senryu

"new diet" -
cake crumbs litter
her keyboard



This senryu was originally posted back in 2009 for the now defunct Read Write Poem



I'm delighted to have 2 senryu included in the latest issue of Failed Haiku. 

Scots in Malaŵi

I recognised my student Rose
by the Bank of Scotland t-shirt she chose
to wear to class before her uniform arrived.

I found my way around the map
by following traces of a certain chap
called Livingstone as we have presumed.

From Mzuzu to Malindi
the place is full of Scots of inde-
pendent spirit and enquiring mind.

Even Banda was a Scot
by formation as near as not.

But the shops sell Coca Cola and never Irn Bru.




previously published in my pamphlet Bougainvillea Dancing

for more about the connections between Scotland and Malawi, visit the Scotland Malawi Partnership website.

Hyperlinking my poetry for Read Write Poem. The best idea is to read the poem all the way through and then follow the links to find out more. I'm not sure how much creative, rather than informative value there is in adding hyperlinks to poetry, but i think its worth looking into. What do you think?

Dialect

I've read some interesting books about language recently, you can read briefly about the environmental aspects of these books over on Crafty Green Poet here. Reading these books and started me thinking about dialect and the languages of the UK. Whether Scots is a language or a dialect is an argument that has been discussed for many a year and no doubt the discussion will continue for a long time yet, though I suspect that if Scotland ever achieves independence, then on that day, Scots will become emphatically and without question a language - just look at Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, three mutually comprehensible languages that I guess would be defined as dialects if they were spoken in different parts of one political state.

I've lived in Scotland for many years now and have a lot of Scots words in my vocabulary (which I use in my poetry too) but i would never consider myself to speak Scots. It's the accent, people from the south of England may mistake my Scottish intonation for a Scots accent but no-one around hear would ever allow that my accent is anything other than English. And ye cannae speak Scots wi' an English accent. Incidentally I thought it was strange that my Scots dictionary that i got for my birthday, doesn't have the word dippit in it. (Dippit is a fine Scots word meaning silly or stupid).

If you feel like writing poetry in dialect or that includes some dialect words, why not hop over to Read Write Poem and take part in my latest prompt over there.

My Ancestors Take the Night Train across Europe

Your sister looks Italian though
my mother says randomly
(though she's always looked very English to me)
or Spanish perhaps,
where does the name Gratrix
come from anyway?

It's an ancient British name I explain
oh she continues well what about Train
that must be Scandinavian?

My paternal Grandmother's maiden name was Gratrix
My mother's maiden name was Train, another ancient British name

My mother's paternal grandfather was a station master and his surname was Train. His son married a Miss Driver. Thankfully they didn't go for a double-barrelled name.

Going Ancestral for Read Write Poem

and yes, that was a real conversation with my mother.

Misinterpreting the Gothic as Goth.....

The Read Write Poem prompt this week is 'the gothic' but I'll deliberately misinterpet that as goth. After a long break, we finally managed to get to a goth club last weekend (Nervenkreig), so I'm feeling in a goth type of mood - here are links to some of my goth poems on this blog:


Falco
Young Woman in Black
Silk Neon Gothic
Crowded

August

In August heat
.............we see
...............from every crossroad
.............a funeral procession winding
..........through narrow hillside streets
..or perhaps it is several processions
for several funerals

so many people are dying now

under a bridge
a thousand miles from here
in the place that was his living home
a dead man hangs

scifaiku

My prompt on Science Fiction poetry is now up at Read Write Poem - you can read it here! I'll be posting my response to the prompt on Crafty Green Poet next Monday, but meanwhile here is a scifaiku I recently wrote:

strange shapes
in the sky
green glow

I posted another scifaiku on Crafty Green Poet here.

48 Hours Without

Third World First Sponsored Fast 1986

I bought a bag of tangerines
for the time of breaking the fast -
they sat, glowing orange
temptation in the fruit bowl.

The first day I struggled
to remain normal, distracted
by ugly rumbles in my stomach -
signs of a deep hunger

that on the second day
gave way to dizzy light headedness,
an ability to float
above the mundane everyday.

On the forty ninth hour
I held a tangerine, its scent
spicing the air; how strangely
difficult it was to eat

to deny myself my entry
into that other existence
I had almost started
to glimpse.


Sacrifice for Read Write Poem

Poetic Collaboration

Read Write Poem this week asked us to collaborate on a piece of work. I didn't do that, but I thought I would share some thoughts about poetic collaboration. One of my favourite pieces of poetic collaboration is the book Paso Doble where the poets Anamaria Crowe Serrano and Annamaria Ferramosca worked together on a series of poems in Italian and English. Each poet wrote a line in her native language and then all the poems were translated. The poems all, whether in the original form or in the translations, move beautifully from one language to another, in the way that a conversation sometimes does between people who share a number of languages. You can read my full review of this book here.

I also enjoy renga or renku poetry, a Japanese form, related to haiku, that is currently popular in Scotland, with people working together to produce linked verses.