written and posted by members of Lancashire Dead Good Poets' Society
Friday 26 April 2024
Wednesday 24 April 2024
The Second-Best Bed
'Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed…’
(from Shakespeare’s will)
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.
Carol Ann Duffy
Monday 22 April 2024
Bed
And things that go bump in the night
May the good Lord deliver us!
The dawn of dusk arrives
As night gently breaks the hold of the day
Windows tightly shut against rain, wind
And the fading blue ambulance sirens.
It is quiet outside - and in.
Deep ink black silence cocoons. Protects. Deadens.
And in the vacuum, allows in the monsters.
Bring back the noise and colour of life. What is to be?
Perhaps Miles will croon a green and golden sax solo to my forest trailer,
Perhaps Ella will vocalese to a feature film of dusty mahogany backrooms.
Slipping into the night, I escape and dream of light.
Saturday 20 April 2024
Wyrd
In their personifications, Urðr means literally "that which has come to pass", Verdandi denotes "that which is in the process of happening", and Skuld signifies "debt" or "guilt".
Friday 19 April 2024
One Night: A Short Story
Wednesday 17 April 2024
Weird Physics
Probably a Poem about Quantum Mechanics
In Classical Mechanics
a reader is presented
with words forming a pattern
on a single page
and by following the lines
formed by these words
will confidently expect
that at the end of the last line
there will be a verse
II
In Quantum Mechanics
a reader is invited
to close their eyes
as words are printed
on a single page
then when told to look
will see a familiar pattern
and by following the lines
will confidently expect
that at the end of the last line
there will be a verse
III
In Quantum Mechanics
a reader is encouraged
to keep their eyes open
and observe a word
while it is being printed
such encouragement may be needed
as the act of interacting
will lead to the collapse
of the verse pattern
and thus a poem may
or may not occur
we just don’t know
First published in The Journal, August 2019
Tuesday 16 April 2024
Weird - In My Crazy Dreams
‘Venus is the only planet that spins clockwise.’ Is that weird? As long as it doesn’t knock me over, I don’t care. I don’t take much notice of planets, apart from what the National Curriculum sets out to teach children, but I don’t think Venus is alone there. It might be Uranus that also spins clockwise, something to do with toppling over on its axis. No? Well, that will be just me on my statin induced weird dreams, then.
I blame the statins, like I do for everything else, but it
could be the chocolate. Just try Cadbury’s ‘Darkmilk’, though maybe not too
much before bed. I’m not having nightmares, thank goodness. My dreams are vivid
and just weird, sending me into odd situations, like trying to figure something
out at work in a dental surgery. I retired nearly three years ago, and I didn’t
work in surgery, I was on reception. I dream about my family, including those
who have passed away. Years ago, when I was having chemo, I regularly dreamt of
going into a room full of people. It was welcoming and cosy. I was greeted with
affection. This was where I belonged. The people were my family, my passed away
family. There was my mother, young and pretty as I remembered her before she
was ill, and my grandparents with aunts who were special to me, taking me into
their fold. The dream was always much the same and with the same missing
person. My dad wasn’t there. It upset me to think that if I died, my dad wasn’t
waiting for me. It was disturbing, to say the least, as if there wasn’t already
enough going on. It was just a very weird, recurring dream brought on by the
chemicals that helped to save my life. As I recovered, I stopped dreaming so much and stopped worrying.
Imagine waking up in a spotlessly clean and tidy bedroom,
bathed in sunlight filtering through tilted blinds. Outside, the neighbour who
never speaks to anyone, smiles and calls out a cheerful ‘good morning’. On the
main road, a few cars go by, carefully observing the twenty mile per hour speed
limit and the pavement slabs are even with no trip hazards.
This would be too weird for words – or I had died and gone
to Heaven.
Meet the Weird-Bird
Birds are flyin’south for winter.Here’s the Weird-Bird headin’ north,
Wings a-flappin’, beak a-chatterin’,
Cold head bobbin’ back ‘n’ forth.
He says, “It’s not that I like ice
Or freezin’winds and snowy ground.
It’s just sometimes it’s kind of nice
To be the only bird in town.
Shel Silverstein (1930 – 1999)
Thanks for reading, Pam x
Monday 15 April 2024
Weird: The strange, unusual and surreal
Michel mentions that if one takes surrealist imagery/poetry at face value, that the creative works appear to be weird and random. He also puts forward how these types of artworks resist simple meanings and concrete interpretations. The Surrealists he says:
Thus, it seems that the Surrealists’ audience back in the day and perhaps today as well, had issues with the works because of their weirdness and non-depiction of a known reality - a fear of the weird, Fear of the Surreal, as Michel’s blog post title is called. I got lost in further reading about the Surrealists for this article, definite food for thought, however I became distracted as I began to reflect on my own work, my own weirdness and creative development.
1)
what moon bright star
giraffe feet clumsy
sink into soil a sandpit
a dark hole swallow
whole and grains like
timer oh the flowers arched
droop stems petals are
gone as dust flies into the
wind my eyes pop out roll
along the hill on a journey beyond
the horizon
2)
homeward bound dogs run past
the prairie dogs on grass by
trees alone she stands among
men who circle the feet with
dogs barking cars racing down the
long straight road to nowhere
somewhere another she lights a
fire to keep warm opening a tin
of beans
3)
onto the shore seaweed slime
open eyes diamonds shine
red or white at night and day
squint moon squint
can you see through black abyss
the owl fluffs its wings
brown speckled feathers
one is lost floating free
to land in moss and fungi
ants crawl spiders weave
squirrels climb the cat stalks
rodents hide
Thank you for reading,
Sources
Alexandrian, S. 1989. Surrealist Art. 2nd Edition. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd Cambridge Dictionary, 2024
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/weird Accessed 14 April
Language is a virus, 2024. Automatic Writing.
https://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques/automatic-writing.php
Accessed 14 April
Michel, L., 2023. Fear of the Surreal.
https://countercraft.substack.com/p/fear-of-the-surreal Accessed 15 April 2024
Sunday 14 April 2024
Stars
False colour image of Proxima Centauri taken from the Hubble Space Telescope 2013. The bright lines are diffraction spikes. |
To Proxima Centauri
We are travelling, we are
on our way to a new galaxy,
a new dawn, a new day,
past conglomerations of
constellations, old stars
viewed from new perspectives
as we become interstellar
detectives, with curiosity and
resolve we will watch the
new solar systems evolve
before our eyes and record
and collect data for those who
follow us later and follow us
they will to make history and
resolve the mysteries of life
as they unfurl in the
expectations and revelations of
distant stars and different worlds.
Thanks for reading the blog and the poem. Please leave a comment as they are all appreciated.
Dermot Moroney 2024
Saturday 13 April 2024
Photographing The Stars
Justine (not her real name) was a student in my A-level English class. She didn't go a bundle on D.H. Lawrence ('The Rainbow') or Thackeray ('Vanity Fair'). I wondered if that was because she was Canadian, too culturally removed. Her father was on assignment in London working for some record company (EMI possibly). It did occur to me that maybe those novels were just too long for her transatlantic attention span! But she didn't much like William Blake either ('Songs of Innocence and Experience'), couldn't accept that the poet saw and conversed with angels. And as for Shakespeare...
In fact she didn't have a lot of time for English Literature, period (as she would have put it). Art was what she did have an enthusiasm for, her main subject. I think economics was the third one but I'm not sure. Her attendance and attention were sporadic at best over the course of eighteen months. She came across as a rich girl doing us a favour by filling in time in class, when what she really wanted to be doing was photographing the stars.
expensive camera gear |
To move this story on, Justine's father apparently decided to break his daughter's cycle of rejections by arranging for her to be the official photographer for a newly signed band on the label he worked for. She was to go on tour with Slowly Boiling Frog, document their shows and offstage antics and shoot the cover for their debut long-player. This was, conveniently or otherwise, in the Easter holidays just months before A-level exams.
Slowly Boiling Frog |