On National Poetry Day

Stuffed Birds at the Blackburn Museum
by Kevin Bamford

While mother was off shopping
at the co-op and the market hall
I studied birds,
birds in glass cases,
motionless.

I tried
to keep their shapes and markings
in my mind,
hoping I could name them
if I saw them in the wild.

It would be years
before I saw a buzzard
or a wren.
And to this day
I haven't seen
what I most wanted then.

Standing before the glass case as a child
I longed to see an eagle in the wild

I saw this poem a few years ago in the Rowley's House Museum in Shrewsbury, pinned to a display case.   I liked it as it reminded me of something from my childhood that I'd all but forgotten.

I was almost six and staying with my grandma whilst my mum was on honeymoon with my new step-father.  I was an unhappy child.  My father had died over a year ago and now my mum had been taken away by a stranger. When she came back we were to move to another house where I was going to have a new, almost grown up sister and loads of new aunts and uncles.  I think I was quite scared of this.   My grandma must have found me a handful at times, she was after all in her early seventies,  and so her neighbour, Mrs Brown, took me out for the day.  I remember Mrs Brown, a plump, jolly lady with dark hair, I remember her big-skirted floral frock, her summer hat, her little gloves and necklace of white plastic popper beads.  She took me to paddle in the  pool at the local town's park.  We had a picnic;  but mostly I remember where we had gone before that.  She took me to the local museum to see its collection of stuffed birds.   Little did I know as I was walking round gazing into the cases that eighteen years later I would go to work in that museum.  Of course, the birds were still there!

Here is a link to the poet's website   -  Kevin Bamford

and here is a link to the National Poetry Day website  -  National Poetry Day

 

 

Autumn

An Autumn Haiku for National Poetry Day

Wind rustles through trees
Crisp leaves fall upon the ground
where green turns to gold

National Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day so I thought I would share a poem with you, but which one? I could have chosen a poem remembered from school - like Meg Merrilees(John Keats), Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Robert Frost), The Listeners (Walter de la Mare) or The Lady of Shalott (Alfred Lord Tennyson). Maybe I could choose something from the Metaphysicals or the Romantics? Or the so called Cavalier poets - like the naughty Earl of Rochester? Something typically British perhaps? The gentle wistfulness of Thomas Hardy or A. E. Houseman? The humour of John Betjeman? Maybe one of the Liverpudlian poets like Roger McGough? Or one of the war poets the tragic Wilfred Owen or Rupert Brooke?

I can be slightly maudlin in my choice of poems; favourites being Farewell (Walter de la Mare); Do not go gentle (DylanThomas) and When I am dead (Christina Rossetti) I love The Parting by Michael Drayton but in the end it had to be Will, if in doubt I always turn to him - he never fails me:-

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempest and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare

Poems and Animals

As today is National Poetry Day and also World Animal Day I thought that perhaps I would combine the two in a poem I remember from my school days:-

The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake (1757 - 1827)

Grey, Grey

For the past week I've been feeling rather low but can't put my finger on any particular reason. For five days now I've had a sore throat and tickly cough which has just about driven me mad and I keep wanting to curl up and sleep. Today it has finally turned into a cold so I'm sitting here with eyes streaming. I've just seen a grey squirrel dancing and prancing across the lawn but, of course, by the time I'd got the camera out and set up it had disappeared. The weather outside is grey and misty so I'm going to add a poem that I wrote, nearly five years ago. I actually wrote it in November and the inspiration came whilst I was walking in Longton, my nearest town. I wandered down The Strand, into Times Square, under the railway bridge and across the old St John's churchyard to home. When I got home I wrote this:-

Monochrome

Grey, grey windswept day,
when all life’s colour is washed away
by drizzling rain and misty gloom,
where, in the street, there is no room,
for anything but monochrome.

Urban seagulls swirl and dive
over naked trees looking half alive.
Pigeons shelter beneath dripping eaves
above damp pavements where sodden leaves
turn from russet to monochrome.

Umbrellas turned against the rain,
then blowing inside out again
as their owners rush towards their day
in concrete boxes bleak and grey
and a life in monochrome.
©Rosie Pursglove 2002

I think it sums up how I feel today. On a lighter note I was amused yesterday by the headline:-
'Man pulls car with ears' - ok, I know, you've guessed - my first thought was why would someone build a car with ears? Doh.....