Poetry Friday -Poems To Blow You Away

It has been exceedingly windy in my neck of the woods the last few days. Cold, icy blasts of wind have blown across the bay and bullied those of us dwelling on the shore. The leaves of autumn have been dancing in my garden.The trees bend and cower.

So, batten down the hatches and hang onto your hat, because all this windy weather prompts me to share a couple of wind driven poems.

It also provides an opportunity to reintroduce a couple of poets, previously celebrated here- the wonderful of Spike Milligan and the equally amazing Max Fatchen return to blow you away with their words.

WINDS LIGHT TO DISASTROUS
As I sipped morning tea
A gale (force three)
Blew away a slice of toast
Then a gale (force four)
Blew my wife out the door
I wonder which I'll miss the most
She was still alive
When a gale (force five)
Blew her screaming o'er Golders Green
When a gale six blew
And it took her to
A mosque in the Medanine
Now I pray to heaven
That a gale (force seven)
Will whisk her farther still,*
Let a gale (force eight)
Land her on the plate
Of a cannibal in Brazil
As I sit to dine
A gale (force nine)
Blew away my chips and Spam
But! a gale (force ten)
Blew them back again,
What a lucky man I am!

Spike Milligan
*Father Still, a stationery priest.

WINDY
The gale upon our holidays
Was not your passing breeze.
It gave our tents a fearful wrench
And bent the frantic trees.
So, if you've seen a flying tent,
And then observe another,
Please call us at your earliest,
We're also missing mother.

Max Fatchen

Image result for leaves in the wind

Poetry Inspired by Images and Objects

There are many ways pictures and photographs can be conscripted to support the writing of poetry. Allow me to share a few ideas with you: Old photographs are a great source of inspiration. Cynthia Rylant explored this idea with great success in her book 'Something Permanent' where she employed the Depression era photographs of Walker Evans to add a new voice to the starkness to the lives of people experienced under extreme circumstances. I have used this strategy to spark many individual poems. In ' I Bet There's No Broccoli On The Moon,' I used a photo I had taken in 2004 while living in New York to inspire a poem. The poem was based on a story related by a friend who grew up in New York. I regularly combined poetry and pictures in my writer's notebook, drawing on inspiration from the photograph and my personal memories. We can also utilize existing cartoons and illustrations to create ekphrastic poems. I frequently use the illustrations of Jim Pavlidis to co...

Peter Dixon -Teabag Poem

Today I'm highlighting the poetry of Peter Dixon. Peter Dixon was not just a poet. He was a performer, educationalist and artist. He grew up in London during WW2, and as a boy his schooling was far from successful. He struggled with spelling and the understanding of word, form and grammar, so he tended to write secretly at home, drawing and writing of things largely ignored by schools. Despite this difficult phase of his life, Peter eventually became a school teacher and then a senior lecturer in education. It often mystified him as to how all of this came to pass. As a teacher, he strived to be unbiased and did not neglect the children who experienced learning challenges. Peter Dixon became a full time children’s writer and educational consultant. His first book was published in 1978. Whilst living in Winchester, Hampshire, with his family, he contributed to over 100 poetry anthologies and had seven collections of his own work published including Grow Your O...

Poetry Friday 'Storm On The Island' Seamus Heaney

Given the fact that we recently celebrated St Patrick's Day, it seems appropriate that I take this opportunity to continue the Irish focus and recognize one of Ireland's leading literary figures... Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland in 1939 and died in 2013. He became a multi award winning poet. His first collection of poems, 'Death of a Naturalist' appeared in 1966 and helped to establish Heaney as one of the major poets of the 20th century. From that first anthology, I have chosen 'Storm On The Island.' This poem tells us about the stoic resistance of people and structures to an incoming storm. The island is not named. Poetic scholars believe this is a poem that can be taken literally, as a monologue on the life and attitude of island people facing a storm, or it can be understood as a metaphor of political struggle on the island of Ireland. Heaney knew both worlds. The poems of this first collection are grounded in the soil...

Search This Blog