Double Dactyl - Higgledy Piggledy Acceptability

Double Dactyl poetry. I hope whoever dreamt this discipline up had lots of fun. According to Wikipedia, the inventors were Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal in 1951. I’ve written lots of poems in various forms and in freestyle, but never encountered Double Dactyl until now. I’ve made an effort and enjoyed playing with words, as I always do. I haven’t completely adhered to the strict rules, but some rules lend themselves to be broken. After some non-starters and others not for sharing, I give you my best three.

Floppetty moppetty
Boris de Vaudeville
Thought he could win
With his clown grin

Scary, like The Joker
Hedonistically
Singing and dancing
Off with his head. Next!

Make of this what you will. If you know me, you’ll understand. I don’t intend to offend, by the way.


Dibdabdoo scribbdabdoo
Emily Bronte
When did you get him,
That special one?

Perhaps your brother’s traits
Identifiable
I gave him my heart
Many years ago.

Of course it’s about Heathcliff. My first introduction was the black and white ‘Wuthering Heights’ film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon when I was eleven, or twelve and long before I read the book. Future English Literature classes took me into studying the book, which is a firm favourite of mine and goes way beyond the end of that 1939 film.

Pippitty flippitty
James Callaghan
Thought it was funny
Not easy to count

In pounds, shillings and pence
Decimalisation,
That was the answer,
Totting up money.

I will always be thankful for decimalisation. In 1963, I cried my eyes out while a horrid teacher yelled at me for getting all my ‘money sums’ wrong. Shillings and pence, pounds, shillings and pence, was just a mass of confusion to my seven and a half year old brain. Someone raging at me wasn’t going to magically make me get my sums right. Family friends came to visit one weekend, probably to see the new baby, my sister. Their daughter was a little older than me and we went off to play. I asked her if she could do money sums and felt delighted when she happily showed me. She taught me very well. Everything clicked into place. I was grateful to her and didn’t fear my teacher anymore. I volunteer in the same school. I often go into the very classroom where I spent miserable times. I’m glad things are different for today’s children. All the teachers are lovely, none of them are scary. Perhaps I should ask the children about that. In later years, I worked in an office where everything revolved around money and payments, including wages. By now we were using ‘new money’, decimalisation had taken place a couple of years earlier in 1971. Thank goodness. I couldn’t have done that job in £sd.

Have fun writing Double Dactyls.

Thanks for reading, Pam x

Read More

Sestina - The Secret

After dealing with the bindweed on the buddleia and nursing the contents of my over-full planters towards flowering, it has been lovely to sit out in the sunshine enjoying what passes for a garden. This sitting out time has been spent wisely, refreshing my memory on the discipline of the Sestina poetic form. Years have passed since my last (forced) encounter and you’d be correct to think that this is not my favourite. Anyway, rising to the challenge, I managed to get the rusty workings of my brain pointing in the right direction for long enough to compose something. I don’t know where the subject came from apart from the dark side of my imagination, iambic pentameter a bit hit and miss, but I hope it meets the criteria.

“A sestina is a poem written using a very specific, complex form. The form is French, and the poem includes six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three line stanza at the end. Each stanza repeats the end words of the first stanza, not in the same order but in a strict formation.” See illustration.

Here is my sestina.

The Secret

After the passing of so many years
She still thought she would know him anywhere.
Decades ago, she wrote him a letter
But did not send it, instead tore it up
And decided it was best for their child
To remain unknown to him, a secret.

What started as a burdening secret
Became less important over the years.
Happy and healthy, this beautiful child
Was delightful company anywhere,
Cheerful and bright and always on the up,
Sometimes, she wished she had sent the letter.

All the details contained in that letter,
The reasons for having such a secret
And how important it was to keep up
For all the childhood and growing up years,
To guarantee acceptance anywhere,
And offer the best of all to this child.

A talented and inquisitive child,
Doing everything right to the letter.
A child going places, not anywhere.
Adult, needing answers to the secret
Of where a father might hide all these years,
Deserves to know the truth, so bring it up.

Then hours of searching and looking up.
So many questions you’re asking, dear child,
Travelling back over so many years,
This grown-up child composes a letter.
Confronted, she shares the truth, her secret,
Oh child, your father could be anywhere.

She always thought she’d know him, anywhere.
The mem’ry of him made her smile light up.
He would hate her for keeping this secret,
Denying him the chance to share their child.
Long ago, he had sent her a letter:
‘Return to Sender’, not lived here for years.

A secret lover, anywhere, now found.
After all the years, a chance to make up
Now he’s received a letter from his child.

PMW 2021

Thanks for reading. Whether you embrace freedom or not, stay safe. Pam x

Read More

The Eighth Deadly Sin - Social Media

The World Wide Web. Love it or hate it, use it or ignore it. We are surrounded by an invisible network capable of linking people with others all over the world within a second, or less. Send an email and it arrives at its destination, regardless of distance, at the same time that the final full-stop is typed and we hit ‘send’. No more neat hand-writing on thin, air mail stationery then having the letter weighed at the Post Office. The what office?  It’s getting like that but there are still a few around, for now. Use your webcam to ‘skype’ your cousin somewhere in Australia and have a conversation like you’re both in the same room, well, with the wonder of the internet, technically speaking, you are. When I was a child, I was fascinated by the wristwatches on the Thunderbirds characters. Press a button and there’s Virgil on the tiny screen chatting to  Scott, or Alan. I was seriously impressed.  Better than a Man from U.N.C.L.E. invisible ink fountain pen. The concept of those wristwatches exists now. It’s not Virgil though, it’s your own family and friends called ‘contacts’.  The eighth deadly sin, for me, Social Media, takes on many forms.

Check search engines like Google or Yahoo and everything you ever wanted to know, and even more that you didn’t want to know, is there. All the things once remembered, now forgotten can be found again. When I was at school, we had things to learn and remember in all our lessons; maths formulae, history dates, poetry to recite off by heart and more. By the time my eldest was working towards his GCSEs, he was very sure that none of us needed to remember anything because all the information was just a click away. I’d dispute his theory, along the lines of ‘what keeps your brain alive if you don’t feed it with knowledge?’ His peers were all the same and I used to despair for ‘the lost generation’, or maybe they are right.

My personal use of Facebook has increased over the years. It is a wonderful tool for collecting people together for events, keeping in touch with friends and sharing a bit of interesting knowledge I’ve stumbled across on Google. But it has its down side. There’s something I don’t want to see. Something I’d rather not know. Something I can’t unread.  And, that cryptic comment from a friend of a friend which disturbs and worries me and I can’t respond because I don’t want to show I’m bothered. Click bait. Yet I can’t leave Facebook completely alone. It is a minimised window on my lap top, so I can pop in and out while I’m busy with something else. It is the first thing I look at when I check my phone on my break at work. It’s sad. It’s a sin. Thank goodness I don’t ‘Tweet’.

Soon I’ll be enjoying a break in Dumfries & Galloway at the hidden away lodges where we often stay. No WiFi at all and no phone signal apart from a small area at the end of a long lane and I won’t be wandering along there on a cold, dark night. I will have peace and oblivion and the patience to wait until I can access the latest photos of my grandchildren, so cute with a Snapchat filter.

Social Media is here to stay. It’s a massive part of the electronic, technology-based lives we have, so I’ll continue to embrace it for what it is and carry on with the same level of discipline I have towards the other seven deadly sins.

My chosen poem is one of mine, a modern nursery rhyme.

Tom the Fool

Dashed home from school

To meet his mates on Facebook.

Oh what a frown

‘Cos the ‘net was down,

He didn’t dare to reboot. 

He hissed and swore

Like never before

And threatened to murder broadband,

Then found the hitch

Was a turned off switch
He should have checked beforehand.

 

PMW 2010

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x 

Read More