Viking Blood

 by David Riley

Poets all have Viking blood.

They raid the past as if it were a coastline, digging up the skeletons, making them articulate, singing songs like children playing. They do it with great beauty, rarely looking away from what they find in this history; often from the smallest thing great stories flow. You need look little further than the sections encompassing childhood in Neil Astley's Being Human trilogy of poetry anthologies to scratch the surface of what can be done. They remind us of children and childhood from all sorts of perspectives. Look up Adrian Mitchell's Beattie is Three for eye-watering restrained sentiment and his A Puppy Called Puberty for the laugh out loudness of shared (male) memories.

While these books are full of memories (is that what makes us human?) what passes as recollection there isn't child's play. The stuff of memory is worked and reworked to make it seem as if then is now and is eternal and shared by all. Even when such ideas are born of the uncomfortable or the meaning remains elusive it is something poets won't stop pursuing, showing child's play refracted through their words:

I cannot like the scent
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet
With no meaning, than this bitter one

as Edward Thomas mused on a childhood memory and the mysterious image it recalled. This sort of thing was raised again this week for me, obliquely, at some of the great events at Lancaster Litfest, particularly a talk following a reading by poet and short story writer David Constantine and writer Adam Marek. In response to a question about his writing Adam replied that what people saw in his work was the crust on a great amount that they didn't - but without all of it what was seen would not be as good. Implicitly a lot of what is below the surface was produced in a form of play.

Once again, the idea of memory and reworking surfaced for me. We must have that mass behind us to give rise to what is best. It might be produced in many ways (even play) and can be shared with others - but often it must then be put aside and we must carry on trying to quarry from it the best that we can.

Such things may never be finished but they are rarely ever wasted;Paul Valéry said, "poems are never completed, they are only abandoned." It reminds me of a child's toys and games, left haphazardly while they move on to other things but always there, the skeletons of child's play to support all we go on to do.

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Stabbing the Cat

 By Ashley Lister

 This past week has been a learning experience for me. It’s been a week where I’ve learnt that what’s 'child’s play' to one person is not necessarily so simple to someone else.

As many of you probably know, Tracy has been taken into hospital with pneumonia. I won’t make any comments here about the incompetence of her local GP, Dr Malpractice, who said she just had flu and should go home and inhale warm water. This is neither the time nor the place to make such cheap jibes against incompetents.

I will say, whilst Tracy’s been away from home, I’ve been learning how to do those jobs around the house that normally fall under the rubric of her responsibility.

Most of this stuff was child’s play. I was able to watch soaps, whine and moan about the neighbours and park the car badly without any additional training or assistance. However, the real challenge came when I was trying to stab the cat.

Mo, our cat, is diabetic. He requires daily insulin injections. Administration of this has always been Tracy’s job since he was first diagnosed with the illness. It’s always been seen as best that she deals with this as I have a bedside manner that’s somewhere between Harold Shipman and Beverley Allitt.

But this week, because she was malingering on a respirator in the hospital, I needed to medicate the cat.

Mo’s dosage is relatively simple: 3 International Units each morning approximately thirty minutes after his first feed of the day. It helps that Mo is supremely good-natured about injections. He lies there and allows amateurs like me to prod, pull and poke as though he’s a stuffed toy. If anything, he’s suspiciously good-natured about injections. In a previous life I suspect he had some sort of substance-abuse habit.

Anyway, according to perceived medical wisdom, the correct way to inject insulin into a cat is to lightly pinch flesh at the back of the neck. The flesh should then be ‘tented’ so there is a hollow where the needle can be slipped. Holding the syringe parallel to the body, the insulin can then be injected.

It sounds so simple.

Written on the page it looks like it’s no more trouble than giving him his dinner.

In real life, it’s all laced with the worry that you’re holding a dangerously sharp needle, filled with a substance that could prove lethal if administered incorrectly. It goes without saying that the practitioner should have steady hands and the cat should have a steady body. And there’s no mention that the cat might decide to mess about instead of simply laying there.

It took me an hour on the first day.

It took two hours on the second day.

He hid. He ran. He jumped. He did everything to avoid being injected. At one point I thought I was going to have to hurl the syringe at him as though I was a darts player and he was a galloping dartboard. When I finally got the syringe near him I didn’t inject before plunging and had to refill my syringe with a fresh dose of insulin and then start the whole process again.

On the third day, empowered by experience and determination, it took less than five minutes.

I’m still not up to Tracy’s efficient skills at stabbing the cat. She can manage it in mere seconds. But not everything in life is child’s play. And there’d be no sense of satisfaction in accomplishment if everything was so simple.

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The Random and the Nonsensical

This week my sister asked my three-year-old nephew what he’d like to dress-up as for Halloween; the obvious (and easy to purchase) answers would have been a ghost, a vampire or even a werewolf, but Josh (full of the randomness of youth) replied with: I’d like to be a parrot.

This ability to be random and nonsensical seems to be child’s play for children; it comes naturally, without effort, and has the power to make us older beings laugh. And for me, this is what some of the best children’s poetry does – it makes us smile and it shows to the children that read it that poetry can be silly and fun.

After searching my computer and flicking through the entire contents of my filing cabinet, I finally found a nonsensical poem that I wrote a few years ago. Therefore, I thought I would share it, and hopefully bring a little randomness to your Wednesday.

  

Poetry on Toast

It’s said poets are peculiar creatures

with a few distinctive features:

a pallid skin from lack of light,

enormous specs to fix bad sight.

They’re more elusive than a yeti

and make great sonnets with spaghetti.

I know this sounds a little odd,

but not as strange as purple cod.

Their page is lightly buttered toast;

lunch is the meal they love the most.

They find their letters in a can

and warm them in a frying pan.

They stir the thick tomato sauce,

pretend to be Inspector Morse.

Investigate the pan for clues

and down at least a dozen brews.

When bubbles start to form and pop,

they bounce like frogs, hoppity-hop.

They plonk the letters on the plate

and start to work at eager rate.

They find two As, a M, a P,

an O, an I, a broken T.

But missing Es disturb, distress

and leave the poet in a mess.

Without an E she is a pot

and every note becomes a not.

All bears are quickly turned to bars

who look at you with angry stars.

And soon all meaning slips away;

it’s packed its bags and gone astray.

It’s left the bread, it’s slammed the door.

It’s gone – the meaning is no more.

The poets soon begin to shout:

I’ve got nothing, zero, nowt.

And in great haste, and under strife,

they grab a fork, a spoon, a knife ...

They gobble words with great delight

then sneak away to think, to write.

Thank you for reading,
Lara

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Sprouts.

Sprouts.

Don't eat sprouts at your girlfriends house, her parents won't like the wind
Don't eat sprouts at your bosses house, the bathroom rarely forgives
But other than that, get them in, chow them down
Those spheres of goodness are worth every pound
They shouldn't be mushy and squishy, not grey
They shouldn't be eyeball shaped, falling away
Keep them green people, blanch them and plunge them in ice
Fry them up in some butter, they're really quite nice
Cut into them, they should still hold a nice crunch
Look like miniature cabbages, have some for lunch
Order sprouts at work parties, order sprouts out at dinner
With the vitamins in you, you're onto a winner
But heed this here warning- Savour them, chew, don't rush
Or you'll end up with renegade sprouts that won't flush!


Shaun Brookes.



The theme this week is Child's Play. I obviously wanted to write something profound about health and safety, over zealous parenting or the incredible feat that is a man jumping from the edge of space. What I managed was a childish poem essentially about farts and unflushables. I'm sure we've all had those days as a writer.

Thanks for reading,
S.

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