu, farewell, life’s bliss;

This world uncertain is;

Fond are life’s lustful joys;

Deathe proves them all but toys;

None from his darts can fly;

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth;

Gold cannot buy you health;

Physic himself must fade.

All things to end are made,

The plague full swift must die;

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour;

Brightness falls from the air;

Queens have died young and fair;

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,

Worms feed on Hector brave!

Swords may not fight with fate,

Earth still holds open her gate.

“Come, come!” the bells do cry.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness

Tasteth death’s bitterness;

Hell’s executioner

Hath no ears for to hear

What vain art can reply.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste, therefore, each degree,

To welcome destiny;

Heaven is our heritage,

Earth but a player’s stage;

Mount we unto the sky.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!