Austerity
flaps its flag of convenience
over the airwaves

all together
now
we’re all
in
it
is a mask
over appropriation

a grudge match
greed v need

blinded
by winking promises
of all those
shiny goods to get

deafened
by unjust prejudice
against
those dispossessed

you say Austerity’s meant to bite
but believe me
it devours
false comfort

only listen
to the dying song
of one canary

I Sit on a Train and I Cry

Pearl drops.
Their faces I imagine
Lost,
Fearful.
It sickens and it slashes me

As he slashed her.

The love.
Captured snapshots I imagine
Soft touches on the cheek
Bold conversations

Twisted and choked
Bled out
In the space of hours.

Normal hours;
Working hours

I cry for the woman
Courageous campaigning
Juxtaposed
Alongside the washing up.

I cry for all of us.
For the venomous rage
Divisive politics creates.

Take back control.
It would be suicide to leave.

I am lost in this society
Of hate and derision
Of incensed knowledge and vision.
Of arbitrary decision.

A murderous, hopeless,
Heartbreaking decision.

It must be the heat, our imaginations are playing up. These poems were written long ago but it’s now that we see them, notice them, now that people send them in. Angela Topping imagines her perfect refuge, and the illustration is her own painting of a garden which she did while at Lumb Bank. Perhaps it is her ideal garden beside the beach hut.

Sarah Watkinson sent one of the oddest of sonnets, complete with a scientific citation: Dacke, M., Baird, E., Byrne, M., Scholtz, Clarke H., and Warrant, Eric J. (2012) Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation, Current Biology. You can just imagine the dung beetles creeping out in a hot night after the sun has gone, guided by all those stars.

Then comes the longest poem this week, by LS Bassen. I don’t entirely understand it but wow. Hard to tell whether it’s a story…

it was all so neat
the way she sorted her possessions
into boxes
little labels marking them
for bedroom or for kitchen
she would never use

it was all so neat
the way she packaged up her life
knowing she could not afford to stay
knowing she could not afford
the choice she had been offered

it was all so neat
the way she organised farewells
the notes, the way she wanted to make sure
she would not cause too much trouble
and her cause was too much trouble
uprooted from the garden she had cared for
uprooted from the home she’d made
told that everything would have to end

and everything would have to end
and so she tidied, packaged, organised
uprooted books of memories
uprooted photographs
with a gardener’s tenderness
uprooted every year
drawing a neat line under it all

she’d told her family she was worried
told…

A Group of Boys at Moqattam Village

It is – unfortunately – not news that in some places (including First World countries) children and adults dig through trash cans or garbage dumps looking for something to eat or for cast-off goods that might be used or sold. There is no story, however, that quite compares to that of the Egyptian Zabbaleen or “garbage people” for sheer industry and inventiveness. From the 1940s these people ran 120 micro-enterprises that collected and recycled Cairo’s garbage. This was the Zabbaleen’s creative solution to the need for jobs and income when farming ceased to be a viable for them.

There was as you might imagine a downside: social stigma, subsistence and disease. Garbage collecting did, however, offer something of a living to an estimated 60,000 – 70,000 people and what these people did was quite remarkable. In fact, it was unique in all the world. They recycled 80-85% of the garbage…

Rhythm and Muse has its final evening of poetry and music tonight, at the Ram Jam club in Kingston Upon Thames. I am very sorry to miss it due to other long-standing plans but I will be thinking of them.

The Grey Horse pub, which the Ram Jam club is part of, is going to be under new ownership from January 2015, so this will be the last regular Rhythm and Muse event for a while. But it won’t be the end of R&M, and there may be festival specials and other goodies to look forward to- the advice is to check the website and facebook for updates.

If you can go tonight I would urge you to do so. Apart from the terrific lineup, including the inimitable LiTTLe MACHiNe, who Carol Ann Duffy declares are ‘The most brilliant music and poetry band I’ve seen in decades’ (see below), there will…

Billy Collins (b. 1941)- poet, writer, anthologist and educator – at the PEN America Gala, May 5, 2015, American Museum of Natural History © Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center, photo under CC 2.0 Generic License

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times – and this, I think, is a sense you develop – I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum – the poem finds a reason for continuing.”

Billy Collins’ poetry is profound, bazaar or tenderhearted observation expressed with wit; the ordinary expressed in the most extraordinary ways. We love this former U.S. Poet Laureate from New York.

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